I stopped halfway through this paragraph and just googled Peter Putnam.
If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog.
> If I want an article to take hours to get to the point I'll go read a recipe blog.
I don't appreciate all the extra text in recipe blogs either.
Y'all know humans are kinda "made of" stories, right? Stories are the unit layer that we add on top of biological structure. It's not "data"
Imho it is essentially self-loathing of the human condition to valorise raw data and detest linear narrative as much as this crowd seems to do
EDIT: Narrative is the wings, without which data cannot travel through enough of the bell curve of minds. Being anti-story is being anti-democratic is toward authoritarianism. </ hot-take>
Narrative is suasion, not substance.
The storytellers know of no other way to tell the audience what is important, so the medium is the message.
But in my defence, I'm in a "punching up" mode here, in the minority sense. I'd probably argue for valorising data more in an arts space.
But something about the current tech world-builders not having respect for narrative makes me frustrated and afraid. How can we ever build things that account for parts of minds and life that we don't respect. (I sense a lack of respect for why and how narrative has been the vehicle of so much human progress and growth)
Many stories and folklore are very popular on HN... but jumping in at "The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air" for an article feels more like narrative fluff than relevant context.
Most people following the link did so out of curiosity, and they were rewarded with an opening line that feels like it belongs in the first page of a long, low density novel, no one opened that link with that level of expected time investment, that's why it's close tab inducing. Even in a novel that feels lazy, at least woo the reader first into being vaguely interested enough to stand your pretentious prose.
Putnam himself would feel perfectly comfortable here.
I do wonder about Putnam's research though. Has it been looked into by experts in the field more recently? The article doesn't really give an answer to this.
Regarding the point about current research, I found in the article:
"Gary Aston-Jones, head of the Brain Health Institute at Rutgers University, told me he was inspired by Putnam to go into neuroscience after Clarke gave him one of Putnam’s papers.
“Putnam’s nervous system model presaged by decades stuff that’s very cutting edge in neuroscience,” Aston-Jones said, and yet, “in the field of neuroscience, I don’t know anybody that’s ever heard of him.”"
morninglight•2h ago
Not even close.