Comments on: Amusing Ourselves to Death

By: Sam

Sam — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 22:12:28 +0000

@Edwin, comment #109

That’s a terribly reductionist argument. Tools are vital to learning and healthy society, the issue is when

-Logarithms are no longer taught nor understood (the basis for all large calculation before calculators, and the tools calculators still use.) Calculators are handed to kids without them having any understanding of the programming or theory underpinning it

-People can no longer spell correctly without spellchecker. Eloquent writing is replaced by 150 characters (which can be eloquent but will never suffice for nuanced reasoning.)

-Kids stop asking questions and stop figuring out how to figure out those questions on their own because all of the world’s knowledge is already at their fingertips with wikipedia.

Pleasure derived from consumption will always be fleeting. Satisfaction comes from the art of original creation. Tools should be used for creation, but increasingly they are glorified $500 media-delivering devices (the iPad) that only fools believe they are using for their “productivity apps.”

By: Fernando Gouveia

Fernando Gouveia — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:00:26 +0000

Just to clear things out: Neil Postman mistake (and I didn’t read his book) may be that he sees both books as their authors’ warnings about what society might turn into (their “fears”), and concludes Huxley made the correct prediction. But that interpretation is wrong. Only Huxley’s book may be considered “prophetic” and intended as a warning for the (near?) future of Western-style societies. Orwell’s book is neither prophetic nor aimed at the West: Orwell’s fiction is based on a society he actually witnessed, not inferred (he didn’t fear hypothetic future events, he denounced actual events already unfolding); the oppressive society he witnessed was Stalin’s Soviet Union.

By: Fernando Gouveia

Fernando Gouveia — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:03:15 +0000

About comment #109: “If Huxley was right, then our ape ancestors would have been the pinnacle of an intellectual being, because they had no tools, medicines, readily available necessities of life.”
That’s a logical error, a non-sequitur. From the premise that material comfort is way of dumbing us (let’s formalize it: C => D) we can NOT conclude that the lack of material comfort will make us smarter, or less dumb (~C => ~D). That’s the famous fallacy of denying the antecedent.

About Neil Postman’s hypothesis about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right: that’s a fallacy, too — namely, a false dilemma. It’s not either Huxley or Orwell was right — they can BOTH be right. And Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451), too, for that matter…

By: Edwin

Edwin — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:34:29 +0000

When calculators were invented, it was feared that people would stop doing arithmetic in the mind.

When word processing software was invented it was feared that people will stop cursive writing.

With the internet and wikipedia around it was feared that people will stop remembering things and would only remember how to look it up.

All of these things did happen.

But instead of subverting the human intellect these tools and almost every tool has only increased what we are capable of. We now focus on things which are more meta.

Happiness, comforts, quality of life.. these things are not evil and will never be evil in excess. They will not make people dumb.

If Huxley was right, then our ape ancestors would have been the pinnacle of an intellectual being, because they had no tools, medicines, readily available necessities of life.

By: Floss The Teeth You Want To Keep: How To Do A TEDx Talk

Floss The Teeth You Want To Keep: How To Do A TEDx Talk — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 03:20:18 +0000

[...] Stuart’s a brilliant artist in his own right. His comics St Matthew Island, Challenged and Amusing Ourselves To Death have had over 5 million views. I was thrilled he agreed to work with me at all. There’s [...]