Autobiography

What Hacker News says

1. knbknbJan 2024
   Who decides or sets the difficulty level of "reading ease" (which is a sortable metadata attribute on the search page) ?

   Some classiications seem a bit ...nonintuitive. For example, the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill is classified as "very diffcult" whereas "The Tempest" by Shakespeare is classified as "fairly easy".

   I would classify it the other way around, but what do I know, I'm a nonnative speaker anyway.

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2. yesenadamNov 2018
   The article refers to John Stuart Mill's Autobiography.

   Mill talks about his amazing early education at the very beginning of the book, starting with

   I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek; I have been told that it was when I was three years old.

   http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10378/pg10378-images.htm...

   His father, James Mill, was one of the founders, with Jeremy Bentham, of modern utilitarianism. This essay by (JS) Mill about Bentham I think is magnificent as an appreciation of Bentham and his huge influence, and as philosophical prose.

   https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/mill-the-collected-works-...

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3. DrPhishOct 2013
   "I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was more thorough, or better fitted for training the faculties, than the mode in which logic and political economy were taught to me by my father. Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on both."

      -John Stuart Mill: Autobiography

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