> The neighborhood was quiet. There was a chill in the air. The scent of Spanish moss hung from the cypress trees. Plumes of white smoke rose from the burning cane fields and stretched across the skies of Terrebonne Parish. The man swung a long leg over a bicycle frame and pedaled off down the street.
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.
vinceguidry · 32m ago
Yes, the quoted section is rather overwrought, but I didn't know it was there. Why? I skimmed right over it. Your ability to take in information would be greatly improved if you can train your brain to be non-reactive to such things.
bryanrasmussen · 29m ago
If you stopped halfway through this paragraph, how did you know what it said?
verisimi · 1h ago
Thanks.
> 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.
patcon · 1h ago
Good god, the perpetual disdain of default HN for narrative exposition is so deep-rooted.
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>
mitthrowaway2 · 31m ago
It was approaching 9 AM one early summer morning, uncharacteristically cool. The city was still quiet as drops of dew hang heavily from the blades of grass and the flower petals, still fresh in their memory of the visitations of bees from the day before. The only sound was the sound of typing, as a comment was posted to HN expressing support for the GP. There's a time and place for literary exposition. Maybe this magazine is the right place and most of their audience appreciates it, but it's also OK to feel put off by it when you're curious and hoping to learn something.
Henchman21 · 1h ago
Please keep in mind that the people who are anti-story are the same folks who view human interaction as a “problem to be solved”. They’re the outliers in society who make the rest of our lives easier. But they have gained way too much power in this world and are intent on dooming us all to their cold, dark, inhuman world.
bitwize · 27m ago
Oh, feck off with your ableist nonsense.
We're not sitting around a campfire shining flashlights into our faces. We're reading an article supposedly about an unsung genius named Peter Putnam. Such an article should open with who he was and what he did that was so important yet unsung, and THEN delve into story details, not bury the important bit behind mountains of "It was a dark and stormy night" type filler.
vinceguidry · 38m ago
You'll never cut through this attitude. It is, as you say, perpetual. HN is their safe space, hence the strong reaction you're receiving. You're going to have to learn how to operate within the mindset if you want pleasant interactions here. Learn to appreciate the dull rationalistic mental sludge.
Putnam himself would feel perfectly comfortable here.
plemer · 1h ago
You loathing others’ preferences /= them self-loathing. Presumptuous and insulting.
tomxor · 1h ago
> the perpetual disdain of default HN for narrative exposition is so deep-rooted.
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.
gorjusborg · 33m ago
The irony is that you noped out of an article about someone whose life's worth of thought led him to believe that you can't understand how someone is right without understanding their circumstances.
Your post is a sort of sad admission that your attitude will prevent you from seeing the beauty in everyone.
You do you though. I am sure there is a reason you are this way ;)
bitwize · 12m ago
That is indeed a take so spicy as to be shartworthy. Disliking this glurgy, fluff-laden narrative article style does not make one a soulless cryptofascist robot. One could imagine a different format for the article that front-loads the interesting bits and then delves into background detail, rather than forcing the reader to wade through pages of lit-fic-wannabe padding to get to the money shot. Articles used to be written this way all the time, but that was before writers and magazines were paid by the ad view.
cwmoore · 1h ago
I hate this (extremely popular) 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.
dzink · 1h ago
The only truly scarce thing for living creatures is time. The HN crowd expects respect of that so a disclaimer would help filter people with the wrong expectations.
patcon · 53m ago
I do agree, both approaches are valid to seek. Setting expectations with disclaimers would be helpful so people can enter willingly instead of perpetually critiquing via comment. I don't like a culture of bashing/minimising one approach, which I admittedly have just participated in.
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)
nissomon · 1h ago
A captivating read, bringing life to a very interesting character. Thank you for posting this.
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.
triska · 1h ago
I second this! What a fascinating read!
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.”"
refactor_master · 1h ago
I agree, it was a very interesting read, though not very information dense. The article vaguely gestures at something that approaches what we now know as “reinforcement learning”, but it seems like Putnams theories were developed entirely in parallel, and those two worlds never intersecting?
khakimov · 1h ago
After this article last week started to read his work (some available here https://www.peterputnam.org/) What a life, what a character.
fumeux_fume · 1h ago
If your fishing net is constructed just right--so as to pick out the many interesting gems in this article, you will be glad to know Gefter has also published a book that revolves around John Wheeler.
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>
We're not sitting around a campfire shining flashlights into our faces. We're reading an article supposedly about an unsung genius named Peter Putnam. Such an article should open with who he was and what he did that was so important yet unsung, and THEN delve into story details, not bury the important bit behind mountains of "It was a dark and stormy night" type filler.
Putnam himself would feel perfectly comfortable here.
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.
Your post is a sort of sad admission that your attitude will prevent you from seeing the beauty in everyone.
You do you though. I am sure there is a reason you are this way ;)
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)
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.”"
Not even close.