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What Hacker News says
- A few of the other sub-commentors here are talking about a good bookshelf as a solution to Herb's problem.
I think it's a great idea. But, as always, determining what is on that bookshelf is a tough one.
The Harvard Classics was a great attempt about a century ago [0]. 'Dr. Elliot's 5 foot shelf of books' was what an undergraduate degree at Harvard in 1909 included. Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot put together about all of the great books that those Gilded Age scions were supposed to digest.
Personally speaking, the greatest thing about the Harvard Classics was the 15-minute-a-day Reading Guide to the corpus. I went through it all a few years ago, and man, that was a really good idea. Like, I like Shakespeare now; he's really good! And I read through that philosophy finally, and that was really good too! And, lord, the poetry; I never really liked poems, but now I really love them. Most days were like that for me. I'll fully admit though, there were some real stinkers in there. But only once in a while.
If you'd like to read along too, you can download scanned versions of the books here: https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212 . For example, today's reading is:
Vol. 2, pp. 31-43 : Plato's Crito -- Socrates unceasingly strove for beauty, truth, and perfection. Sentenced to death on a false charge, he refused to escape from the death cell, even when opportunity was offered.
As an aside, I'd love for an updated version of the Harvard Classics complete with 15-minute-a-day type readings or other media. I really did look forward to that dose of mind-training every day when I went through it. Does anyone know of a good place for daily mind training that is like this?
- There is a bookshelf called The Harvard Classics.
The collection of literary works, philosophical texts, and scientific writings was initially titled "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf." It was assembled by Charles W. Eliot, who served as Harvard University's president.
Almost all the books can be read for free in Gutenberg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/40
My favourite will always be the plays of William Shakespeare. It has it all.
- Dr. Eliot (of Harvard Classics) also edited a 10-volume Children's Classics set, with (IIRC) a reading guide similar to the one included with the Harvard Classics.
- The Harvard Classics [0] (or Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf[1]), is a 51-volume anthology of 'the classics' compiled by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and published in 1909. It is the WASP collection of literature and gives a very interesting eye towards the first Gilded Age and into the minds of US leaders during the first half of the 20th century.
If it were to be updated, nearly 110 years later, many works would be left out (like, nearly all of the middle French plays) and MUCH would be included. Without a doubt, one of the books to be included would be The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, winner of the 1987 Pulitzer[2]. This book goes from start to finish on how the A-bomb was made, the major and minor players, and their thoughts about the bomb all along the way. Rhodes takes us into the heads of the physicists and clears out all the calculus and gets to the human parts of the endeavor.
All the players in the race for the nuke knew the bomb was unavoidable for mankind. Leo Szilard was the first person to really conceive of the bomb while waiting for the stoplight to change where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury[3].
There were thoughts, groups, and people that entertained the thought that they could form a group of 'priest-scientists' that would keep the uranium safe from politicians and warlords. Keep the power flowing but stop the chain reaction from going critical and taking out billions of people. But as the race progressed, all the real players for the nuke knew that such a utopia was impossible. That this particular genie was out of the bottle the second that Leo, or any other physicist, had made it across Southampton Row.
These robots are a microcosm of the same issues that the atomic physicists faced nearly 100 years ago. They know the damage that the ideas will have upon us all, they know that the semi-bucolic world we now live in will fall away to violence, and they know that they can't stop it. But, bless them, they are trying to sound the alarms and maybe, just maybe, change the minds of some of the politicians and warlords.
Looking back at the first Gilded age, with all their knowledge, they had no templates for the power of The Bomb and finally facing the mortality of all humans. Fortunately, we do have the templates, at least in terms of the use of lethal robots. We know how this plays out, we know how to make an atomic bomb, and we programmers need to learn from the physicists of the '30s and '40s.
[0] https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb
[3] https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2617750W/The_making_of_the_a...
- Yes. The undergraduate 'great books' program used at St. John's came from the University of Chicago (Mortimer Adler and others) through Stringfellow Barr. The University of Chicago based their program on Charles Eliot's work (i.e., the Harvard University Classics).
I was also pointing out that it's (anecdotally) beneficial to read the Harvard Classics and other foundational works, but if you're looking for some sort of academic purity, there you go.
