• Great Essays
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Some of the best things I've ever read are in the form of essays, be they political, educational or satire (or all 3!). Even when I disagree with the argument, I can still admire the mastery of the language used to express it. Here are some of my favorites, with a short extract from them as a summary: [I][URL="http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/"]Politics and the English Language[/URL][/I] by George Orwell: [quote]In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called [I]pacification[/I]. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called [I]transfer of population[/I] or [I]rectification of frontiers[/I]. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called [I]elimination of unreliable elements[/I]. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.[/quote] [I][URL="http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf"]Lockhart's Lament[/URL][/I] by Paul Lockhart [quote]By concentrating on [I]what[/I], and leaving out [I]why[/I], mathematics is reduced to an empty shell. The art is not in the “truth” but in the explanation, the argument. It is the argument itself which gives the truth its context, and determines what is really being said and meant. Mathematics is [I]the art of explanation[/I]. If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you deny them mathematics itself. So no, I’m not complaining about the presence of facts and formulas in our mathematics classes, I’m complaining about the lack of mathematics in our mathematics classes.[/quote] [I]Can We Know The Universe[/I] by Carl Sagan [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2aE-iWNqlc[/media] [quote]Our common-sense experience and our evolutionary history have prepared us to understand something of the workaday world. When we go into other realms, however, common sense and ordinary intuition turn out to be highly unreliable guides. It is stunning that as we go close to the speed of light our mass increases indefinitely, we shrink towards zero thickness in the direction of motion, and time for us comes as near to stopping as we would like. Many people think that this is silly, and every week or two I get a letter from someone who complains to me about it. But it is a virtually certain consequence not just of experiment but also of Albert Einstein's brilliant analysis of space and time called the Special Theory of Relativity. It does not matter that these effects seem unreasonable to us. We are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. The testimony of our common sense is suspect at high velocities.[/quote] [I][URL="http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html"]Keep Your Identity Small[/URL][/I] by Paul Graham [quote]Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities.[/quote] [I][URL="http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/"]Diseased Thinking - Dissolving Questions About Disease[/URL][/I] by Scott Siskind [quote]So here, at last, is a rule for which diseases we offer sympathy, and which we offer condemnation: if giving condemnation instead of sympathy decreases the incidence of the disease enough to be worth the hurt feelings, condemn; otherwise, sympathize. Though the rule is based on philosophy that the majority of the human race would disavow, it leads to intuitively correct consequences. Yelling at a cancer patient, shouting "How dare you allow your cells to divide in an uncontrolled manner like this; is that the way your mother raised you??!" will probably make the patient feel pretty awful, but it's not going to cure the cancer. Telling a lazy person "Get up and do some work, you worthless bum," very well might cure the laziness. The cancer is a biological condition immune to social influences; the laziness is a biological condition susceptible to social influences, so we try to socially influence the laziness and not the cancer. The question "Do the obese deserve our sympathy or our condemnation," then, is asking whether condemnation is such a useful treatment for obesity that its utility outweights the disutility of hurting obese people's feelings.[/quote] [I][URL="http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/"]Undiscriminating Skepticism[/URL][/I] by Eliezer Yudkowsky [quote]Back in the good old days, there was a simple test for this syndrome that would get quite a lot of mileage: You could just ask me what I thought about God. If I treated the idea with deeper respect than I treated astrology, holding it worthy of serious debate even if I said I disbelieved in it, then you knew that I was taking my cues from my social surroundings - that if the people around me treated a belief as high-prestige, high-status, I wouldn't start mocking it no matter what the state of evidence. On the other hand suppose I said without hesitation that my epistemic state on God was similar to my epistemic state on psychic powers: no positive evidence, lots of failed tests, highly unfavorable prior, and if you believe it under those circumstances then something is wrong with your mind. Then you would have heard a bit of skepticism that might cost me something socially, and that not everyone around me would have endorsed, even in educated circles. You would know it wasn't just a cheap way of picking up cheap points. Today the God-test no longer works, because some people realized that the taking-it-seriously aura of religion is in fact the main thing left which prevents people from noticing the epistemic awfulness; there has been a concerted and, I think, well-advised effort to mock religion and strip it of its respectability. The upshot is that there are now quite wide social circles in which God is just another stupid belief that we all know we don't believe in, on the same list with astrology. You could be dealing with an adept rationalist, or you could just be dealing with someone who reads Reddit.[/quote] [I][URL="http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/nerds-are-nuts.php"]Nerds are nuts[/URL][/I] by Razib Khan [quote]A literal reading of the Bible leads to ludicrous conclusions, but if one perceives that the game is all or nothing, then perhaps one must assert the truth value of Genesis as if it was a scientific treatise. Religious professionals have often been skeptical of literalism because a deep knowledge of languages and the translation process highlights various ambiguities and gray shades, but for those whom the text is plain and unadorned by deeper knowledge its meaning is "clear" and must be take at its word. Scientists and engineers live in a world of axioms, laws and theories, which though rough and ready, must be taken as truths for predictions and models to be valid. (...) If one is told that one's religion is based on a book, and that book plainly seems to imply ludicrous assertions, how to square this circle? Many a scientific mind simply accepts the ludicrous axioms and starts to generate inferences.[/quote] [I][URL="http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html"]The Awful German Language[/URL][/I] by Mark Twain [quote]To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female -- tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it -- for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay. Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may [B]think[/B] he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.[/quote] [I][URL="http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm"]The Relativity of Wrong[/URL][/I] by Isaac Asimov [quote]When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.[/quote] [I]Cargo Cult Science[/I] by Richard Feynman [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg[/media] [quote]But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to cheek on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress - lots of theory, but no progress - in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.[/quote] [I][URL="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html"]A Person Paper on Purity in Language[/URL][/I] by William Satire (aka Douglas R. Hoftstadter) [quote]It's high time someone blew the whistle on all the silly prattle about revamping our language to suit the purposes of certain political fanatics. You know what I'm talking about-those who accuse speakers of English of what they call "racism." This awkward neologism, constructed by analogy with the well-established term "sexism," does not sit well in the ears, if I may mix my metaphors. But let us grant that in our society there may be injustices here and there in the treatment of either race from time to time, and let us even grant these people their terms "racism" and "racist." How valid, however, are the claims of the self-proclaimed "black libbers," or "negrists"-those who would radically change our language in order to "liberate" us poor dupes from its supposed racist bias? Most of the clamor,as you certainly know by now, revolves around the age-old usage of the noun "white" and words built from it, such as [I]chairwhite, mailwhite, repairwhite, clergywhite, middlewhite, Frenchwhite, forewhite, whitepower, whiteslaughter, oneupuwhiteship, straw white, whitehandle,[/I] and so on. The negrists claim that using the word "white," either on its own or as a component, to talk about all the members of the human species is somehow degrading to blacks and reinforces racism. Therefore the libbers propose that we substitute "person" everywhere where "white" now occurs. Sensitive speakers of our secretary tongue of course find this preposterous. There is great beauty to a phrase such as "All whites are created equal." Our forebosses who framed the Declaration of Independence well understood the poetry of our language. Think how ugly it would be to say "All persons are created equal," or "All whites and blacks are created equal." Besides, as any schoolwhitey can tell you, such phrases are redundant. In most contexts, it is self-evident when "white" is being used in an inclusive sense, in which case it subsumes members of the darker race just as much as fairskins.[/quote] Share some of your favorite essays so the rest of Facepunch can read them!
out of all of these essays that i've read, the george orwell one is my favorite he's kind of a dick but he pulls it off so well
[QUOTE=SystemGS;36711771]out of all of these essays that i've read, the george orwell one is my favorite he's kind of a dick but he pulls it off so well[/QUOTE] I don't really see how he's a dick, how do you mean?
Dain does this involve school written essays because I need to do one and I have questions.
[QUOTE=Zarjk;36712451]Dain does this involve school written essays because I need to do one and I have questions.[/QUOTE] The thread is young so why not? I'm probably not one to critique anything since I haven't written an essay in years but let's give it a shot
[img]http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517733l/5128.jpg[/img] The Doors of Perception: [quote]The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley describes an experiment that the author enters into in 1953 to test the effects of mescalin, the psychedelic ingredient in peyote. The essay explains how the author comes to be involved in the experiment and what happens while he is under the influence of the drug. Huxley also broadly explores why people take drugs and some of what they experience when they are under the influence of drugs.[/quote] Heaven and Hell: [quote]Heaven and Hell is a philosophical essay by Aldous Huxley published in 1956. Huxley derived the title from William Blake's book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The essay discusses the relationship between bright, colorful objects, geometric designs, psychoactives, art, and profound experience. Heaven and Hell metaphorically refer to what Huxley conceives to be two contrary mystical experiences that potentially await when one opens the "doors of perception"—not only in a mystical experience, but in prosaic life.[/quote]
[QUOTE=skynrdfan3;36712509][img]http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517733l/5128.jpg[/img][/QUOTE] Could you give a brief description of what it's about?
I read "A Modest Proposal" by Jonathan Swift in my AP Lit class, and it was thoroughly informative. [url]http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm[/url]
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