Kind of off topic, but anyone finds the "Subscribe to the newsletter" jarring?
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode:
...his confrontation between Snow and Leavis – two dramatically different thinkers, representing traditions long in tension – gets at something more fundamental than
the worn phrase that survived it: our deepest and conflicting temperaments towards life.
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According to the English novelist Anthony Powell, C P Snow was affable, and rather humourless, the sort of man who gladly recognised a joke in conversation...
Maybe I've been desensitized by all the "Subscribe now" pop ups that take over your entire browser, but seeing the subscription box inline with the rest of the text didn't bother me too much.
It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.
Anti-AI arguments are often literally 'It's anti-Life' - that mysterious thing that creative humans have which a machine couldn't possibly ever.
I'd be more convinced if the antis demonstrated this clearly in their own work instead of simply affirming it.
I'm agnostic. I have no idea what Leavis meant when he said Life, and he clearly didn't either. He comes across as a rather narcissistic figure who enjoyed tearing others down to build himself up - the opposite of Snow, who seems to have been a rather dull bureaucrat with genuine good-intentions.
It's possible the two cultures aren't really the humanities vs science but those who have genuine concern for others and those whose fragility drives their ambition at the expense of those around them.
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
Kind of off topic, but anyone finds the "Subscribe to the newsletter" jarring?
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode:
Maybe I've been desensitized by all the "Subscribe now" pop ups that take over your entire browser, but seeing the subscription box inline with the rest of the text didn't bother me too much.
It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.
Anti-AI arguments are often literally 'It's anti-Life' - that mysterious thing that creative humans have which a machine couldn't possibly ever.
I'd be more convinced if the antis demonstrated this clearly in their own work instead of simply affirming it.
I'm agnostic. I have no idea what Leavis meant when he said Life, and he clearly didn't either. He comes across as a rather narcissistic figure who enjoyed tearing others down to build himself up - the opposite of Snow, who seems to have been a rather dull bureaucrat with genuine good-intentions.
It's possible the two cultures aren't really the humanities vs science but those who have genuine concern for others and those whose fragility drives their ambition at the expense of those around them.
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
Loved that.
[delayed]
And his actual book on the two cultures is worth reading too (and only 54 p.).