5 ms·

You can discover beliefs that are shocking today, such as this excerpt from the article "Adolescence": "In the case of girls, let them run, leap and climb with

You can discover beliefs that are shocking today, such as this excerpt from the article "Adolescence": "In the case of girls, let them run, leap and climb with their brothers for the first twelve years or so of life. But as puberty approaches, with all the change, stress and strain dependent thereon, their lives should be appropriately modified. Rest should be enforced during the menstrual periods of these earlier years, and milder, more graduated exercise taken at other times. In the same way all mental strain should be diminished. Instead of pressure being put on a girl’s intellectual education at about this time, as is too often the case, the time devoted to school and books should be diminished. Education should be on broader, more fundamental lines, and much time should be passed in the open air."

ahaspel 5mo ago
No doubt. That’s one of the reasons I find the 1911 edition interesting — the authors have more license to express their own opinions, which naturally reflect those current at the time.
- genghisjahn 5mo ago
  "Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us." On Reading Old Books C. S. Lewis https://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/article/97/Lewis.On-Reading-Old-Books.-CS-Lewis.pdf https://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/article/97/Lewis.On-Re...
zozbot234 5mo ago
You can nowadays paste the text from pretty much anything that's in the public domain into a near-SOTA LLM such as Kimi or GLM and it will give you a pretty nice summary of what it's about in modern language (Extremely useful: the LLM tendency to go overboard on formatting nicely balances out the wall-of-text format from historical publications, which was aimed at saving paper and minimizing manual layout effort), and then gladly tell you about all the things in the historical text that would be absolutely beyond the pale today. (Sometimes you have to nudge it by prompting "How would this text be received today?" or something like it after it has put its nice summary in context, but once you do that it tends to be quite thorough.)
- quamserena 5mo ago
  You can also read the text yourself and draw your own conclusions...
- smallerize 5mo ago
  You didn't really explain what that does for you. Why do you paste it into an LLM?
  - zozbot234 5mo ago
    I'm not sure if you're familiar with public domain texts from around the 19th or early 20th century, but they were not intended to be skimmed or speed-read the way we'd skim a modern text prior to getting into a more attentive close-reading. Even their short magazine articles were actually the near-equivalent to our scholarly papers, and were often read aloud at length in parlor gatherings. So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.
    - smallerize 5mo ago
      Oh well that was the whole point to me. If I wanted to read something that's not from 1911 I could just do that lol
    - keane 5mo ago
      Mostly from a bit further back but you might enjoy https://earlymoderntexts.com/texts https://earlymoderntexts.com/texts
    - BigTTYGothGF 5mo ago
      The trick is to have a basic level of literacy and then you don't need the machine to chew it up for you like a mother bird.
    - qmr 5mo ago
      > So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability. Perhaps your attention span needs improvement.
yieldcrv 5mo ago
It’s only shocking to write it, or declare it as sacrosanct Many people practice it, and women’s movements that put most energy on doing the opposite have since dialed back to pointing out that they were fighting for choice, including that choice of not being in a workforce. An option of a “soft life” that is wildly popular, and timeless. People just needed a new way to say it. If it was culturally supported for men to be subsidized by another, a large percentage of men would immediately take that graduated and intellectually diminished role too. This is not a reliable option and is rare. If common, it would unironically solve representation imbalances in other fields, since it would no longer be about shoehorning women into them, because enough men would leave on their own. A level of enlightenment still missing from Women in <field> fireside chats at every industry conference worldwide

ahaspel 5mo ago

No doubt. That’s one of the reasons I find the 1911 edition interesting — the authors have more license to express their own opinions, which naturally reflect those current at the time.

genghisjahn 5mo ago
"Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us." On Reading Old Books C. S. Lewis https://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/article/97/Lewis.On-Reading-Old-Books.-CS-Lewis.pdf https://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/article/97/Lewis.On-Re...

zozbot234 5mo ago

You can nowadays paste the text from pretty much anything that's in the public domain into a near-SOTA LLM such as Kimi or GLM and it will give you a pretty nice summary of what it's about in modern language (Extremely useful: the LLM tendency to go overboard on formatting nicely balances out the wall-of-text format from historical publications, which was aimed at saving paper and minimizing manual layout effort), and then gladly tell you about all the things in the historical text that would be absolutely beyond the pale today. (Sometimes you have to nudge it by prompting "How would this text be received today?" or something like it after it has put its nice summary in context, but once you do that it tends to be quite thorough.)

quamserena 5mo ago
You can also read the text yourself and draw your own conclusions...
smallerize 5mo ago
You didn't really explain what that does for you. Why do you paste it into an LLM?
- zozbot234 5mo ago
  I'm not sure if you're familiar with public domain texts from around the 19th or early 20th century, but they were not intended to be skimmed or speed-read the way we'd skim a modern text prior to getting into a more attentive close-reading. Even their short magazine articles were actually the near-equivalent to our scholarly papers, and were often read aloud at length in parlor gatherings. So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability.
  - smallerize 5mo ago
    Oh well that was the whole point to me. If I wanted to read something that's not from 1911 I could just do that lol
  - keane 5mo ago
    Mostly from a bit further back but you might enjoy https://earlymoderntexts.com/texts https://earlymoderntexts.com/texts
  - BigTTYGothGF 5mo ago
    The trick is to have a basic level of literacy and then you don't need the machine to chew it up for you like a mother bird.
  - qmr 5mo ago
    > So having a LLM split the text into manageable sections for you and provide a hint of what each lengthy wall-of-text paragraph will be about is actually a huge gain in readability. Perhaps your attention span needs improvement.

yieldcrv 5mo ago

It’s only shocking to write it, or declare it as sacrosanct Many people practice it, and women’s movements that put most energy on doing the opposite have since dialed back to pointing out that they were fighting for choice, including that choice of not being in a workforce. An option of a “soft life” that is wildly popular, and timeless. People just needed a new way to say it. If it was culturally supported for men to be subsidized by another, a large percentage of men would immediately take that graduated and intellectually diminished role too. This is not a reliable option and is rare. If common, it would unironically solve representation imbalances in other fields, since it would no longer be about shoehorning women into them, because enough men would leave on their own. A level of enlightenment still missing from Women in <field> fireside chats at every industry conference worldwide