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Comment by ryandvm | Hacker News Reader

This is the most apropos comment about this moment that I have read in months.

When I went to college for CS, I was on a scholarship that required I keep my GPA. To have a little insurance for that, every semester I took a random extra easy intro class. That way, if I was bombing a hard class, I could drop it to keep my GPA while still being a full-time student.

One semester, I took Intro to Sociology and it was a revelation. I ended up completing all of the courses required to get a minor in sociology within a couple of years. I dropped out before I ever got close to finishing my CS major.

I wish more people knew sociology. It affects our lives more directly and profoundly than possibly any other science, but it's mostly unknown by the masses.

Do you have any recommendations for sociology books for laypeople?

Good question. It's been over twenty years at this point, and we skimmed a lot of texts in the classes I took. The one that actually stuck with me was Erving Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life", but I don't know how much that would still resonate.

Emile Durkeim's "Suicide" is famous in sociology because it helped kick off the entire field of study. It was, I think, one of the first works to consider how a profound individual action (suicide in this case) might be largely determined by the surrounding social structures.

I don't know what a good introductory book would be.

Paging through the four of Goffman's books I read a quarter of a century or so ago a day or two ago was a bit of a disappointment for me, personally; not sure if I am attempting to dissuade you, but it always disappoints me to read something years later, after experiencing a good chunk of a lifetime after it, and feel a let down. I remember that book well, though. And I know what you mean about sociology... though I feel like most of the models and almost everything they teach in school now doesn't fit anything people have spent the last ten or twenty years throwing out there. It upsets me (more than I let on). It isn't "only" or even largely AI that makes me sad; AI makes me angry on top of the 'sad', if anything.

Mostly just replying here because I enjoyed your other comments on this thread, and do not want to get too deep into comments. But man; it makes me sad how much the world changed. Most things in the world feel so heavily inauthentic now.

A comment on your other comment here, though: bespoke software will never be like it used to be. I don't know if anyone will FEEL the way it used to feel to program something, even as recently as 25-30 years ago. I mean, I still remember my excitement at buying my first real IDE, and how tickled I was that parts of it reminded me of Smalltalk/ParcPlace. Like, man; the first time I didn't have to make an icon for an exe independently of the software I was coding and compiling in. Or the first time I figured out cc on an old AT&T unix box with no documentation... or essentially grinding my way through learning SQL in the early 90s when books didn't exist... Who the heck would think that was even interesting now? We all have and had the web but even that seems quaint to the newer people. I am not sure why they code or what they feel they get out of it other than inflated (often poor) attitudes and not always deserved paychecks.

Anyway.

Building actual things with one's actual hands is, indeed, nice. Disagree though about it being in the attic. Sometimes it has every bit as much meaning there as anywhere else. Don't need a reason to create things like that. And not interested in art.

Anyway, not sure I would enjoy it as much as I did the first time, but check out Sissela Bok's writing if you haven't.

There. All my replies to your threads in one place, kinda. Sorry if it is a bit hard to follow.

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