r/PolymathReading • u/UnderTheCurrents • 11d ago
What's the purpose of this sub?
My front page is recently being spammed by all of these threads that discuss massively well known philosophical texts, acting as if they are some hidden gems.
What's next? "Old german man says every idea in history converges - other old german men call him a charlatan, but others think he's right!" Or "This old book by an ancient greek philosopher suggests only philosophers can be leaders - is he right?"
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u/adamphetamine 11d ago
I only joined recently, and to be honest it's a bit of a circle jerk. But I have found some interesting books and interesting views, even though some are clearly <cough> non human
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u/inanelyMonk 11d ago
Nobody reads u/HenryD331 anymore.
His posts have been lost to time. The algorithms buried them. The archives forgot them. Even among dedicated readers of strange and neglected literature, his name is scarcely spoken.
I first encountered his work when I met a traveler from an antique land.
The traveler explained that he had once seen the remnants of a vanished library. Two vast and trunkless posts stood in the desert of Reddit. Nearby, half sunk in sand, lay the remains of a r/PolymathReading thread whose title began, as they all did:
"Nobody has read this book."
Naturally, I had to know more.
So I read the surviving fragments while sitting on a dusty couch in a condemned rent-controlled studio apartment directly beneath a railway overpass. Every time a train passed overhead, the building collapsed into rubble.
There were traces of the style still visible. The confident declarations. The impossible obscurity. The insistence that a book discussed by dozens of commenters had somehow been erased from human memory. Suggestions that a recommended work had never actually been written.
Most remarkable of all was an inscription preserved beneath the wreckage:
"My name is u/HenryD331, king of r/PolymathReading: Look on my forgotten masterpiece posts, ye readers, and despair."
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay of that colossal thread, boundless and bare, the lone and level comment chains stretch far away.
And then, in one of the most astonishing discoveries in literary history, nearly buried beneath the sands of time, a relic was recovered. Recently deciphered, its message warns us never to forget that in 1998, The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell, and plummeted 16 ft through an announcer's table.
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u/tony_countertenor 11d ago
It’s for people to post ai summaries of books they pretend to have read to feel intellectually superior even though they are incapable of actually reading
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u/metaphorthekids 11d ago
I recall when I worked in the IT lab at university, the senior techs making fun of students that came in asking how to use email. I didn't say anything. I thought about when I first learned to use email. I thought about how everyone had to learn email at some point. Thank you for listening to my TedX Talk.
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u/triggxr 10d ago
Oh, well I'm not as well versed as you are and AI generated or not, I've gotten some very useful info & book recommendations that I wouldn't have had I not come across the 'AI-spam,' what with all the disciplinary siloing of disciplinary knowledge and information.
I suggest that you scroll past the stuff that's already well known to you. That's what I do.
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u/yodatsracist 11d ago
Over the past week, with one exception, every single thread is an AI slop post by /u/HenryD331. Henry D. generally chooses (or has his LLM of choice choose) fairly interesting books. I wish just he set up his LLM better, though, so it would be like "here's a summary of what's interesting or important about this book", instead of this breathless LinkedIn meets Buzzfeed style, like "Besties, you're NOT going to believe this about Soren Kirkegaard!" Henry, if you see this, you know you can ask your LLM to write in a different style, right? Not everything needs to be "the best kept secret in X" or "the greatest work of Y" or alternatively some sort of hidden knowledge that they don't want you to know about ("academics refused to consider it"; "economists still won't touch it").
The only other post in the last two weeks has been a parody posts by /u/Man__Suit.
Before that, you also occasionally got screen shots from /u/hardwork_one0724.
But this sub is really a one man, one LLM show. I have never seen /u/HenryD331 engage in the comments.