I hope you enjoy the dialogue pdf, it is a fun read and I ended up reading the English version in one sitting before I posted the link. It reminded me of the fun I had when I first read the Chinese translation. (By the way, Rényi’s “Dialoge über Mathematik” have two other dialogues and they are quite good as well, worth to try to find it from the library or Amazon.)

The Socrates piece was a great article and managed to intrigue me and hold my interest. But to be honest, when it is in the length of a book of a few hundred pages long, a lot of other “interesting” stuff have to be very well intergrated into the book. I think Deadwood is a good example. If one of the episode wasn’t as interesting and I couldn’t follow 70% of the what they were trying to say, I might have stopped watching. Fortunately, David Milch is a master story-teller and managed to hold my interest in each and every single episode.

I hope you don’t mind me being honest. But then a good socratic dialogue probably demand us to hold lies down to a minimum.

To start with your very last point: Actually, I was thinking of making The Hannibal Blog that very forum. You reckon?

I’ll have a read of that dialogue pdf. Looks fun.

And you made me very happy by saying that you did NOT have a pre-existing interest in the Socrates piece but found it welling up within you. That’s what I live for.

Thanks for creating a community for us to amuse ourselves, teach ourselves, challenge ourselves, feel safe to contradict ourselves, and sometimes to be plain silly.

This piece and others you linked to reminded me of a lovely little Chinese book I read more than 20 years ago when I was wiser, more self-assured, handsomer and video game machines didn’t dare to tell their owners they were obese!

The tiny Chinese book was a translation of Hungarian mathematician Alfréd Rényi’s “Dialoge über Mathematik” which contains the charmingly insightful “A SOCRATIC DIALOGUE ON MATHEMATICS”.

Well, I took some time yesterday to try to find something to share. Well, I lucked out and found an English version of this gem of a socratic dialogue as imagined by Rényi. Plus I was delighted to find the author’s postscript which was not in my Chinese translation.

http://math.boisestate.edu/~tconklin/MATH124/Main/Readings/Socratic%20Dialogue%20On%20Mathematics.pdf

It is wonderful to see you crediting many people in the community who contributed to our shared discovery and even took time to include this sporadic visitor. And then I thought of what Confucius wrote in Analects,

三人行，必有我師焉。擇其善者而從之，其不善者而改之。

Which I venture to translate as,

“In a group of people, I can always learn from someone.
Observe their merits and try to learn from them.
Observe their mistakes and try to reflect and correct our own failings.”

P.S. Sorry for taking longer to reply to this post than I had originally thought.

P.P.S. I quite enjoy “The tyranny of the majority”. And to be honest, I didn’t think I would enjoy “Arguing to death” at all as I don’t have the slightest idea about most of the long dead Greeks, Athens, Carthaginian, et al (Fabius, Scipio, … huh, who?). Fortunately, to my surprise, I ended up enjoying “Arguing” like I enjoyed (very much) the TV series Deadwood (which I don’t understand about 20% of their words).

[Tangent: David Milch, creator of Deadwood & NYPD Blue, speaking at MIT
http://kempton.wordpress.com/2007/07/17/deadwood/ ]

By the way, you and your publisher have probably thought about something like this. Will there be a companion blog/website to your book pre and post book launch where lively discussions about things, views, and ideas in and around the book can be further explored? Freakonomics is one model and I am certain there are many just as or more interesting ideas to be explored.

Here how I met him and here one secret of him that worked wonderfully for us.

Hey! Not THAT secret. No Greek pedagogy fully lived beware!

[in case some of you guys thought about that]

well, i also am intimidated at times by the erudition but not enough to stop me from risking foolish posts. when i get a “word play” the reward is feeling clever, when the meaning/reference eludes as in “agonist or carthannibal” the penalty is confusion.

on the other hand this is one of the most un-intimidating blogs in the respectful way its participants interact even on the most contentious topics (as edward notes)

it certainly teaches well the “power of disengaging” when discourse turns to debate!

This post strikes a note and brings me to personal memories – pls allow me you Anglo Saxon people, me coming from other climes.

The thing is I started blogging with dialogues in mind. My mentor, whom I call Magister, taught me his dialectic a bit and he certainly was like a Socrates to many of us, who underwent a metamorphosis, not many doubts about it.

Before meeting him I had been reading Superman and spent my days with a rock band, much to the consternation of my parents. He expanded my views (beyond Clark Kent and Pink Floyd, at least I’m sure) and allowed the insights I had received from school – and from a dear though boring father – to be of any use.

That is why my blog is dedicated to Magister, a well known writer and outstanding educator I make fictitious a bit not desiring him to be recognized.

My blog was therefore originally planned as a dialogue carried out:

1) within our mind

2) among minds (mostly books) and

3) via discussion with commentators

Num 1) and 2) I originally thought the most critical. No sign of readers at first plus Magister taught us how to reflect on and have dialogue with classics, a solid education of the mind plus an antidote to everyday superficiality. He told us how Machiavelli, once back home, took off his clothes, cleaned himself and, with his best attire on, entered his library and had dialogue with the ancients. He asked questions. They replied.

Things bookish at school suddenly got damn interesting, we running to buy piles of books and devouring them like mad.

Getting back to the Man of Roma’s blog, well, one day the Indians from the subcontinent arrived, sooo young.
(my post on ‘Sex and the city of Rome’ being the culprit I presume)

As a high school teacher, years after M’s days, I used to discuss and laugh so much with my pupils. It was natural for me to behave in the same way with my Indians. I tried to explain my culture to them, they did the same with theirs. Oh we had so much fun, I got so many fond memories of all of them, of Ashish the Geek Wrestler for example, a witty dude now in Mumbay studying networking engineering (and having stopped blogging altogether.)

This also changed the tone of my blogging a bit. Moreover MoR became wild sometimes too because of personal problems now overcome. Many times have I thought to erase some of my most weird rants. But after all, I’m glad I didn’t do it.

Ok, that’s it. I wanted to share.

PS
Cheri, Joe you depicted so well stroke a note too, now you know why.
Andreas, this was loooong.

Thanks for the wonderful discussion.

Here in Ireland, we don’t have the American two-party war between the blues and reds (or Blues and Greens?), so the bad argument isn’t partisan as such. Instead we have a lot of anger at any authority figure, from government to European Union to economists. On our internet, the paranoid tendency is loudest in each corner, no matter what its politics.

I do not think that the good man Socrates would appreciate what little we have done with him and his school over the last 2,500 years.

I best say nothing at all, except Thank You.

One or two other people have said that to me. How do i change that?

Thanks for being here, Susan!

So, thank you, Andreas, for all your good work. I look forward to reading “Hannibal Agonistes”, or whatever your book will be called, when published.

Thank you for your sharp wit and hilarious irreverence.

Thank you for your kindness and grace.

When the Divine Writer in the Sky doled out talent, she dispensed an extra portion to you.

You highlighted my sentence containing the words “nonconformism” and “sedition”.

Were not the White Rose actively subversive and seditious, and do we not consider them heroes precisely for that reason?

I didn’t consider how ‘pure’ this blogging dialogue can be. Naked minds, no bodies, just our thoughts bouncing on one another. So true that this connection – the German Hannibal, the Economist, his readers – makes me nervous, your naked mind getting some flesh back somehow.

But I’m a Roman, man, a detail not to be forgotten. Roman-like, I’ll get over it

Oh, the payments. In natura for me too pls. Preferably females.

too late to make it to the end of your piece but “Socrates’s habit of demolishing every conceivable opinion but not offering anything positive” – lieberman reincarnated?

@ phil, well if you just ask questions and never offer any answers most people will offer up an answer on their own and end up feeling rather clever – it would seem socrates couldn’t stop while he was a head.

it is sometimes better to be kind than to be right.

……nonconformism is not an absolute virtue and easily veers off into sedition, subversion or other actions deemed unpatriotic……

Is it not true that in all democracies, whose citizens can publicly speak their minds without being thrown in jail, this freedom of speech is allowed only in times of peace? But when war comes, are not states of emergency always declared, so that freedom of speech is drastically curtailed? And is it not true that it is precisely during times of war, when individual rights are trampled on in the extreme, when freedom of speech should be most important to the individual?

I suggest, then, that in democracies, freedom of speech is allowed only when it poses the least threat to the status quo, or to the well-being of those set in authority.

Think also that in your average democracy, it isn’t government that Joe Sixpack feel most oppressed by. It is by his boss at work, or otherwise by the stress and nature of his job. But should Joe Sixpack, as a citizen, exercise his right of free speech by speaking out against his boss or company, he will suffer by being thrown on the soup-line, which could have devastating consequences for him and his family.

What then, free speech?

Which is to say, I’ll be giving you … words. Lots of words.

You can have them on paper, double-spaced, or electronically.

Regarding our share from your book sales, do you do direct deposit or will you be mailing checks?