Yeah, this is exactly how I feel about the book. It's a shame you've stopped reading fiction - why is that?
4,491 karma · joined July 15, 2011
Do you have any class notes / resources you could share? I love the guy.
What was he like as a teacher / in person?
Marx is WAY more interesting than Ayn Rand. Although you're probably better off reading Chomsky today. Popper is awesome.
Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I'm not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.
How did things get this way? Can something people have spent thousands of years studying really be a waste of time? Those are interesting questions. In fact, some of the most interesting questions you can ask about philosophy. The most valuable way to approach the current philosophical tradition may be neither to get lost in pointless speculations like Berkeley, nor to shut them down like Wittgenstein, but to study it as an example of reason gone wrong." - PG
Not an appeal to authority, mind you, just a way of saving myself time.
You question whether it's really seen as that eccentric: I've actually corresponded with a bunch of UK philosophers about Wittgenstein, all of whom regard his earlier work as vaguely interesting if subsequently outmoded (a more or less accurate assessment) and his later work as eccentric and mostly irrelevant to serious philosophy (a totally wrong-headed assessment). I'm happy to send you email extracts if you still doubt that.
I should note that I studied philosophy here in the UK (at Oxford), so perhaps I'm biased towards the UK. But I think this applies to the US too: Wittgenstein sort-of influenced the American tradition via Rorty and Kripke, but he's still not central to modern American academic philosophy. Kripke got him totally wrong anyway, and Wittgenstein's only a piece of Rorty's outlook.
As to your last comment - what you seem to be saying is that this is highly improbable based on 'well if it's that good why doesn't everyone believe that' considerations. To which I'd respond: (a) it's not a totally obscure work. In fact, it's regarded as the main late Wittgenstein work. But (b) late Wittgenstein is totally undervalued by the mainstream of academic philosophy, mostly because (I think) he renders it irrelevant; and (c) you're better off actually reading the thing and deciding for yourself. Otherwise you become a sort of 'efficient market theorist' w.r.t. academia/books. Not a position I'd want to hold, personally.
My Dad had copy of ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ by Betty Edwards lying around. I’d always been really bad at drawing - never progressed beyond the kids-drawing phase, got bad feedback on drawing at school, so stopped.
Anyway, Edwards’s theory is that ‘bad’ drawers don’t look at the thing itself and draw its shape, they translate reality into abstract concepts first and then draw what that concept visually looks like. So I’ll look at a face, then decide I’ll draw the ‘eye’ first, query my mind to see what an ‘eye’ looks like, then draw the generic 'eye' shape that everyone draws.
Whereas a skilled artist looks at the eye in front of them - which looks nothing like the standard symbol for ‘eye’ - and draws THAT.
Edwards has a bunch of exercises to prove this, and one of them triggered a massive epiphany for me.
She had a Picasso sketch in the book which was printed upside down on the page. Her instructions were to copy the drawing, keeping it upside down, and never naming the limb/whatever you’re drawing, and never turning your drawing right-side-up until it’s complete.
I was sceptical, but decided to test her theory. So I started copying this upside-down drawing, fully expecting it to turn out even worse than usual.
When I finished, I couldn't believe it. The drawing was AMAZING. It looked like someone else had done it. The figure I’d drawn looked alive.
I went on to learn to draw pretty well. So after that, my mind always looked back and thought - well, if I can learn to DRAW, and I was so BAD at drawing initially, I can pretty much learn to do anything.
A few comments, in the spirit of honest feedback:
(1) Your problem isn't making it more social right now. Your problem is the product itself.
How do people solve this problem right now? By writing stuff down on paper, or in Word Docs, or even making a Powerpoint deck. Your problem here is that the solution isn't much better than these alternatives - even if you offered me free 'chits', I'd still prefer to use a Word doc, just because I'm comfortable with it, and I don't see how the thing you're offering makes life any easier or better for me. Indeed, it just looks like a version of Powerpoint.
(2) The text isn't rendering correctly in Chrome. Specifically, the 'want to improve your interviewing skills' line is overlapping with itself, which means a bad first impression.
(3) The name isn't great. Little 'chits'? Everytime I say that, it feels like I'm saying 'little shits'.
(4) The 3 steps don't make sense. Place my order and then what? Is this a physical product? (It is, but I had to think about it - bad.) Decide whether I want a call with you guys? Why would I want a call? Is the product not easy enough to use on its own? I don't want to waste my time speaking to people... and so on.
Try and make the 'steps' thing compelling, and use images.
Again, congrats on deploying the app, and I'm sure you'll continue to iterate on the design etc - but I would strongly recommend reconsidering the product first. If you've spoken to many customers already and they REALLY WANT these things, and if you've already got orders (do you guys charge money? Again, not clear from the home page) then I'm probably wrong - but I doubt it.