Comment by arduanika
2 days ago
You seem to really like history. Maybe you're ready to graduate from podcasts to reading books and primary sources. Fair warning: you might end up with a picture of history that is less cartoonish and motivated.
2 days ago
You seem to really like history. Maybe you're ready to graduate from podcasts to reading books and primary sources. Fair warning: you might end up with a picture of history that is less cartoonish and motivated.
What primary sources are you referring to? Come with receipts next time instead of just vitriol.
None in particular. I was talking about "primary sources" as a category. See also what I wrote here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178573
It was a meta point. Sorry if I gave you the impression that I was weighing in on the particulars of jmyeet's essay. Rather, it was a high-level point that if you know a ton of little facts but you're only seeing half of the story, then you need to improve and broaden out your intake.
I would have the same opinion of a poster who was so one-sidedly pro-America and anti-China.
And maybe you can read a book about adding to the conversation instead of navel gazing oh superior intelligent one who has read so many books but can't add a comment or reference a book to point to a concept that could help add to the shared pool meaning.
The good books, unlike the good podcasts, can rarely be reduced to a single forum comment. You don't read them to cite them as a zinger in an online back-and-forth. You read lots of them, and you cross-reference them with the world around you, to slowly build up a view of the world that's irreducibly complex. You read them to escape yourself and your times -- the exact opposite of "navel gazing", in a sense.
Most books add to "the shared pool [of] meaning", as you say. Pick any one; I didn't have a specific one in mind. The commenter to whom I was responding is in a state where pretty much any well-written book about history would help them out a lot. Something written before 1980 might be especially illuminating.
It might take many books, if they want their comprehension of history to actually be "hardcore".