When you read about the Classics (stories that have stood the test of time because of how well they convey human truths), it's as if you are living a thousand different lives instead of living just one. As a humanities major working in tech, I observe daily how the miopia of living with the experience of the present only can have negative effects on the products it produces. For a distillation of this thought I recommend reading this short story (15min) by Anton Chekhov: http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/Bet.shtml
>As a humanities major working in tech, I observe daily how the miopia of living with the experience of the present only can have negative effects on the products it produces.
Interesting. Is it possible to elaborate on this? I enjoyed the short story you linked (thank you) but still would like to understand your unique perspective.
It takes longer to sift through the dreck of reddit curated by popular vote of random people on the internet (who might be expert in a sub's subject or might just like funny pictures) to get to stuff worth reading than it does browsing through a list curated into a canon by civilisation over millenia.
And that's before you consider that much of what appears on reddit isn't "real experiences of real people" anyway, it's self-indulgent, exaggerated or downright made-up rubbish posted for meaningless "karma".
That is a very good point I didnt even mention, but you are totally correct. That demographic must have actual interesting stories and POV , but they will not appear on reddit without being grossly transformed.
"Real lived experience" is heavily overrated nowadays, in all sorts of domains. A bunch of individual anecdotes is not data - at least not before people have taken the time to tally them up properly, which usually happens on generation-level timescales.
