Usually I don't. The issue is that I so often see people who I reckon are brighter than me who fail to recognize their shortcomings or failures, that is they're not good at self-introspection or avoid doing so.
Things I'm reasonably good at are self-awareness and being aware my own limitations (if it were ever claimed that I wasn't much good at anything then no one could justifiably claim those). Being aware of them has often kept me out of trouble.
Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes is also guilty of an unusual kind of cleverness. I remember reading this one story (whose name I forgot) where Sherlock essentially concludes that a person he's looking for is pretty intelligent just because the hat of the person is big and deep (after all, if the head is big, there's got to be more brains).
> Very often, this kind of cleverness comes in the form of seeing through illusions [...] But this kind of cleverness that cuts through illusions can become its own kind of illusion.
> Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting—alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching—all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be.
It definitely feels like much of always-online culture is a defense mechanism against feeling scared and powerless, even as it presents itself as anything but.
Be clever but be humble too. There's not a lot to it. The first will propel you very far and the second will help when the first doesn't suffice anymore.
They're almost inversely related in practise, because accuracy requires understanding of the subtleties, so if you have to explain the accuracy then the audience already doesn't understand the subtleties, and if they don't understand the subtleties it's usually because they don't find them interesting.
"""
According to legend, the Cyclopes had only one eye after making a deal with Hades, god of the underworld, in which they traded one eye for the ability to see the future and predict the day they would die.
"""
Really enjoyed this essay, the parallels between the flâneur of old and modern lurkers is a brilliant connection. Really makes me question how much time I should be spending on twitter and reddit.
> Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all?
This sounds like the proletariat mimicking their leadership, in that the above is a description of how politics seems to work. We need a better class of example-setters before we're going to see better behaved societies.
The topic of discussion is quickly lost, and any hope of progress towards a resolution along with it, amongst a competition of witticisms.
I'm quite happy with this cleverness of mine:
"I'd rather be right than popular, and I often am."
But this could just be an intellectual hedging of my bets against whatever the real-life-vulnerability equivalent of down votes is; Stern, disapproving glares.
I think this is the downsides of cleverness that Oscar Wilde eludes to. Its overuse can be hollow, snide and become downright mean and cynical. Very emotionally draining.
I think that's confusing the catalyst with the problem. Many people write hollow, snide, mean and cynical things that aren't clever. Many people write clever things that aren't hollow, snide, mean and cynical. I'm not so sure the connection is direct. I think people tend to remember and repeat clever things and that means clever negativity gets shared more than non-clever negativity. I think the bigger problem is that Twitter has long been a contest of people trying to make those who disagree feel shitty using remarks that are almost required by the platform to be glib.
> What should we make of this apparent degradation?
Make it apparent. Oh, but in a way the author did.
Bad signals: «Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes»; «associations»; «positive»; «is seen»; «many will identify»; «we tend to use»; ... «redeem ... by making a clever joke ... that shows»; «to appear»; «the game» ...
The accusation of levity is circular, acted from a perspective firmly installed in levity.
Very little appears of any constructive consideration of the Point: we have to manage a World, we need well processed information, we had been since the dawn of time, playing is for spare time - and Stern is mostly playing.
--
> the medium’s stupidity
In spite of a number of faults, let us hold HN dear for the goods it offers.
Am I the only one who found this essay to be meandering? It’s frustrating because I felt from the headline that it was going to make a valid point about the odd gloss of humor as a way of social/existential self-defense that is permeating our time. And I think that that’s what the author may actually be getting at. I found the quotes pulled into the comments here to be great re: quote tweets, but I felt like the essay itself was almost like a granite obelisk of one cultural reference after the other.
I don't intend this meanly, but do you read much non-technical nonfiction? New yorker articles, memoirs, things like that? This one is not particularly an outlier, but also not a ton of that stuff gets posted to HN.
Maybe I don't know. But we've self-selected into a forum where the main activity is the discussion of writing so I would expect us to be more practiced and open-minded about it than average.
It reminded me of one of Paul Graham's essays. It is important to hone writing skills as a way of looking more deeply at issues and understanding them.
This is quite an interesting phenomenon, though it's more unique. I find those kind (can't come up with a sensible qualifier... the best thing that comes to mind is "upper middle class normie journalism") of pieces incomprehensible on the higher strata of the parsing tree. I understand the words (which is not always the case with fiction, eg Blindsight - there are pages where I need to do multiple dictionary lookups, English is not my native tongue thou), the sentences more or less clearly denote facts or ideas, but... the more I read of them the less they make sense together.
Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical.
Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data?
Yeah I'm not necessarily trying to endorse that style of writing either, and I think "upper middle class normie journalism" is a pretty good name for it.
But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I also think that, like consuming only social media probably atrophies your attention span, reading only "direct" prose atrophies your ability to experience the ride of other styles and receive what they have to give.
And again I don't really intend this as a value judgement. Both styles have their place and there is no moral imperative to enjoy all approaches to writing. But having a limited palate accidentally, being blind to that, and thinking the fault is entirely in anything that lies outside of it is in a very literal sense pathetic. And here I often sense that it is perceived as virtuous distance from foolishness instead.
> But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I think that reaction's a combination of that sort of writing sometimes being amateurish wankery poorly-imitating better writers with better ideas, and an awful lot of tech- and science-nerd sorts having decided around 5th grade that they were already expert readers and literature and language classes were just a bunch of time-wasting made-up bullshit that couldn't possibly teach them to be better readers or writers. "It's this entire field that's wrong, not me!"
Poor literacy is almost as prevalent as poor math skills, folks are just less comfortable owning up to it. Plus a lot more people overestimate how good they are at it, I think, than do with math skills.
HN's content is entirely nonfiction, which demands a focused and discuplined style of writing: claim, defense, conclusion. Because its goal is to entertain, fiction frees the author to meander, muddle, or mislead — all of which impede making or defending a thesis.
If an article is nonfiction, then get to the point and stay there, dammit.
Yeah see this is the sort of very narrow-minded view of nonfiction I'm talking about. It's fine if that's the only thing you can bring yourself to value but it doesn't put the fault in the writing.
I did to. I actually find a lot of writing meandering these days (for instance, almost all of the stuff from SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen).
I think part of the issue is that these kinds of essays serve both as an argument and jumping off point for discussion, but also as a form of entertainment. If you enjoy the entertainment, you might enjoy the argument being padded and meandering. But if you're mostly interested in hearing the argument and responding, this type of writing can fell like it's intentionally wasting your time.
You do not have to respond to everything. Some writing is an opertunity for reflection. If you respond without some reflection, you become more of an NPC.
On a forum I could give things a couple of days and then write a response. Or I could start my own thread on the topic. But that's less of an option in places like HN. If I write a comment here two days from now, there's a good chance that zero people will see it. If I want to discuss the topic but not the essay, what are my options? I could start my own blog, write my thoughts on the matter, submit it to HN, hope that I'm one of the 1% of the submissions that make it past the screeners who hang out on "New," then hope I actually generate some discussion and don't immediately fall off the page.
I actually agree with you that more reflection in general is a good idea (though I don't necessarily agree that these kinds of essays engender that kind of reflection, but that's a separate topic). However, the online communities that exist now are designed to dissuade people from doing anything (reflection, research, editing, etc.) that take more time.
This kind of writing has its own rewards. It is just as valuable to the writer as the reader. Paul Graham makes the point that developing writing skills also develops your ideas. If you cannot articulate your ideas well enough for others to understand it, it is likely the case your idea is still fully undeveloped.
I mean, certainly there are plenty of things people want to comment on without writing a blog post on it. This discussion, for example. We're discussing this with relatively quickly written comments, not as blog posts that we spend a great deal of time on, put away for a day, come back to edit, etc.
It's also the case that time is limited, and there are some topics we don't want to spend much time on. It's common to see people argue that if you don't spend as much time on the topic as them, then your opinions on it aren't as worthy, but I can't really agree with that. It's very often used as a way to defend poor beliefs against obvious criticisms. You see it a lot with conspiracy theories. "You can't dismiss this unless you've read all of the writings on it!" But only true believers are going to subject themselves to dozens of books on a crank theory.
There is no reason to expect you will find the sort of dialogue you want unless you take some steps to initiate it yourself. The people who regularly appear on the front page of HN did not start off doing so.
I think the rise of meander is more likely a sign of inattention and the inability to focus. An essay is much more powerful and memorable if it can state a clear thesis and defend it memorably and undeniably.
In today's writing, perhaps because we demand so great a volume of it, purposeful prose financially rewards the author's extra effort less than ever before, and is less appreciated by readers because they're less willing to pause their pace of consumption to reflect on subtleties and unobvious insights. The online written word has evolved into a 24x7-driven ehpemeral commodity, where cleverness alone is the desiderata that makes or breaks the work and its auteur.
It was hard not to read it and think “this guy is analyzing cleverness? Like this?” It’s hard to read it and not feel the author themself wasn’t peacocking their cleverness. And I’m not entirely fond of the attempt at reinforcing a point this abstract trying to use quotes or excerpts from sources. It’s an idea; it doesn’t need evidence. It’s just meant to evoke thought. I’m ok with that and don’t need you to try to prove it by something Kierkegaard said.
I think the piece does resound a bit if you can clean off the gunky verbal tripe and look at what they’re trying to say. There’s a definite problem regarding people trying to be clever. I’m just not convinced that’s the source of the problem. Just a symptom.
> It’s an idea; it doesn’t need evidence. It’s just meant to evoke thought. I’m ok with that and don’t need you to try to prove it by something Kierkegaard said.
The point of citing Kierkegaard is to make use of the insights of others to try to explain something and to shed light on it. What the author is examining starts as a vague, confused, and murky impression that requires refinement, analysis, and effort to get to the essence of the thing. Clarity is not a given. Do you presume to know all there can be said about a thing? If not, then looking at what others have said is an opportunity to grow in wisdom and break out of the provincialism of one's own limited perspective, if only by the very act of wrestling with their material. I thank the wise who came before me for showing me the way and enriching my understanding of reality.
The creation of an idea is not something that requires prior art. The addition of prior art to an idea falsely equivocates it to evidence of the idea’s merit. However I believe an idea has merit when it has resonance, period.
It is meandering, but that's a good thing so far as I am concerned. It's an essay in the old-fashioned exploratory Montaignian style where the journey matters as much as the destination, not the sterile persuasive plod of the modern style.
Are you referring to “Classic” style of prose as it is portrayed in the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”? If so, good point. But in my opinion, taking your observation into consideration, the piece now falls even flatter if I were to interpret it as an attempt at that style of writing.
If the author stuck to just dissecting only Twitter or Seinfeld or Kierkegaard or Einstein using some supporting of details derived from just one of of those references, or even tied in one extra reference for robustness, that’d be great in my opinion. But this essay reads like it was constructed from a bunch of transcluded notes from an Obsidian vault or a zettelkasten (where reference upon reference can be taking due to bi-directional links between notes).
I can go as far as to say that this is less classic prose, than it is prose in the manner of a Family Guy episode.
> Are you referring to “Classic” style of prose as it is portrayed in the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”?
No, although that's an excellent book. I'm referring to the essay-writing tradition that started with Michel de Montaigne (who first used the word 'essay' in that sense). He was a skeptic and thought of essays as wandering and exploratory, not probative.
However, in Montaigne's essays he often doesn't have a clear thesis at the beginning of the essay. You are reading his (magisterial) thinking transcribed onto the page.
The OP gestures towards a thesis ('here's why society's championing of cleverness is bad') and then spends paragraphs meandering around it.
I found the writing beautiful. Sometimes if writing "gets to the point" too directly, it can fail to make an interesting point at all. Weaving together lots of references and ideas provides a lot more nuance and richness IMO.
Agreed. Curiously that meander makes the implicit point that the author never made explicitly, that cleverness is shallow. It's all about witty one-liners that lead no deeper than eliciting a smirk and a mote of respect for the joker's facility with an unobvious turn of phrase. Little surprise that Wilde wanted to be remembered for more than merely that, which alas, he isn’t.
I agree, the writing is entertaining, but it doesn't stick to any particular points. If it did, there would be more accountability for the author to say things that lead to useful conclusions, I think. At times I found myself wondering what the author was getting at, but then they would move on.
Is talking about "culture" a way of lumping fiction and reality together? Fictional always-right, wisecracking detectives aren't real, but there are real detectives, and presumably some clever ones whose actual cleverness is of real practical use. Fictional scientists who are more passionate than logical aren't real, but there are real scientists, whose cleverness is presumably valuable. Realistic work of professionals doesn't make for good reading. Fiction is entertainment in the first place.
I actually thought it was very tightly structured: early in the essay (fourth paragraph) it sets out four character types ("the private detective, the comedian, the flâneur, and, most recently, the social media poster") and then proceeds to dwell on each of them in turn, in orderly sequence.
In more detail, here's a paragraph-by-paragraph "map" of the essay:
• [1–2] Three quotes that speak of cleverness negatively. So is there something wrong with being clever?
• [3-4] Connecting cleverness to being an "outsider". [IMO the main theme pervading the whole essay: alienation/dissociation.] The four character types [mentioned above].
• [5–9] The detective as outsider. [Raymond Chandler, Chinatown.]
• [10–13] The comedian as outsider. [Woody Allen, Seinfeld]
• [14–16] The flâneur (with link to detective).
• [17–19] Online cleverness (with links to the observations made about the earlier types).
• [20–22] Three paragraphs of conclusion: Kierkegaard and a way out.
In light of this, this essay is far more methodically structured than most I've read! From your comment it sounds like you're most interested in the "comedian" bits (paras 10–13 and 19), but the rest of the essay is quite connected too. And the journal is subtitled "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture", so it makes sense that there are references to contemporary culture.
The unspoken archetype in his essay is the God-being, which he is playing by implication. He gets to watch even the watchers, observing truly from outside the space he's describing. It is still a game of cleverness - writing the article itself.
I asked ChatGPT to summarize it after reading the whole thing and made a pretty good job. Maybe is better to read the part about being humble in the full version but still...
Cleverness is often seen as a positive quality, but it is also associated with being an outsider. In modernity, this has led to the proliferation of cleverness in public life, often in the form of contrived knowingness and irony. This has led to cleverness becoming a currency online, with people competing for likes and subscribers with clever jokes and analyses. There is an affinity between cleverness and alienation, as exemplified by the detective archetype, who is a detached and calculating outsider. This kind of cleverness often takes the form of seeing through illusions and can be found in popular media, online commenting, and in fiction. The proliferation of cleverness in public life has led to it becoming a nuisance and being criticized by figures such as Oscar Wilde and Søren Kierkegaard. It is important to distinguish between genuine wisdom and cleverness, and not to value the latter over the former.
Now the matter becomes to identify the unintelligence expected of ChatGTP in its product.
I see a few (e.g. linking 'Kierkegaard' and 'proliferation'), but it would be probably more interesting to do the same on an article presenting some solid argument.
> Pretty good job
Do you think the summary is really structured? Does it present an argument? Does it identify its nodes?
Or is it more like Woody Allen having made that speed-reading course and concluding that War and Peace is about Russia?
I tried to ask ChatGPT to make a more comprehensive summary but it gave me a very similar output, i think because "summary", to the model, has to match certain conditions of length, it is a very limiting factor; to my understanding, this tool wasn't meant to be used for this type of article (at the moment), instead, i find it perfect for summarizing long blog posts optimized for SEO.
However, if your goal was to just know what to expect from the article and then read it, it made a 'Pretty good job'.
I like that summary better than the actual article. The article read as floaty and artificial. ChatGPT's sickly sweet tone peeks through a bit here, but the pacing is much better.
This is one of the problems with chatGPT. Good writing is not just a way to communicate ideas. It is also a way to develop ideas that are worth exploring. Being proficient with language - good language skills - means being proficient with ideas. It is easy to lose site of this when you're profession is a technical one that mostly reads instruction manuals or technical documentation.
I completely disagree with this piece, and I think the author is missing a few key details that lead him wrong.
The author focuses a lot on the trappings of cleverness - the witticisms and the "outsider" nature of the clever individual. This is the wrong thing to focus on. People with conventional ideas today exploit these trappings (with the help of professional marketing and PR teams) to give themselves an air of importance and brilliance. It's no surprise that when you focus there, you will find cleverness to be "impotent."
Instead, cleverness defined as a cross-disciplinary ("outsider") perspective is incredibly valuable in the modern world. A lot of cleverness comes from people who otherwise seem very boring - they are clever in their specialty and in their own way, but not the supposed "renaissance men" that media personalities seem to be attracted to.
You're hitting the right point in that it's focusing on the first type of cleverness, but that's because that's the type of cleverness that society and social networks find to drive "engagement" and therefore it's treated as far more important than your second definition of cleverness, which is the type that provides progress to technology and society and politics and so on - but it's boring because society's issues that need solving are so deep and complex and niche that any cleverness in the solution is lost to anyone but experts in the same field.
And so what the layperson sees, because it's what's chosen by the engagement maximising algorithm, is only ever type 1 cleverness. Hence it's the topic.
Which is ironic in itself, a well written article about the focus being wrong because the focus is wrong.
(My pithy summation is also such an example, it's clever but adds or solves fucking nothing, welcome to my career).
I don't think cleverness is quite the same as inventiveness or a skill that equips you for a job. It is more a psychological tool people often use to navigate the world. I think that's what the essay was getting at.
This strikes home for me. The witty jokes I make to isolate myself from a world I often can make no sense of. The isolation that hides insecurities and the lack of courage to take leaps of faith and participate in an imperfect society rather than hang at the periphery and judge it.
Whatever the reasons/excuses - genetics, upbringing, current social trends towards individualism, whatever - I can find no solution though. Whenever I force myself to get involved I end up disilusioned and eventually angry. Impotence describes it perfectly.
So in the end one must asume that whatever is lacking, be it wisdom or faith, or humblesness, it really is lacking and preventing me from making any significant impact. And being only clever is similar to being a clown.
The contrast between cleverness of this form and religion resonates with me as someone who's gone from atheism to deep appreciation of the truth of religion.
Our love of our own cleverness is the ego's attempt to assert its relevance. "I am smart. I can figure out the world on my own. I am right in what I think and believe" whereas religion puts us in our place, as mortal and limited beings in an infinite and eternal universe, whose knowledge and even theoretical ability to grasp the ultimate truth is limited.
I haven't encountered religion to claim to have all the answers. I have seen it deeply acknowledge man's limitations and the resultant profound awe of the mystery.
The poster and you are talking about different things. You are describing the reaction of a class of practitioners and he is describing the reaction of a different class of approachers. You have identified two different real profiles.
I haven't seen religion truncate the search for truth. In my understanding, many of the men to whom we owe our understanding of the world were religious.
Newton and Darwin were driven to understand how G-d implements his designs.
The Big Bang was theorized by a Catholic priest scientist who was looking for (and found) the moment of creation. Edward Hubble who proved the big bang through observation was a deeply religious Christian.
The lack of self awareness in this piece was entertaining.
Writing about impotent pretensions to cleverness on on the Internet on a site on the Internet hardly anyone will read, quoting Seinfeld, Raymond Chandler, a vintage movie script, and Kierkegaard, and name-checking Oscar Wilde and Einstein, all under the modest tag "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture" is... quite a look.
What an odd comment to make. His central thesis about "cleverness" allowed him to tie together a number of disparate elements. It is what writers do strive to do. If this was in the New Yorker would that confer legitimacy? That feels very elitist.
The flow of the writing reminded me a lot of Paul Graham's essays.
> tie together a number of disparate elements. It is what writers do strive to do
Very hopefully not. A game of associations ("first", "test", "try", "feel", "skin"...) is already «t[ying] together a number of disparate elements». But randomly, in idleness, possibly decadent.
Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
Which by the way seems to have been an intended target of TFA. Compromising a lot with its enemy, though.
> Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
I remember reading something similar from an old Ernest Hemingway interview.
Does anyone who knows what I'm talking about have a link?
I'd like just to specify that I composed that paragraph on the spot. Rem tene, verba sequentur.
If Hemingway said something similar, I'd say it is not specifically because great minds think alike - also that -, but because we described the same thing. There is an infinite number of ways to describe, say, a glass through «relatively fixed perspective form[s]», but a pretty limited number of «ideal structure[s]» pertaining.
Well, since I in fact have written it from scratch, as an original - though saying nothing new but an actual state of things -, please do find the exact quotation, so we will wonder upon the "magic" that allegedly happened.
Incidentally: I checked earlier, because I was intrigued - though probably "«for different reasons»", i.e. to compare the views - and I could not find it. I saw that there exists an "Hemingway on Writing", 2019. But I do not know. I admit I never read Hemingway (owing to queues). Though I can guess we have pretty different styles: syntactic vs paratactic.
Edit: but if that "magic" happened - /if/ -, I know the trick, and I can already tell you (rephrasing what written before): if, e.g., "a circumference is the set of points equidistant from a centre", the ways in which you can say that idea will collapse into that.
Further edit: although, if the equivalence were there word by word for that deontic definition of writing, I'd turn to the supernatural.
If it was in the New Yorker, it would be grounded much better. It would include an interview with an academic invested in the subject, or a profile on someone in the news (but not too popular!), or frame it through the writer's home life.
That confers legitimacy in a way that a frozen block of quotes does not.
Same thing with Paul Graham. He actually did things, and wove those experiences into his writing. The exact same thoughts coming from nobody mean a hell of a lot less.
Maybe it's embarrassing to interview a guy from down the street instead of a professor at Columbia, or have anecdotes from the local supermarket instead of a brownstone on the Upper East Side.
Still, anything is better than hiding behind a solid wall of references. Let a little light in! Reassure me that the author's not dead!
Lack of self! The author is a ghost. I read it as a cry for help. "I am lonely", he says. But it's worse than that, because there is no him to be lonely. His cognition is bound up in fragments of other people's fictional lives.
I am afraid they did. I have seen quotes from that on the Spectator to defend a pro-abortionist stance, in a text where the actual argument was a pelvic taunting.
Maybe I don't understand what a pretension to cleverness is. I can believe that someone might misquote Seinfeld, or any cultural resource, to appear to lend support to an argument that it doesn't (although why someone would think even an argument actually supported by Seinfeld was made stronger thereby I don't know—the show is famously and intentionally about awful, shallow people). However, to me, a pretension to cleverness involves an attempt to signal some sort of cultural cachet—here, I think of cleverness as being synonymous with a sort of tricky or practical intelligence. Does Seinfeld carry that cachet?
> … in a text where the actual argument was a pelvic taunting.
I don't understand what this means, but I suspect that better understanding it would not make my life any better.
> I don't understand what this means, but I suspect
I interpret it that while afraid, you do not mind me explaining, also/at least for others that may not have understood.
Argument: "We adopt this stance, because it allows X and doing differently would cause Y and Z".
The Spectator, a few months ago: "It is like in that Seinfeld episode where she expressed her concerns and he replied that all [slur] are [slur]. Yeah, take that, [slur], because this [vulgarity] has met your [relative]".
Edit: and when I read that, I thought that the current decadence, each day more evident, is abusing boundaries.
Edit: ...although, I suspect that this type of articles that The Spectator has so horribly decided are acceptable, could actually be tolerated, under the circumstance that they are read and acted by Mike Meyers in a costume.
Somebody here lacks self-awareness, but I'm not sure it's the author. To quote the article:
> Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting—alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching—all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be. Like the too-clever detective whose need to exhibit command tends to result in more chaos, the clever poster’s attempt to stand above the medium’s stupidity merely reveals dependence on its meager pleasures. Cleverness devolves from the output of analytical acuity into a transparent show put on to allay the anxieties of passive consumption.
I don't think this is correct. You're conflating pretentiousness with cleverness, and also making the claim that quoting or name-checking a few pillars of western culture is pretentious. It's not: if you're writing a piece about culture, it's sort of par for the course. Whether it's being written on a "site on the Internet hardly anyone will read" is irrelevant to whether it's being clever or not, but it's certainly ironic, because you read it, and I read it, and it's on the front page of HN.
And, if you still think that it's trying to be clever, and you think that invalidates its point, doesn't that argue for its thesis?
If a thing is clever, doesn't that define it as essentially superficial and insubstantial? And isn't cleverness that serves only to elevate the author, pretentious? Given the meandering focus of the piece and the author's penchant for dropping names rather than making clear points and reinforcing them via reason or contrast, 'pretentious' seems apropos.
IHMO, cleverness always lacks substance; it's superficial, droll, better-than-banal — but never synonymous with brilliant or everlasting. Pretension is cleverness that serves only the author. Both apply here, I fear.
> If a thing is clever, doesn't that define it as essentially superficial and insubstantial? And isn't cleverness that serves only to elevate the author, pretentious?
That's probably one definition of clever, but not the only one. Describing those different meanings is the first thing the article does, and it sounds like you actually agree with where he ended up.
I think what you're describing as pretentious is really just the tone of the article, which is a function of the publication it's writing, for and what that audience expects. To me, it would be pretentious if he'd used examples that he wasn't actually familiar with, in order to seem more knowledgeable than he was. But the ones he chose seem fine to me: I would expect his audience to be familiar enough with them, and they helped make his point. People sometimes use pretentious to mean "high brow", but I don't think they mean the same thing.
There is nothing in it to indicate a lack of self awareness. Even if it is "clever", in the detached, above-it-all sense, it doesn't make the premise any less valid. Sometimes a piece can not escape being hypocritical if the object it is scrutinizing is so ever-present that includes the article itself.
It's like if you wrote an essay on the limitations of language, and then someone went "But you're using language to write it". Well that part is inescapable, isn't it? Just like you can't really scrutinize cleverness (in the sense the author intended), without being clever, without being above it all, at least for the duration of the article. You need that vantage point for any sweeping reflections on current culture.
Funny enough, I didn't consider quoting Seinfeld or Oscar Wilde as symptoms of the particular strain of cleverness the author is referring to.
>Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?
That those people are clearly not clever at all and most can’t think for themselves so they just parrot whatever they heard from others? Trying to feign cleverness and actually being clever are not the same thing.
I dont know if Reddit has always been like this, but it is now. Essentially 90% of all top level comments are some dumbass joke, or some pop culture reference, or some winking cutesie reply. It makes me sick just thinking about it. I'm not saying it all has to be high minded essays for every comment, but what you have now is the equivalent of elementary school playground talk. Grow the fuck up.
It was like that before, but the jokes were in-jokes that made it feel like a community, e.g. a reference to bacon, narwhals, or some other nonsense. This was interspersed with genuinely thoughtful replies. Eventually the site got too big, the LCD quips won out and the conversation became junk food for the mind.
The irony of the witty. The cleverest of quips.
To be more sure of yourself by standing above the rest.
For the clever themselves may just find it was the loudest whom made the news that day.
When I was managing programmers I sometimes warned them about being careful to distinguish between cleverness and wisdom. Never realized that Wittgenstein had made this remark.
In the context of programming, the best person on my team was wise, but he sometimes could not resist being clever to the detriment of the readability of the code. To me, clever code is the stuff you might find (admittedly these are extreme) on the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. "Wise" code is code that does what it needs to do but is clear. The weakest person on a team should be able to read and understand (and maybe fix bugs in) this code.
We had one example where the person in question had just read about multiple inheritance in C++ and just could not resist the urge to use it in some key code that none of the rest of us understood at all! I made him rewrite it without multiple inheritance.
I can't help but think of a parallel between "wisdom vs cleverness" and "difficulty vs complexity". (from Rich Hickey's definition: https://paulrcook.com/blog/simple-made-easy)
Being clever rather than wise will push you to find those simple/elegant solutions that are not easy to understand or maintain. In reverse being wise rather than merely clever you will go with the boring or seemingly complex solution if it is easier for the team to understand and maintain.
I am watching Rossellini's Cartesius -- the intellectual biography of René Descartes -- and was thinking of submitting a link to it; it is held to be a very accurate if not an exciting film. Watching this film I think I may have a clue as to when cleverness became a "public nuisance".
One of the TIL moments for me in the film is learning why the conservative intellectuals of the day were dead against "new planets" discovered by telescopes. It turns out, since all their natural sciences were governed by Zodiac hand-me-downs from Babylon via Aristotle and Avicenna -- ~"all natural phenomena are caused by the movements of heavenly bodies" -- having their magic number Seven (7) be supplanted was a complete intellectual crisis.
It was "cleverness", being "aloof" and "an outsider" that marks the man, Descartes (at least as depicted here). He repeatedly makes the point in the film as to why he chose to live among Dutch merchants and sailors instead of fellow geeks in Paris! ("I want to be left alone to think and reflect").
I think pre-Enlightenment the conservative ethos was held to be 'godly' and 'true'. Then a sequence of brilliant clever men such as Descartes heedlessly began to question practically every received wisdom. And then by the time our witty man of letters comes around, it had become fashionable and no longer the unique instrument of true wits and true minds.
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A reviewer: "At first glance this is the most tedious of Rossellini's portraits, double the length, with even more repetitive talk about a more abstract subject: the correct use of mind."
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadThings I'm reasonably good at are self-awareness and being aware my own limitations (if it were ever claimed that I wasn't much good at anything then no one could justifiably claim those). Being aware of them has often kept me out of trouble.
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That’s from The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
There are at least a couple of other examples of this line of thought in the books : https://www.ihearofsherlock.com/2011/03/skull-was-of-enormou...
Sometimes being clever is about the ability of self-delusion as long as it serves one's goal, as described in On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality — https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/selfdelusion.html
The sort of cleverness that the essay is complaining about seems to me to be summed up in the phrase: "you’re so sharp you’ll cut yourself".
It definitely feels like much of always-online culture is a defense mechanism against feeling scared and powerless, even as it presents itself as anything but.
The above is also an example.
edit: not the op.
https://www.greek-gods.info/monsters/cyclopes/
Advice: question /why/. The rest should follow.
> Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all?
This sounds like the proletariat mimicking their leadership, in that the above is a description of how politics seems to work. We need a better class of example-setters before we're going to see better behaved societies.
The topic of discussion is quickly lost, and any hope of progress towards a resolution along with it, amongst a competition of witticisms.
I'm quite happy with this cleverness of mine:
"I'd rather be right than popular, and I often am."
But this could just be an intellectual hedging of my bets against whatever the real-life-vulnerability equivalent of down votes is; Stern, disapproving glares.
Make it apparent. Oh, but in a way the author did.
Bad signals: «Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes»; «associations»; «positive»; «is seen»; «many will identify»; «we tend to use»; ... «redeem ... by making a clever joke ... that shows»; «to appear»; «the game» ...
The accusation of levity is circular, acted from a perspective firmly installed in levity.
Very little appears of any constructive consideration of the Point: we have to manage a World, we need well processed information, we had been since the dawn of time, playing is for spare time - and Stern is mostly playing.
--
> the medium’s stupidity
In spite of a number of faults, let us hold HN dear for the goods it offers.
There's meandering with multiple sometimes subtle qualities along the way and there's ... meandering.
Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical.
Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data?
[0] https://acoup.blog/
But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I also think that, like consuming only social media probably atrophies your attention span, reading only "direct" prose atrophies your ability to experience the ride of other styles and receive what they have to give.
And again I don't really intend this as a value judgement. Both styles have their place and there is no moral imperative to enjoy all approaches to writing. But having a limited palate accidentally, being blind to that, and thinking the fault is entirely in anything that lies outside of it is in a very literal sense pathetic. And here I often sense that it is perceived as virtuous distance from foolishness instead.
I think that reaction's a combination of that sort of writing sometimes being amateurish wankery poorly-imitating better writers with better ideas, and an awful lot of tech- and science-nerd sorts having decided around 5th grade that they were already expert readers and literature and language classes were just a bunch of time-wasting made-up bullshit that couldn't possibly teach them to be better readers or writers. "It's this entire field that's wrong, not me!"
Poor literacy is almost as prevalent as poor math skills, folks are just less comfortable owning up to it. Plus a lot more people overestimate how good they are at it, I think, than do with math skills.
If an article is nonfiction, then get to the point and stay there, dammit.
I think part of the issue is that these kinds of essays serve both as an argument and jumping off point for discussion, but also as a form of entertainment. If you enjoy the entertainment, you might enjoy the argument being padded and meandering. But if you're mostly interested in hearing the argument and responding, this type of writing can fell like it's intentionally wasting your time.
I actually agree with you that more reflection in general is a good idea (though I don't necessarily agree that these kinds of essays engender that kind of reflection, but that's a separate topic). However, the online communities that exist now are designed to dissuade people from doing anything (reflection, research, editing, etc.) that take more time.
It's also the case that time is limited, and there are some topics we don't want to spend much time on. It's common to see people argue that if you don't spend as much time on the topic as them, then your opinions on it aren't as worthy, but I can't really agree with that. It's very often used as a way to defend poor beliefs against obvious criticisms. You see it a lot with conspiracy theories. "You can't dismiss this unless you've read all of the writings on it!" But only true believers are going to subject themselves to dozens of books on a crank theory.
In today's writing, perhaps because we demand so great a volume of it, purposeful prose financially rewards the author's extra effort less than ever before, and is less appreciated by readers because they're less willing to pause their pace of consumption to reflect on subtleties and unobvious insights. The online written word has evolved into a 24x7-driven ehpemeral commodity, where cleverness alone is the desiderata that makes or breaks the work and its auteur.
I think the piece does resound a bit if you can clean off the gunky verbal tripe and look at what they’re trying to say. There’s a definite problem regarding people trying to be clever. I’m just not convinced that’s the source of the problem. Just a symptom.
The point of citing Kierkegaard is to make use of the insights of others to try to explain something and to shed light on it. What the author is examining starts as a vague, confused, and murky impression that requires refinement, analysis, and effort to get to the essence of the thing. Clarity is not a given. Do you presume to know all there can be said about a thing? If not, then looking at what others have said is an opportunity to grow in wisdom and break out of the provincialism of one's own limited perspective, if only by the very act of wrestling with their material. I thank the wise who came before me for showing me the way and enriching my understanding of reality.
If the author stuck to just dissecting only Twitter or Seinfeld or Kierkegaard or Einstein using some supporting of details derived from just one of of those references, or even tied in one extra reference for robustness, that’d be great in my opinion. But this essay reads like it was constructed from a bunch of transcluded notes from an Obsidian vault or a zettelkasten (where reference upon reference can be taking due to bi-directional links between notes).
I can go as far as to say that this is less classic prose, than it is prose in the manner of a Family Guy episode.
No, although that's an excellent book. I'm referring to the essay-writing tradition that started with Michel de Montaigne (who first used the word 'essay' in that sense). He was a skeptic and thought of essays as wandering and exploratory, not probative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays_(Montaigne)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montaigne
The OP gestures towards a thesis ('here's why society's championing of cleverness is bad') and then spends paragraphs meandering around it.
Is talking about "culture" a way of lumping fiction and reality together? Fictional always-right, wisecracking detectives aren't real, but there are real detectives, and presumably some clever ones whose actual cleverness is of real practical use. Fictional scientists who are more passionate than logical aren't real, but there are real scientists, whose cleverness is presumably valuable. Realistic work of professionals doesn't make for good reading. Fiction is entertainment in the first place.
In more detail, here's a paragraph-by-paragraph "map" of the essay:
• [1–2] Three quotes that speak of cleverness negatively. So is there something wrong with being clever?
• [3-4] Connecting cleverness to being an "outsider". [IMO the main theme pervading the whole essay: alienation/dissociation.] The four character types [mentioned above].
• [5–9] The detective as outsider. [Raymond Chandler, Chinatown.]
• [10–13] The comedian as outsider. [Woody Allen, Seinfeld]
• [14–16] The flâneur (with link to detective).
• [17–19] Online cleverness (with links to the observations made about the earlier types).
• [20–22] Three paragraphs of conclusion: Kierkegaard and a way out.
In light of this, this essay is far more methodically structured than most I've read! From your comment it sounds like you're most interested in the "comedian" bits (paras 10–13 and 19), but the rest of the essay is quite connected too. And the journal is subtitled "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture", so it makes sense that there are references to contemporary culture.
Cleverness is often seen as a positive quality, but it is also associated with being an outsider. In modernity, this has led to the proliferation of cleverness in public life, often in the form of contrived knowingness and irony. This has led to cleverness becoming a currency online, with people competing for likes and subscribers with clever jokes and analyses. There is an affinity between cleverness and alienation, as exemplified by the detective archetype, who is a detached and calculating outsider. This kind of cleverness often takes the form of seeing through illusions and can be found in popular media, online commenting, and in fiction. The proliferation of cleverness in public life has led to it becoming a nuisance and being criticized by figures such as Oscar Wilde and Søren Kierkegaard. It is important to distinguish between genuine wisdom and cleverness, and not to value the latter over the former.
I see a few (e.g. linking 'Kierkegaard' and 'proliferation'), but it would be probably more interesting to do the same on an article presenting some solid argument.
> Pretty good job
Do you think the summary is really structured? Does it present an argument? Does it identify its nodes?
Or is it more like Woody Allen having made that speed-reading course and concluding that War and Peace is about Russia?
However, if your goal was to just know what to expect from the article and then read it, it made a 'Pretty good job'.
Lewis Hyde "Alcohol & Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking"
The author focuses a lot on the trappings of cleverness - the witticisms and the "outsider" nature of the clever individual. This is the wrong thing to focus on. People with conventional ideas today exploit these trappings (with the help of professional marketing and PR teams) to give themselves an air of importance and brilliance. It's no surprise that when you focus there, you will find cleverness to be "impotent."
Instead, cleverness defined as a cross-disciplinary ("outsider") perspective is incredibly valuable in the modern world. A lot of cleverness comes from people who otherwise seem very boring - they are clever in their specialty and in their own way, but not the supposed "renaissance men" that media personalities seem to be attracted to.
And so what the layperson sees, because it's what's chosen by the engagement maximising algorithm, is only ever type 1 cleverness. Hence it's the topic.
Which is ironic in itself, a well written article about the focus being wrong because the focus is wrong.
(My pithy summation is also such an example, it's clever but adds or solves fucking nothing, welcome to my career).
I believe the word you're looking for is "dilettante".
Whatever the reasons/excuses - genetics, upbringing, current social trends towards individualism, whatever - I can find no solution though. Whenever I force myself to get involved I end up disilusioned and eventually angry. Impotence describes it perfectly.
So in the end one must asume that whatever is lacking, be it wisdom or faith, or humblesness, it really is lacking and preventing me from making any significant impact. And being only clever is similar to being a clown.
Our love of our own cleverness is the ego's attempt to assert its relevance. "I am smart. I can figure out the world on my own. I am right in what I think and believe" whereas religion puts us in our place, as mortal and limited beings in an infinite and eternal universe, whose knowledge and even theoretical ability to grasp the ultimate truth is limited.
Newton and Darwin were driven to understand how G-d implements his designs.
The Big Bang was theorized by a Catholic priest scientist who was looking for (and found) the moment of creation. Edward Hubble who proved the big bang through observation was a deeply religious Christian.
Writing about impotent pretensions to cleverness on on the Internet on a site on the Internet hardly anyone will read, quoting Seinfeld, Raymond Chandler, a vintage movie script, and Kierkegaard, and name-checking Oscar Wilde and Einstein, all under the modest tag "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture" is... quite a look.
The flow of the writing reminded me a lot of Paul Graham's essays.
Very hopefully not. A game of associations ("first", "test", "try", "feel", "skin"...) is already «t[ying] together a number of disparate elements». But randomly, in idleness, possibly decadent.
Writers (should be supposed to) try to present a coherent complex idea - defending a thesis, modelling a description, disclosing potentially fruitful relations - by making its ideal structure explicit through some relatively fixed perspective form. That remains, structuring information (and in a loop of criticism checks), in a set of globally (as opposed to locally) strong relations (between the nodes). With a so implied Purpose in the statements.
Which by the way seems to have been an intended target of TFA. Compromising a lot with its enemy, though.
I remember reading something similar from an old Ernest Hemingway interview.
Does anyone who knows what I'm talking about have a link?
If Hemingway said something similar, I'd say it is not specifically because great minds think alike - also that -, but because we described the same thing. There is an infinite number of ways to describe, say, a glass through «relatively fixed perspective form[s]», but a pretty limited number of «ideal structure[s]» pertaining.
Sorry, I shouldn't have written similar. It's literally word for word equivalent.
Have you ever considered rewriting the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, but for different reasons?
Incidentally: I checked earlier, because I was intrigued - though probably "«for different reasons»", i.e. to compare the views - and I could not find it. I saw that there exists an "Hemingway on Writing", 2019. But I do not know. I admit I never read Hemingway (owing to queues). Though I can guess we have pretty different styles: syntactic vs paratactic.
Edit: but if that "magic" happened - /if/ -, I know the trick, and I can already tell you (rephrasing what written before): if, e.g., "a circumference is the set of points equidistant from a centre", the ways in which you can say that idea will collapse into that.
Further edit: although, if the equivalence were there word by word for that deontic definition of writing, I'd turn to the supernatural.
That confers legitimacy in a way that a frozen block of quotes does not.
Same thing with Paul Graham. He actually did things, and wove those experiences into his writing. The exact same thoughts coming from nobody mean a hell of a lot less.
> Same thing with Paul Graham. He [is part of the financial elite]. The exact same thoughts coming from [some pleb] mean a hell of a lot less.
So... actual elitism. This isn't a very charitable way of engaging with literature, and it's your own loss.
Plenty of "nobodies" had thoughts that became legitimate well after their own lifetimes.
Still, anything is better than hiding behind a solid wall of references. Let a little light in! Reassure me that the author's not dead!
> … in a text where the actual argument was a pelvic taunting.
I don't understand what this means, but I suspect that better understanding it would not make my life any better.
I interpret it that while afraid, you do not mind me explaining, also/at least for others that may not have understood.
Argument: "We adopt this stance, because it allows X and doing differently would cause Y and Z".
The Spectator, a few months ago: "It is like in that Seinfeld episode where she expressed her concerns and he replied that all [slur] are [slur]. Yeah, take that, [slur], because this [vulgarity] has met your [relative]".
Edit: and when I read that, I thought that the current decadence, each day more evident, is abusing boundaries.
Edit: ...although, I suspect that this type of articles that The Spectator has so horribly decided are acceptable, could actually be tolerated, under the circumstance that they are read and acted by Mike Meyers in a costume.
Correction: "to defend an anti-abortionist stance".
Sorry, this writer is having attention faults.
And my comment is the quintessential backlash to the snarky quintessential comment.
Oh god. Are we becoming too self-aware. Someone shut us off.
> Another way to redeem passive lurking is by making a clever joke that shows that you are above the whole thing. Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position. The game, in effect, is this: Who can appear the most above it all? But the circumstances of posting—alone at the controls with no one around but everyone watching—all but guarantee that posts are alloyed with insecurity, however clever they might be. Like the too-clever detective whose need to exhibit command tends to result in more chaos, the clever poster’s attempt to stand above the medium’s stupidity merely reveals dependence on its meager pleasures. Cleverness devolves from the output of analytical acuity into a transparent show put on to allay the anxieties of passive consumption.
And, if you still think that it's trying to be clever, and you think that invalidates its point, doesn't that argue for its thesis?
IHMO, cleverness always lacks substance; it's superficial, droll, better-than-banal — but never synonymous with brilliant or everlasting. Pretension is cleverness that serves only the author. Both apply here, I fear.
That's probably one definition of clever, but not the only one. Describing those different meanings is the first thing the article does, and it sounds like you actually agree with where he ended up.
I think what you're describing as pretentious is really just the tone of the article, which is a function of the publication it's writing, for and what that audience expects. To me, it would be pretentious if he'd used examples that he wasn't actually familiar with, in order to seem more knowledgeable than he was. But the ones he chose seem fine to me: I would expect his audience to be familiar enough with them, and they helped make his point. People sometimes use pretentious to mean "high brow", but I don't think they mean the same thing.
It's like if you wrote an essay on the limitations of language, and then someone went "But you're using language to write it". Well that part is inescapable, isn't it? Just like you can't really scrutinize cleverness (in the sense the author intended), without being clever, without being above it all, at least for the duration of the article. You need that vantage point for any sweeping reflections on current culture.
Funny enough, I didn't consider quoting Seinfeld or Oscar Wilde as symptoms of the particular strain of cleverness the author is referring to.
what does that have to do with the lack of self-awareness?
That those people are clearly not clever at all and most can’t think for themselves so they just parrot whatever they heard from others? Trying to feign cleverness and actually being clever are not the same thing.
The humor of Kierkegaard: an anthology (edited by Thomas C. Oden)
https://archive.org/details/humorofkierkegaa0000kier
What a breathe Omm
In the context of programming, the best person on my team was wise, but he sometimes could not resist being clever to the detriment of the readability of the code. To me, clever code is the stuff you might find (admittedly these are extreme) on the The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. "Wise" code is code that does what it needs to do but is clear. The weakest person on a team should be able to read and understand (and maybe fix bugs in) this code.
We had one example where the person in question had just read about multiple inheritance in C++ and just could not resist the urge to use it in some key code that none of the rest of us understood at all! I made him rewrite it without multiple inheritance.
Being clever rather than wise will push you to find those simple/elegant solutions that are not easy to understand or maintain. In reverse being wise rather than merely clever you will go with the boring or seemingly complex solution if it is easier for the team to understand and maintain.
One of the TIL moments for me in the film is learning why the conservative intellectuals of the day were dead against "new planets" discovered by telescopes. It turns out, since all their natural sciences were governed by Zodiac hand-me-downs from Babylon via Aristotle and Avicenna -- ~"all natural phenomena are caused by the movements of heavenly bodies" -- having their magic number Seven (7) be supplanted was a complete intellectual crisis.
It was "cleverness", being "aloof" and "an outsider" that marks the man, Descartes (at least as depicted here). He repeatedly makes the point in the film as to why he chose to live among Dutch merchants and sailors instead of fellow geeks in Paris! ("I want to be left alone to think and reflect").
I think pre-Enlightenment the conservative ethos was held to be 'godly' and 'true'. Then a sequence of brilliant clever men such as Descartes heedlessly began to question practically every received wisdom. And then by the time our witty man of letters comes around, it had become fashionable and no longer the unique instrument of true wits and true minds.
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A reviewer: "At first glance this is the most tedious of Rossellini's portraits, double the length, with even more repetitive talk about a more abstract subject: the correct use of mind."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0161382
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:26FF01235DA0205BFA466939EED0EA5100CBB3BE