RE: SI is a bunch of unimportant people ...
Dear Ali,
I noticed your reference to my earlier post, which I cannot easily find because of the limited access to the archives. My collected posts, are unfortunately, at the printers so are not accessible. My defective memory suggests that I said something like "mostly unimportant people" or some other weasel word, because I remember writing thus and intending that they apply to you and me, and most of the others but implicitly not to Paul and Yousef and Albert (when not in attack-dog mode), and a few others who were engaged in or retired from what I considered important work. I didn't mean to insult you -- because have great knowledge, if somewhat undisciplined and packed into a singularly combative and angry young (?) man. I think your knowledge is underutilized, and I am surprised that you persist in what appears to me -- an outsider -- to be a job that denies you the opportunity to exercise your considerable abilities, I mock no man's work, nor no woman's either. My amateur diagnosis is "Acute, Insultive Behavior Syndrome (AIBS), arising from untreated frustration, and anger caused by denial of opportunity to exercise his knowledge.(DSM V)." I would not presume to advise you, but there is much research from the counseling literature that demonstrates conclusively that combative, confrontational style is destructive of the personality. Anger actually can destroy the lining of your stomach and ileum, although bacterial infestation usually helps. Frustration quickly leads to bitterness, and bitterness to clinical depression.
As a friendly observer, I must say that you rarely win the confrontations, especially with Paul, and often look absurd which embarrasses me for you, although you don't need or want my pity. I say nothing about your occasional attacks on me, because surely you see that I do not play the game. It took a long time unlearning it, but I hope I am finally there. Of course, now and again I strike back, but I refuse to get trapped into name calling. This is not an elaborate put-down, and I would have preferred to send it you via e-mail but I can't get your address to work.
Each of the eager posters has a story. There are a million stories in the Naked City. Though I haven't been asked, I think Paul posts in part because he is bubbling over with knowledge about Intel and computing, that he feels compelled to share and occasionally some of it bubbles out to us. He likes applause -- who doesn't-- but he has a high standard for controversy, and he bitterly resents the insults that obviously less well educated and endowed people, annoyed at his self-confidence (which they term arrogance), aim at him, and he too often explodes in Olympian wrath and contumely. But I have noticed that he nearly always wins the disputes.. He is not often wrong. I, for one, have learned far more about the business from him than from all of the other posters on the thread, or SI as a whole. I view him as a personal resource of the first magnitude. But there is some pathology there, as well. I sense that he feels his career was cut short, for whatever reason, before he had made the full contribution of which he was capable. I see some Kierkegaardian, existentialist angst -- some sense of work left to be done. He, Ali, may be calling out for another opportunity to serve just as I sense you are, and perhaps, although no longer timely in my case, I am.
I don't look at this thread as purely chrematistic. We discuss great events, the prosperity and survival of great technological companies, and the direction in which computing is going. Because we are not intimately engaged in turning the computing revolution, we take the opportunity to make a little money, or lose it, if our judgment is bad. We think the quality of ideas is evaluated on the results of our investments. We are spectators, most of us, and this is why I say we are mostly unimportant people. Your remark to Paul -- "retired and uncapable for any useful contribution to your society" is not only mercilessly cruel, it is, in my opinion dead wrong. No one can value the contribution of the writer, the essayist. It is that sense of casting bread on the waters and never getting anything back that makes the life of a writer so frustrating and empty. Can you imagine that Paul could have written his long article without the hope that others might learn? But what can a writer know about his effects on the world? You and I can look at our poor posts and guess quite accurately the effect they will have -- thus my nom de clef. Paul puts his work into coherent form. I have used his article to enlighten two teams in my course who had chosen Intel to study and had gone astray in the wealth of material they found. One of the students, a very bright young Japanese-American boy of considerable intellectual power, said "Paul's article made the scales fall from my eyes." (a remark that would have amused another Paul from 2k years ago, a Paul not easily amused. amused than ours). This is a young man with hyperbolic ambitions in computing. He says he is obsessed by Intel, and is torn between starting his own networking business and working for Intel. He could matter. And in an indirect, untraceable way, Paul may have made a "useful contribution" to his society, as might I by transmitting it. Keynes said never to underestimate the power of ideas. An idea requires a thinker, and Paul is a thinker. Why don't you put your ideas together in a coherent form and contribute to the intellectual debate. .
Let me close with a few words from Tennyson ---
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men who strove with gods.....
......
`Tis not too late to seek a newer world,
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.
Some imagination by a 21 year old poet!
but then, I tend to overdramatize everyday matters.
Best wishes
Hugh |
