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Meaningness
Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.
Meaningness is a hypertext book (in progress), plus a “metablog” that comments on it. The book begins with an appetizer. Alternatively, you might like to look at its table of contents, or some other starting points. Classification of pages by topics supplements the book and metablog structures. Terms with dotted underlining (example: meaningness) show a definition if you click on them. Pages marked with ⚒ are still under construction.
Meaningness is a hypertext book (in progress), plus a “metablog” that comments on it. The book begins with an appetizer. Alternatively, you might like to look at its table of contents, or some other starting points. Classification of pages by topics supplements the book and metablog structures. Terms with dotted underlining (example: meaningness) show a definition if you click on them. Pages marked with ⚒ are still under construction.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 23, 2021
Many thousands of words that add up to "the map is not the territory" with too many terms in that summation being zero.
Chapman is a writer with the same skill and same weaknesses as Sam Harris; his individual sentences are clear, but zoom out any farther and you'll find an unstructured mush of competing intent.
Take as a representative example his page "How to Think Real Good". The intent is obvious: explain best practices for thinking more effectively. But it's not long until he's lost that thread and by the end the most concrete advice he's given us - on let's reiterate: the topic of thinking more effectively - is "when choosing your college major, choose Math".
Put bluntly, this is writing so unfocused I wouldn't trust him to water my plants.
Update 9/23/2021:
I have revised my opinion of Chapman and his work downward; he is deeply delusional crank, believing that "cats know the meaning of can openers" and "feminism doesn't exist anymore", "catatonia is common", "depression is voluntary".
For most readers he won't cause any more harm than reading, say, Aleister Crowley would. For depressed people he will be actively harmful, because he reinforces the prototypical globalized emotions of the depressed with language like "this experience has meaning" instead of the more accurate "this experience made me feel good".
Chapman is a writer with the same skill and same weaknesses as Sam Harris; his individual sentences are clear, but zoom out any farther and you'll find an unstructured mush of competing intent.
Take as a representative example his page "How to Think Real Good". The intent is obvious: explain best practices for thinking more effectively. But it's not long until he's lost that thread and by the end the most concrete advice he's given us - on let's reiterate: the topic of thinking more effectively - is "when choosing your college major, choose Math".
Put bluntly, this is writing so unfocused I wouldn't trust him to water my plants.
Update 9/23/2021:
I have revised my opinion of Chapman and his work downward; he is deeply delusional crank, believing that "cats know the meaning of can openers" and "feminism doesn't exist anymore", "catatonia is common", "depression is voluntary".
For most readers he won't cause any more harm than reading, say, Aleister Crowley would. For depressed people he will be actively harmful, because he reinforces the prototypical globalized emotions of the depressed with language like "this experience has meaning" instead of the more accurate "this experience made me feel good".
May 29, 2024
Fantastic, highly recommended, worldview-altering book. Only complaints are the dogmatic tone and the hypertext medium being inconvenient. I plan to revisit at some time in the future.
December 3, 2022
A systematic (although a little disorganized) and very honest study of how we construct meaning. At times exceedingly self-referential to a point where it's not useful, but great read nonetheless. I love Chapman's extreme sensibility in finding the right words to say what he means.
October 17, 2022
Only 4 stars as I have grappled with the questions so much before, that a lot of the information was redundant to what I already knew.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews