Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 13-03-2016

andrewducker

Comments 10

fanf March 13 2016, 12:04:02 UTC

I love the way they missed out "tons of" in "full of hundreds of biscuits". Also, who knew Emirates made biscuits as well as flying planes?

andrewducker March 13 2016, 12:32:54 UTC

Yeah, I have no idea if Emirates make biscuits, or if they've just been stockpiling them against an apocalyptic emergency.

skington March 13 2016, 18:12:15 UTC

Also, is there a better example of someone so lazily cutting and pasting the joint press release from Emirates and the airport?

andrewducker March 13 2016, 18:30:18 UTC

It was a particularly badly written story, I thought.

kalimac March 13 2016, 16:07:30 UTC

1) The biggest mystery in the article about theories of consciousness is how the author managed to write an entire article about theories of consciousness without ever mentioning the phrase "the ghost in the machine." Because that's the long-established term for the dilemma being puzzled over here. The article reads like it's inventing its objections from first principles instead of consulting centuries of philosophical speculation on its topic. F for failure to do a literature search ( ... )

skington March 13 2016, 18:16:57 UTC

The article is pretty unfair, I must say: this isn't about some college student with a crazy theory who won't listen to reason, this is a college student and practically everyone in the entire world disagreeing with Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury may have intended to write a book about the evils of TV and mass media. But that's not the book that people read.

Also, I wouldn't say his name was synonymous with just one book. Arguably the Martian Chronicles is as famous, for instance.

ggreig March 13 2016, 21:15:07 UTC

No-one knows better than the author what the book is about, so if Ray Bradbury says that's it, that's it. It's definitive.

What other people are doing is putting their interpretation on the book, which is what the book is about for them; that's OK too, and valuable, and reflects their experience, both of life and the book. They own their experience of reading the book; they don't own the book.

The problem is that people are seeing a false dichotomy here. They're so wrapped up in their interpretation of the book and their genuine ownership of that experience, that the author's original intention must somehow be "wrong". The student said so, kalimac said so above, and you imply it in your first paragraph (sorry if I've put the wrong interpretation on that ;-) ).

The thing is that both interpretations (and maybe others) are valid, and a book can have more than one meaning. Obviously in this case, it's being seen to have a meaning that the author didn't originally intend, but that doesn't - and can't - make the author's interpretation "wrong ( ... )

kalimac March 14 2016, 04:34:34 UTC

If "both interpretations are valid" (your words), then Bradbury is still wrong, if we take the article as an accurate report. For what Bradbury is reported as saying is, "the theme of the novel was the dangers of television." Not that that is what he intended to say, which is the actual thing that "no-one knows better than the author," not the theme that he sees as a reader with no greater privilege than any other reader, not one possible interpretation that he happens to prefer, but the theme.One we're playing in that sandbox, he's as open to correction as anybody else ( ... )

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