I think at least part of being a nerd is about doing/knowing/owning things, not about saying things. There have definitely been times that I’ve finished watching a show because I wanted to be able to participate in conversations about it, rather than because I actually enjoyed the thing. If my friends are talking about something, it sometimes feels low-status not to have an opinion, or (in other contexts) to have opinions based on what I’ve heard about something I haven’t seen/read myself.
I have, for a long time, thought about a rather simple experiment in good taste. In Finland, for instance, there is a robust rock music scene (still, to this day, in ways that's probably no longer true in US, at least as a mainstream thing.). Like elsewhere, there exist bands and artists (historical and present) that a hipster would consider mainstream crap and that would be hipster-mark-of-approval critical favorites.
If someone took Finnish mainstream-beloved and hipster-beloved songs and played them to, say, Americans, would they be able to recognize which is which based on sound alone? In this case, even the lyrics wouldn't help, since, they would be unintelligible (in most cases) anyway. If it was possible for some pop music expert to recognize this on sound alone, it would at least prove something about this subject; if it wasn't, it would also be proof of something. I'm not sure exactly what, though; whether there would be an universal hipster quality of music that transcends cultural borders, or that hipster-loved music just sounds weirder than mainstream music, or that it's all just a matter of cultural markers.
Of course, the problem for me is that I'm already 39, and thus hopelessly behind on what the cutting-edge of hipster music at the moment would be (and don't really have the time or desire to follow pop music, either), so I'm not really no longer one to find valid qualifiers for what is hipster-beloved or not.
Of course you could do the same with books, movies etc., but you'd need at least some sort of translation there, probably.
As it happens, I (an American) have listened to and rather like some Eppu Normaali and Ultra Bra. I do not speak Finnish beyond knowing a few random words, but I think it's a pretty-sounding langauge. Some of favorite tracks by these bands include: Vesireittejä, Kirjoituksia, Sokeana Hetkenä, Osa Luonnollista Karsintaa, Afrika, sarvikuonojen maa, Kuumemittari, Olen Tuntenut Sinut. Also I painted the lyrics of the chorus to Jääteloauto on my dorm room door when I was in college (the "Lunta silmaripsissasi katsoit minun ja hymyilit, sanoit / täytyy mennä tansitunille / ja minä jäin seisomaan lumeen" part).
As far as I'm concerned as an American, even being aware of these Finnish bands that exclusively sing in Finnish is a pretty hipster thing to do, in the sense of being deliberately and ostentatiously counter-mainstream; painting the lyrics to one of their songs on my door definitely was. But you can tell me whether my taste is in accordance with Finnish-mainstream tastes, Finnish-hipster tastes, or something else.
(Also if there are any other Finnish rock/pop bands I should listen to, happy to accept recommendations)
Eppu Normaali is probably, at least historically speaking, the biggest rock band in Finland. Not exactly hipster credit material. Ultra Bra was traditionally somewhat more hipster-appreciated despite being a big in the mainstream, though they're also divisive - I like them, but listening to Ultra Bra is basically an instrumental part of the Finnish "blue tribe equivalent" (ie. educated, white-collar, urbanite (most likely a Helsinkian), liberal) stereotype. In other words, within a Finnish context, your taste would be mainstream and probably mark you as a 40-50-year old lib-left type.
If you like Ultra Bra, you should probably check Scandinavian Music Group, the New Order to Ultra Bra's Joy Division (yes, that comparison would probably be offensive to numerous Finns). Leevi & the Leavings is good if you like the sounds of Finnish. If you want some of the stuff I'd listened to a lot, check CMX, Ismo Alanko's work (bands Hassisen Kone, Sielun Veljet and a bunch of groups with the name "Ismo Alanko" in the band name) and Kingston Wall.
He creates very fitting style parodies/homages by various Finnish rock artists/groups (the videos starting with "Tehdään biisi niin kuin...", with the name of the group or artist coming after. There's usually a bit of exposition before the song itself, but the song generally occupies the last third of each video. Them being homages actually means they sort of encapsulate an artist's song or career in a way that any individual song by the artist itself can't.
I'm not sure but in general insofar as they've been exposed to it, Americans who lived through the era of rock and roll have a horror of the twinned concepts of rock music, or even pop music, and Europe. This might interfere with a sober appraisal.
Modern Eurovision? Europop in general - even the British Isles looked askance at some of the Continental productions, given that we're more tied-in to the American musical genres?
The nadir/zenith of disco? Though to be fair, while a lot of it was trashy, it was glittery trash and when you're young, slightly drunk, and on a sun holiday then something poppy and glam to dance to isn't the worst thing in the world.
And that gives some interesting crossovers, such as this international hit which was a Turkish pop song, covered by Holly Valance (amongst others) and let's face it, it's a banger even if it is Eurotrash pop 😁
It's big, though not as big as it used to be. I'm a bit biased, since Nightwish originates from my home region, so I was exposed to it from very early on. Of course it's far too mainstream to have any sort of hipster credibility.
Tarja Turunen is/was a well-known celebrity and Tuomas Holopainen and other band members (including Jansen and Olzon) are quite well-known, as well.
I think the elephant in the room is that the mammoth media corporations and associated entities that run our lives figured out that there was gold on the leper colonies, and thought they could take advantage of the gold if they could just drive off all the lepers.
Nerd properties went mainstream and printed money. People still dislike the nerds, because they're nerds.
I think this starts to get into something major, the changing nature of marketing. To finalize your thought, at least for a while, nerds were anti-influencers; having your product associated with nerds would reduce the interest in the item for other people. You want un-trendy people to buy your product but not be associated with it, and nerds are un-trendy. Hipsters, on the other hand, as trend-chasers try to be trendy (though once a particular set of 'hip trends' reaches a stereotype, it's gotten to the point where they are no longer new enough to be a trend).
In the beginning, marketing was making as many people as possible aware of your product. Your advertisement said what your product did, and you tried to get it to as many pairs of eyes as possible. However, your competitors will figure this out and match you. Eventually this runs into diminishing returns when everyone's aware of your product and your competitors product, so if you want to come out on top you have to change your marketing to be more effective.
At some point, things changed when people mastered the skill of gathering information about individual consumption habits with things like focus groups. If you know who is likely to buy your product, you can tailor your advertisement to them, both in the details and in where the advertisement is placed. Eventually, of course, your competitors start doing the same thing.
Beyond tailoring your marketing to people who want to buy your product, there's the step of tailoring your marketing to people that will market your product for you: the influencers. At first, the only influencers are celebrities, but we've now evolved a class of dedicated influencers, and the number grows as more people get the ability to broadcast to the public (such as through social media).
Marketing increasingly consists of targeting influencers because that's the most marketing you can get for your money. Partially, this is because most of the public is inundated with obvious advertisements, and we recognize them as such. The reason we have influencers is because they are marketing launderers (marketing launderers : marketing :: money launderers : money); the most successful advertisement for a product is a recommendation from someone you trust, and influencers trick the mind into believing they are real consumers and not marketing professionals and thus are trustworthy.
> Hipsters, on the other hand, as trend-chasers try to be trendy (though once a particular set of 'hip trends' reaches a stereotype, it's gotten to the point where they are no longer new enough to be a trend).
I don't think this is accurate. Hipsters (in their quintessential Platonic ideal form) are trend-makers, not trend-chasers. They seek out new-to-them, unpopular, obscure things; they insist loudly that their tastes are objectively better than whatever's currently popular; and once they've sold enough people on something that it's no longer unpopular or obscure, they move on to something else.
There's a second, larger group of people who follow hipsters around and copy them. They're properly characterized as trend-chasers, but they're not hipsters; it's just hard to tell them apart from the outside.
Is there any reason hipsters can’t be both trend makers and chasers at the same time? If they gain status from appreciating under-appreciated things, there will be aspects of both making (as other people follow them, possibly eventually even reaching the general public) and chasing (as hipsters identify things that other hipsters have already found and then start appreciating them).
I've known some serious comic book nerds since the 1970s including a number of people in the business or adjacent. It was a niche hobby, but there were 30+ years of narrative from dozens of books each published monthly for years even before the first MCU movie appeared. Just as the opera nerds I knew in high school knew the plot, lyrics and music of just about every opera, these comic nerds knew the world of comic books.
I've also been following computer generated graphics over the same period. I even knew a guy who won an Oscar for his pioneering work in the field, and I've heard my share of production horror stories. I almost joined an CGI shop, but Hollywood was too cutthroat and I didn't like cocaine. Through all this, for decades, computer graphics disappointed me. So much of it had been too well anticipated by the art world in the 1960s. It needed to get beyond this. Still, every year the technology was getting better. We saw glimpses of possibility in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Maybe it was good enough for television, but it wasn't up to projection on an iMax screen.
What happened around 2000 was the CGI finally caught up with the imaginations of artists like Kirby, Sterenko, and Ditko. Only nerds, in the old fashioned sense, and I knew male and female nerds, some more and some less socially awkward, read comic books and followed the stories and characters. Suddenly, it was possible to mine those hundreds, even thousands, of stories and present them as good looking movies. They could be shared. I remember watching the first MCU Thor movie. There was a CGI pan of Asgard, and I sat there thinking that if only Jack Kirby had lived to see this. Then I realized that he already had.
How could sports be interesting? It's just people trying to get the ball from one side of the court to the other, over and over again.
How could reading be interesting? It's just people turning pages of a book, over and over again.
How could debates be interesting? It's just people talking at each other without changing anything, over and over again.
How could tabletop roleplaying games be interesting? It's just sitting around a table with little figurines and telling the same type of stories, over and over again.
Was thinking similarly; a repeating sitcom could get boring, but change it to a drama (which sports are) and you have pretty much every cop show. Law and Order lasted 22 seasons.
I also dislike sport, but I agree with you that Scott's take is uncharitable. If you don't drink whisky you're going to think every whisky tastes like rubbing alcohol. If you don't like sport, you're going to similarly perceive the coarse, obvious features (loud crowds, "I guess that guy is a fast runner who can throw a ball well", advertising) and miss the finer grained details of individual players' style, particularly interesting plays, and higher level strategy.
I don't really enjoy conventional sports, but I got very into watching StarCraft tournaments and all the same features are there – I just found the window dressing interesting enough that I took the time to learn to appreciate the nuance. If instead 8 year old Godshatter had enjoyed kicking a ball around on the playground, I'd probably have given football enough of a chance to learn to appreciate its subtleties too.
Almost everyone has *a sport* that could resonate with them, because almost everyone enjoys at least one or two physical activities. But unfortunately, almost everyone is forcibly exposed to the dominant local lowest common denominator sport (football, soccer, etc).
In an ideal world, a much wider variety of sports get exposure, and people try watching and/or playing a bunch of them, and you end up with Capture the Flag and professional Rube Goldberging and I end up with fencing and fire juggling.
I don't know. I was quite into various sports when I was at school (as well as being a nerd), but I never could get into watching them (except for cricket, very erratically, ironically one of the few sports I never played in an organised way). But then I later did get quite into watching StarCraft tournaments, especially the Korean Proleague.
So if you had been more into playing sports as a kid I don't think that would have changed things.
First, there's a distinction between the variety of the experience. Reading, debates, and roleplaying games all involve words and narratives with tons of complexity that make them vastly different each time. If they did not, they would quickly get boring. Reading books with the same plot over and over again, having a debate about the exact same topic over and over again, or roleplaying the same adventure over and over again, would very quickly get boring. The first time is fine, the second time can be a new experience. If it's especially deep or compelling you might do it a third or fourth time, but the majority of the time repetition very quickly makes it boring even if there are minor variations. Only weird nerds read the same book twenty times. If people watched a different sport with brand new rules every week, that would be a lot more comparable to someone who reads a new book every week.
Second, there's a distinction between engaging in the activity and observing the activity. Watching someone else read is not interesting. Watching someone else play a roleplaying game is usually not exciting (unless they're especially entertaining people). Debates can be entertaining to watch, but even then it's probably less entertaining than engaging in one yourself. The criticism isn't against people playing sports, it's about people observing second-hand, which is much less exciting.
Personally reading a different book every week is a vastly different concept from observing a new instance of a sports game with the same rules every week.
Part of the appeal of sports is that you can't know what's about to happen: no writer sat down and decided what they would like you to see or hear next. If you have watched the sport with a keen eye, you may begin to be able to make good predictions about what will happen - but that in itself is another rush.
"The defense lined up in press coverage, and there's no secondary defender on the fastest receiver. If the quarterback recognizes it and brings his running back in to chip the blitzer *(note: chipping blitzers is a time-honored tradition in American football, stop laughing)*, then there's a good chance they score a touchdown on this play."
Depending on your level of interest in the visual aspects of the sport, you might then develop an interest in watching replays to learn why things happened the way they did. It's possible to work backwards to find the cause. "Oh, I see why this receiver was wide open. The defense gambled with a blitz, and they put the corners in press coverage to try to keep the quarterback from being able to get right of the ball quickly while the blitz was coming. But the running back was able to help block for just long enough for the wide receiver to run past the defender."
Of course, this is heavily the province of the sports nerd (or the sports pro, whose job depends on knowing what happened and why). Most sports fans (as I understand them) are more on the level of "What did Johnson think he was doing on that play?? Kick him off the team! Fire the coach!"
Sport is more fun to engage with emotionally than intellectually. You pick a side, and you hope they win. You get to experience the joy of victory and the agony of defeat and the smug satisfaction of drubbing an opponent and the tension of hoping for a come-from-behind win.
You get this from fiction too but not nearly as much; in movies you hope the good guys win, but they always do, so you can't engage with it emotionally nearly so much. You get it from war and politics too, with genuine uncertainty, but it's too serious to be fun.
> in movies you hope the good guys win, but they always do
This might be true of modern American movies, but it's not true of modern movies generally and it also isn't even true of American movies generally.
I do think it's worth worrying about the kind of worldviews that we get from people whose experience of the world amounts to "in movies, bad things don't happen".
Yes. Or at least that describes my interest in sports. (There are many types of sports fans.) It's an emotional ride, my team against the other. And the ride is somehow better the less I can predict the outcome. Which is why I say that, "Happiness is a .500 sports team".
I'd like to push back against repetition not being enjoyable. It's possible to eat the same lunch every day and genuinely enjoy your sandwich. Or to go for the same walk every day on the same route, but you notice differences in the weather and what people you see.
People also vary in what differences they notice. An outsider might find it hard to distinguish between instrumental folk music tunes, while someone who has learned some of the tunes will have no trouble recognizing them. Noticing the differences isn't the same as enjoying them, but it helps.
It seems like there are a lot of activities that are both routine and varied, and people appreciate both at the same time. Going to a game (or a concert) is a routine where in many respects you may know what's going to happen, but the details are different, and I assume both the routine and the variations are appreciated by people who go to them.
It can be hard to predict at what point boredom will set in. You can do the same thing for years and one day decide that you're bored with it and it's time to do something different.
I guess I should refine my claim to something like "Enjoying repetition is weird and nerdy, but it's okay to be weird and nerdy sometimes." Repetition of most things is boring for most people, but everyone has different preferences and pays attention to subtle differences in things that make it less repetitive while other people either don't notice those differences or, more likely, don't care.
I certainly do quite a few weird nerdy things, and enjoy certain repetitive things. But I recognize that this is unusual and weird and most other people won't enjoy those same things.
I think the point was that repetition is in the eye of the beholder. Perceived repetition ("it's just orcs chasing British men for three whole books", "it's just piano scales for an hour and there aren't even drums", "it's just dudes moving a ball and stopping when the whistle blows") means the perceiver doesn't understand the thing well enough to distinguish what's important from not. I don't think this is weird at all, and in fact it's pretty close to universal.
Watching sports is generally more of a base level enjoyment, like having sex or eating ice cream. It doesn't matter that it's basically the same thing every time, it still generates the same brain response.
Intellectual stimulation is another fun brain state to chase, one that inherently requires novelty.
Sport is bounded by rules, but within those rules, each competition is wildly unpredictable and different from the others. If an observer says that watching (a) Keri Strug vaulting on an injured leg to win gold, (b) Soviet Olga Korbut cracking the Cold War ice and finding her way into American hearts with a smile during a floor routine, and (c) Simone Biles performing physical maneuvers so difficult that the International Gymnastics Federation has to literally expand the difficulty scales, is all the same experience, comparable to reading the same book over and over, because all 3 events took place in the context of gymnastics, I think it says more about the declarant’s shallow engagement with the subject matter than it does about any alleged uniformity in the sport.
I was thinking more about the RPG part of your comment, since that has the closest similarity to sports, they both have a fixed set of rules but plenty of space for improvisation within the bounds of those rules. I love TTRPGs, barely pay attention to sports at this point in my life, and I had the thought “A D&D character could have dozens of spells to pick from in a given moment, that gives it so much more variety.” Then I remembered learning soccer moves in high school and went to find a list of them. This non-exhaustive video has 100 https://youtu.be/mXjW78AgGu4
I imagine a sports nerd who could identify and understand players using these moves and why that move was a great choice for the particular situation would be part of how each week’s game could feel like a new and exciting experience, just like I feel the same about each week’s D&D session, even though every week I (from the perspective of an outsider) do some talking, do some fighting, and roll some dice for some skill checks, so it’s all just the same every time.
But there's still the distinction between participating and watching. If you're playing D&D you have agency. You think about the best choice for each situation and then you get to pick what you do and see what happens as a result. You get feedback and confirmation, rewards and punishment. You are controlling a part of the game with goals and abilities. I don't doubt that playing soccer is fun for the players. But as an outside observer? Maybe I can see getting some enjoyment from watching a game once or twice. I've seen a couple sports games, and I've listened to some D&D podcasts, and they were... okay. But I quickly got bored and don't do either anymore, because it's not the same as actually participating.
Sports are directly analogous to intense interest in a particular genre, particularly fantasy, swords and sorcery, etc.
"The Silmarillion is boring, Beowulf is boring, there have been one million historical battles and one million fictional battles, and nothing ever changes and there's always some forgettable warrior who ends up king, I do not *care* which warrior it is"
is the direct and proper analogue.
More importantly, these are not descriptions. They are preferences. To describe a sport as boring or exciting, to describe epic fantasy as boring or exciting, these are not actually descriptions, they are expressions of preference. "Swords resonate with me, balls do not".
Teams don't resonate with me, so I was not a sports fan. I didn't think balls did either, but then I found juggling. Balls are cool. Car racing resonated with me to a surprising degree, so that is becoming my thing. Swords and sorcery resonated with me, always, so epics are cool. Murder doesn't resonate with me *at all*, so mysteries are boring and repetitive and true crime is boring and repetitive. These are directly analogous expressions of preference.
I think the appeal for sports come from the fact that, every game is different in the sense that, the meta is different. If you get a bunch of pseudo random number based players play a game based on a set of rules, over and over again. It wont be interesting after the first try. But the fun comes from the fact that, the same thing that worked last time, might not work this time, either due to conditions or due to other plays trying to prevent that player from doing that particular thing.
It is like watching a cat and mouse game, each player tries to one up the other. And unless this meta-chasing is not circular, any sport will stay interesting. This is also why the same game is played completely differently now compared to say 10 years ago, the meta chasing has gone so far, that the game itself has evolved, eventhough the rules surrounding it hasnt changed much.
And don't get me started on sex. It's just a meat stick moving around in a meat hole. Same thing every time, same ending. No idea how anyone could find that interesting.
Personally, I find watching Lindsey Vonn do slalom as awe-inspiring as listening to Diana Damrau sing "Queen of the Night", and for much the same reason, the exquisite form and power demonstrated. Finding the art and skill of physical movement to be boring is as mystifying to me as finding Mozart boring.
> How could sports be interesting? It's just people trying to get the ball from one side of the court to the other, over and over again.
> How could reading be interesting? It's just people turning pages of a book, over and over again.
> How could debates be interesting? It's just people talking at each other without changing anything, over and over again.
I don't think these are alike in kind. Books and debates stay relevant over time. People generally do lose interest in hearing the same debate over and over again, and in reading the same book over and over again. But a debate from 2100 years ago can still be relevant to someone today (check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Salt_and_Iron !), and people do seek them out and try to learn from them. The same is true of books (and in fact all debates from 2100 years ago that we still know about are books).
A sports game from a month ago is usually of no interest to anyone. The exception is coaches/statisticians who are trying to learn about strategy.
Reading and debates are about knowledge; sports and roleplaying games aren't. So reading and debates are interesting to people who desire knowledge. Following a sport is interesting to people who want whatever it is they want.
Why is this week's game better viewing than last week's game, for you? Why does their value change if the games stay exactly the same, but happen in a different order?
For me sports is an emotional ride. I turn off the intellectual part of my brain, and just live in the moment. Of course you need some emotional investment in your team, and for me this happened in childhood, mostly due to me dad. If I think about sports in an intellectual way, I end up at... this is some weird shit, like gladiators at the colosseum. (Oh and playing sports is also fun, but is mostly orthogonal to watching sports.)
>>I don't think these are alike in kind. Books and debates stay relevant over time. People generally do lose interest in hearing the same debate over and over again, and in reading the same book over and over again. But a debate from 2100 years ago can still be relevant to someone today (check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Salt_and_Iron !), and people do seek them out and try to learn from them. The same is true of books (and in fact all debates from 2100 years ago that we still know about are books).
>>A sports game from a month ago is usually of no interest to anyone.
I don't think this comparison is apples to apples. If one takes the broad portfolio of all sports games ever played, then compares it to the small number of books that have stood the test of time, well it's only natural that looking at the two will leave the impression, "Wow! Books sure stay relevant longer than sports do!"
But that's because you've prefiltered out the massive, massive amount of chaff in the mix on the book side of the equation. How many books are published each year and promptly forgotten? Is the percent of books that become A Tale of Two Cities really all that different from the percent of sports competitions that end up being Jesse Owens at the 1939 Olympics?
But that has nothing to do with the comparison I'm drawing. A penny dreadful still holds the same value now that it did when it was published. A sports match doesn't. I'm not filtering out any chaff; I'm saying that the books hold their value, whatever that value may be, and the sports matches immediately decline to zero. The value people perceive in a match is taken from external sources.
Hmm yeah, there is a fond remembrance of past victories in sports. But for me it is the 'present moment'* of sports that makes it impactful. Sports is closer to food and sex than books. You can remember last nights dinner, but it's nothing like really enjoying what you are eating tonight.
*if you don't know the results you can watch in tape delay, but there is the ever present risk of spoilers....
>A sports game from a month ago is usually of no interest to anyone. The exception is coaches/statisticians who are trying to learn about strategy.
Not so fast. Sports enthusiasts may talk about events and matches that happened nearly half a century ago. It remains as emotionally relevant as any other socially important occasion.
Well, I know that Lasse Virén tripped and fell during 10,000m distance run in München olympics in the 1970s. Or Diego Maradona's "Hand of God" goal sometimes in 1980s. Both happened before I was born, and I don't even follow either sport at all. I suspect that if you count, there are more people Finland (Virén) / worldwide (Maradona) who can name these events than people who can name any particular book from 1970s or 1980s.
And I suppose I could equally well ask: have you not ever felt the thrill trying to get a hold of the ball in any competitive ball game? ;) I was never any good in anything in PE, yet I can recognize emotions involved.
To answer: Probably I have seen a newsclip? But I am putting those examples forth as an anecdotal evidence that I am not much a sports person (I don't watch Olympics or World Cup or play any sports) yet could name them.
On the other hand, I have not watched news footage of signing of Treaty of Lisbon, or more recently, Finland's representative signing the NATO membership papers, either; yet they are events of some importance and have some consequence.
I'd expect that a serious sports fan who pays more attention to any sports would know how various players' recent performance compares to previous games or season. (Are they gaining new skills? Or losing their athletic edge?) They might have an opinion about how their favorite sport has evolved over time, and how it compares to some past historic games.
A more generalizable form of argument is like this: not all things that are important or interesting or "relevant" are important or interesting or relevant in the same way as books or debates or knowledge.
Part of the allure of sports is in its one-time-only nature: there is always just one particular instance of a particular competition happening right now: it is not scripted nor "fixed" according to preferences of scriptwriter who wanted to create a make-believe story, but a genuine contest between athletes happening right now. Something real. Every decision and move a player makes counts. Very French existentialist. And after it has happened, it has similar kind of importance to participants (the audience included) as any other historic event of social importance. And because it is different, people rarely study past sports events like a bookish person reads a book.
One could argue that many people are interested in unimportant, "unworthy" things. But one could also argue that many people are paying attention to them is evidence that they are interesting.
I think that there is a market opportunity for this when done correctly. I would note the existence of documentaries from ESPN (and others), highlight/compilation clips on youtube, etc. Part of the problem is that enjoyment of sports is a real time experience (even when viewed on TV) similar to watching a show or seeing a band perform.
Every now and then I look for and re-watch the video of Franz Klammer's incfedible 1976 gold medal downhill run[1], or the American 1980 "Miracle on Ice" Olympic hockey victory over the USSR[2]. I saw both these events in real time as they happened, and they were phenomenal. They still are, and rewatching them brings back the astonishment and glee they originally summoned.
Yes, but disdain for sportsball is common amongst intellectuals, nerds, etc. I understand the roots in western philosophy's focus on brain, etc. But given science/evolution, the animal/physical part of us is likely more important than the intellectual. And we have our big brain so that we can do sportsball like things: remember when each type of prey goes to which watering hole, "calculate" how to shoot arrow to catch them on run, etc. The bulk of our historical existence was much, much more like sportsball in all its facets (playing, observing, keeping stats) than it was like being an egghead intellectual. So the folk who can't embrace the physical, see the beauty in it, be roused by it, are the ones who have some explaining to do, not those in the . . . 95% of humanity who love it?
>>So the folk who can't embrace the physical, see the beauty in it, be roused by it, are the ones who have some explaining to do, not those in the . . . 95% of humanity who love it?
I think a lot of it is fewer parts "unable to see/appreciate" and more parts "pretending to be unable to see/appreciate for purposes of social signaling." If you tried to show it to a Martian, they'd find it really odd that there's this group of people for whom, if someone mentions gardening, and gardening is not of interest to them, they quietly let the topic pass, but if someone mentions football (US or otherwise), and football is not of interest to them, they suddenly need to make a big show about how they've never been into "sportsball" and never could be.
It's just the "I love all music, except for country and rap" energy, operating in another class setting. The question of whether the speaker has the capacity to appreciate the subject matter is less at issue than the question of whether they would ever permit themselves to.
You can see the beauty of something but not be all that interested in it. I'm like that with music. I can understand its attraction even though I don't experience it. There are a surprising number of people like me who don't "get" music on a visceral level. (Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project was one.) Some people are like that with respect to food, though only a handful of them actually stop eating.
I don't think the disdain is about the sports themselves. It's more about school sports culture which can be particularly noxious in the US. If you've had a bad experience with gym coaches and athletes in school, you may be less than enthralled with sports culture as an adult.
I wouldn't put the onus of appreciated the physical on those who don't. One of the big differences between humans and animals is our oversized brains and how much of our behavior is cultural rather than physical. For example, religion is extremely important to many people and societies, even today, are you going to put the onus on those who don't indulge in religion? Why should they be the ones having to explain themselves?
Because everyone from beginning of time has been religious? Doesn't mean it's right, but makes clear where burden lies. It's like claiming the beatles or shakespeare suck. You might be right, but you've obviously got the burden on that claim. Never understood why purportedly rational people weren't way more humble about whether the religious might be right, given the numbers, impact, etc., over time. So they in fact obviously should be the ones having to explain themselves!
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have).
It's tricky, because then you're kicking the can back to "ability" or "competence" (which are also ill-defined).
I think art should be graded on a scale, taking into account the limitations the artist faced. That's not the whole story (some art is just crap, no matter who makes it), but it can't be shut out of the discussion, either.
Look at the Beatles: the defining rock band. They weren't always paragons of quality. They wrote plenty of shallow yeah-yeah-yeah pop songs, and made sloppy mistakes - in "Hey Jude", at 2:57, you faintly hear Paul say "fuckin' hell!" as he fat-fingers a chord. That's on the master recording!
What made them great wasn't their quality, but that they achieved so much with so little. They were working-class twenty year olds in a world of crappy analog recording gear...and they reshaped pop music anyway. You can produce far more polished music with on a laptop today, but what could you do if you were in the Beatles' shoes, in 1960 Hamburg? To me, that's the issue
What makes Marvel films feel contemptible (to me and perhaps Kriss) is that they are created with every possible advantage on their side...yet they're so consistently bland and mediocre.
Imagine having access to Hollywood's best directors and writers and actors, and budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars...and you make Thor: Love and Thunder? Something's not right.
edit: or put another way, imagine you're a caveman, painting a horse on a cave wall at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc. Suddenly, there's a flash of light, and a 21st century human steps out of a time machine. He smirks at your cave painting. "Huh, you think you're hot shit? In the future, there's something called 'Midjourney'. It produces WAY better art than you ever could. You call that a horse? BAM! This is a horse! Ignore the fact that it has five legs! Bet you're feeling like a pretty crappy artist now, eh?"
I think a laserlike focus on "quality" that ignores context kinda misses the point. Art doesn't just manifest out of nowhere; it comes from the world, from a creative struggle, and this affects how we perceive it.
> Imagine having access to Hollywood's best directors and writers and actors, and budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars...and you make Thor: Love and Thunder? Something's not right.
If you're just the one director, I'm guessing this is actually pretty hard, since you have a massive unmanageable system and pressures and probably can't get away with doing much on your own.
This is definitely an area I'd like to see more explored: why big movies with $100 million budgets can come out so, so badly. How could that many people screw up and not one of them say "wow, this sucks, what if we did this instead?" Especially since YouTubers can come up with decent ways to fix a movie just days after it released.
A lot of it comes down to outside powers that can veto suggestions. $100 million being a lot of money, it often comes with many strings attached. Studios or parent companies can afford a mediocre movie that's pretty much guaranteed to be okay. They cannot afford a terrible movie. The pressure is to make sure the movies hit certain key points and not mess up. There's much less incentive to make something genuinely good.
Because people who have good taste aren't in charge. The people in charge aren't being punished enough for their mistakes, so the movie industry learns slowly, as a whole. It does learn, MCU's success is beyond unprecedented, and certain select people like Cameron can reliably put out hits.
"What made them great wasn't their quality, but that they achieved so much with so little. They were working-class twenty year olds in a world of crappy analog recording gear...and they reshaped pop music anyway. You can produce far more polished music with on a laptop today, but what could you do if you were in the Beatles' shoes, in 1960 Hamburg? To me, that's the issue"
This speaks well of the Beatles' personal virtue, but it doesn't suggest I should listen to them, except maybe to reward them for how virtuous they are.
I don't like many bands, but I do enjoy the Beatles' music. Still, I think I listen to them for reasons other than that they're virtuous, and I wouldn't listen to them if they were just good for their time but bad overall. Maybe I only think I like them because they're so popular that I can't help hearing them and forming good associations with them?
I think there's a component of this whole discussion that revolves around the amount of time we can or are willing to devote to something.
My sister is really interested in obscure music, and is apparently willing to spend many hours listening to stuff to find the gold. When she makes a suggestion I listen and she's right - I've never hated anything she's suggested to me and usually enjoy it. But I also enjoy mainstream music and songs from a wide range of years. I could type "top 100 songs from the 1960s" into Google then pick out which ones I wanted to listen to. That takes a lot less time and has far fewer failures than trying to sift through unknowns. The Beatles established themselves as a premiere band in the 1960s and I know I like a good number of their songs. They have enough songs that I could listen to them without getting tired of hearing one or a few songs on repeat. So if I want to listen to something from the 1960s and enjoy it, I can save myself a bunch of effort and just play the Beatles (or, more realistically, one of about a dozen well-established bands from that decade).
I think the MCU does something similar. (Or, for that matter, the hundreds of retreads, reboots, live-action remakes, 30-years-later-sequels). Rather than try to establish something new that people will like and convincing them to give it a try, it's easier - takes less time and more likely to succeed - to tap into something that is known and liked already.
From that perspective you can look at "nerds" as those taking a deep dive into particular content and "hipsters" being the group seeking something new. Both are putting in time that most people are not willing or able to put into the fandom. Much easier to watch the next MCU or Disney live action remake and not think about it too much. Considering how much money these movies make, the studios seem to be correct on it too. Those of us annoyed by these developments are rare only inasmuch as we care enough to put time into finding better alternatives than the shallow and repetitive options most accessible.
>What made then great wasn't their quality, but that they achieved so much with so little
I'm pretty sure for most of their career the Beatles had a whole lot of resources behind them. Sure they were restricted by technology of the time, but so was everyone else at the time, and the Beatles are still held above their contemporaries.
I wonder if perhaps the idea of 'quality' as a generalizable concept is wrong? I think any deep conversation about the quality of, say, a pop band, needs to get into specifics of music. You end up with some kind of ranking of pop bands, but with no way to generalize the ranking method to another medium like film
I do too, as far as early 60's music is concerned anyway. Plenty of that stuff is terrible to listen to in stereo, especially on headphones. Best to stick to tried and true while your tech and skills aren't up to snuff.
If you watched the P Jackson document, was hilarious to see that the Beatles, as biggest/richest group in world, didn't even have roadies who tuned their instruments before they showed to play! Instead, the Beatles just tune by ear occasionally (makes me realize they likely get great chorus-like effect by all being slightly out of tune). And they're operating in a very jokey little studio! Seriously, it's eye opening compared to what a decent studio is today (that's still in business). All those little errors add depth/character that sterile modern recordings can't touch, even though there's an entire cottage industry of folk trying to recreate that magic via effects that deliberately degrade sound, etc.
>They were working-class twenty year olds in a world of crappy analog recording gear...and they reshaped pop music anyway.
I have to hard disagree here. The band that reshaped pop music were not working-class twenty year olds anymore. They were worldwide stars with unlimited access to sophisticated recording equipment at a time it was a particularly scarce resource. Hamburg-era Beatles sung and wrote conventional pop-rock, they were good, but one of many, well within contemporary musical currents. Then they're allowed into high-quality studios and soon start recording "Tomorrow Never Knows"'s and "A Day in the Life"'s. And that, that is what reshaped pop music.
One could even argue the technological progress is what reshaped it. The Beatles were just in the right place, at the right time, and took full opportunity. But if it wasn't for them, someone else would have led the way (even if it was for them, someone else could have, imagine a more healthy and assertive Brian Wilson). Yes, you can technically produce "more polished music on a laptop today", but emphasizing this fact obscures the relative insignificance of the process of musical production becoming cheaper and easier compared to advanced studio techniques becoming available at all, and musical production becoming a valid artistic tool in the first place.
The recording equipment the Beatles were given access to after becoming worldwide stars was the most sophisticated in the world AT THE TIME, but by modern standards it was still primitive, unreliable and laborious to use.
I don't know how much time you've spent in modern studios, but recreations of the gear used at Abbey Road in the late 60s, whether its a hardware preamp by Chandler or a digital emulation by Universal Audio, are absolute mainstays of modern recording. The Chandler TG2 is certainly the best preamp I've ever used and pretty much every engineer I know who does rock has a Fairchild 670 and EMT140 plugin in heavy rotation. While their tape decks and console might have been technically limited by modern standards, they were hardly primitive, not really any more laborious to use than a modern hybrid studio, and I'd wager no more unreliable than most protools rigs I've worked on. The sad fact is that almost all of the innovation in audio since the early 70s has been directed towards making things cheaper and easier to mass produce; the highest tier of audio gear hasn't changed much since the 70s.
I think the words "plugin" and "emulation" are doing a lot of work there, aren't they? Plugins don't require periodic servicings, unlike analogue gear. Of all the man-hours spent recording the Beatles' classic albums, how many were spent on busywork like winding and cutting 2-inch tape? There were also practical limitations on how many tracks could be recorded as part of a single session, forcing the Beatles to bounce multiple instruments down to single tracks.
Working with plugins has its own set of headaches, between ridiculous DRM schemes and compatibility issues. The kind of servicing that most well built analog gear needs can easily be handled by anyone who knows their way around a multimeter and a soldering iron, which should be anyone who's invested in high end analog recording gear.
Working with tape requires busywork, but so does a 120 track protools session, and personally I really do not enjoy the "draw automation tracks for every paramater of every plugin on every track" game that digital audio encourages you to play, nor do I particularly enjoy the sonic results.
As far as bouncing tracks goes, I don't think it's much of a creative limitation. I grew up in the digital era and when I switched over to 8 track tape, I found it incredibly liberating. You can't throw overdubs at the wall and see what sticks, you can't phone in your takes and Frankenstein it together after the fact, and the mix comes together in a matter of minutes rather than days or weeks. There is no buss compressor or line mixer on the planet that will make a bunch of disparate drum tracks gel as well as forcing em all into the same quarter inch of tape.
The constraints create magic! (Which we know from, e.g., poetry, where you write a sonnet rather than complaining you should have more lines, or no rhyme scheme, or whatever, working within the form is its own reward.)
The Beatles are heroes in part because they insisted on doing what had just become technologically feasible. Sure, somebody else would have done it later if they hadn't, but it might have been 18 or 24 months later. Sinatra did something similar in the 1950s by pushing the envelope of quality in popular music for the new long-playing album. Elvis, in contrast, mostly did not insist on bettering the state of the art, although his 1968 classics at least came close to catching up.
Ooh, I really appreciate you bringing up Presley here. Looking at someone who was never consciously pushing the envelope can be instructive in its own way. I was never more than passingly familiar with his music, but I'm now checking his output while paying attention to chronology, and it's clear that, between around 1965 and 1968, *something* had happened. I find it hard to pin down the exact ways and points when things change, but once you get to the likes of "A Little Less Conversation" or "In The Ghetto", his recordings sound recognizably different, recognizably (more) modern.
Mark Steyn's theory is that Elvis was too nice of a guy, a really polite kid, for his own development as an artist. He let himself get pushed around by Colonel Parker and other people, including his fans. He took some control over his career in the late 1960s and made the monumental singles Suspicious Minds and Burning Love, but mostly he didn't have the drive or the self-confidence.
Even Sinatra let himself get pushed around for a big part of his career, before taking over as the auteur of his own music career around 1953. (Unlike Elvis, the mature Sinatra didn't let his mostly lousy movies get in the way of his music. Although, one movie where Sinatra tried hard, The Manchurian Candidate, is remarkable, so maybe we lost some good movies from Sinatra caring about music more.)
The 1965 Generation had some good influence on each other as ambitious artists. Dylan's colossal self-confidence rubbed off on some of the others. Lennon's abrasiveness and snarkiness was a good influence on McCartney, kept him from being too nice like Elvis was. And McCartney's ambitiousness was good for Brian Wilson.
(I'm using "good" here in the sense of good for music fans, not necessarily good for, say, Brian Wilson's health and sanity.)
"edit: or put another way, imagine you're a caveman, painting a horse on a cave wall at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc. Suddenly, there's a flash of light, and a 21st century human steps out of a time machine. He smirks at your cave painting. "Huh, you think you're hot shit? In the future, there's something called 'Midjourney'. It produces WAY better art than you ever could. You call that a horse? BAM! This is a horse! Ignore the fact that it has five legs! Bet you're feeling like a pretty crappy artist now, eh?"
I call forth the soul of G.K. Chesterton, former student of the Slade School of Art, from Purgatory to set him right on this:
"This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.
...It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. ...But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. ...But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God. These are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road."
This sounds super uplifting, but I'm compelled to point out that it's possible that all those paintings were in fact instructional manuals. Less "love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line", more "this is the spot on the deer where you can stab for maximum damage".
Possible to have both in the same drawing! Chesterton was looking at those with the eye of an artist, or at least someone who started out with artistic training, so he could speak for that element.
Fair point; the technical illustrator could also be an artist, and in fact the best ones usually are. Still, purpose does matter here. It may or may not be true that animals possess no innate facility for art; apes and octopi and even birds can produce decorative constructs, but one can always argue that these are mating displays or accidents or something. However, many animals (even housecats !) absolutely do instruct their young. Thus, if cave paintings were primarily instruction manuals, then Chesterton's thesis is built on a foundation of sand.
I don't think the badness of the MCU can be reduced to degree of difficulty. In the Youtube series Honest Trailers, when discussing the MCU, they often say something like "watch as one faceless CGI army faces off against another faceless CGI army".
Ease of production leads to laziness and blandness and stuff that isn't that interesting. But when you had to hand-craft every costume and each character was an actor, there's more effort and creativity put into it.
There are good things done with CGI but they can't be cranked out the way MCU stuff is.
Regarding the horse cave guy vs Midjourney, I'll just recall that I read somewhere that they designed those cave paintings to appear to move a bit when exposed to flickering light like you'd have with a torch. Not to say that there's nothing to the degree of difficulty argument in that case, but the cave drawings potentially do have something that Midjourney lacks.
Watching an analysis of the fights in The Last Avatar (the live action one), the analyst made a similar comment - the moves had no relation to time or space or the fight itself.
For example, blocking a fireball, which was in the air already, took five seconds and required six positions to do.
It's almost like the director and the fight choreographer weren't actually talking to each other and the antagonists weren't in the same room at the same time. So the choreographer was looking at the actor and saying "Well, this is a cool move we could film you doing today..." and later the poor editor had to cut the resulting takes into something more or less coherent.
I'd point out that it's entirely possible for MCU movies to be relatively unpopular. Marvel's been pretty lucky, but there was Eternals, and that one absolutely deserved being unpopular, and one reason was the CGI. They've also had bad luck with some TV series. DC has tried the same thing and have had a lot more poorly received superhero movies--but a few well-received ones too. When ease of production *actually* leads to less interesting things, people are... less interested in it.
CGIs transformation from something occasionally used to do something otherwise very difficult into the mainstay of movies was a very bad choice for the art of making movies. I feel like it really started with Star Wars TPM and the other prequels, but it's increasingly common for really badly done CGI to be all over the screen. It's distracting and off-putting. Then you realize that Jurassic Park had competent CGI in 1993 which works much better than stuff 30 years later because it was used sparingly and with great care, rather than as a crutch for every part of the movie.
The late 70s to early 80s SW movies have better special effects than the major movies since, despite having fewer options and worse options. The worst special effects in the original trilogy were the schlock they added for the special release - using too much CGI to try to do something they could have done much better with less.
I'm inclined to agree with some of the other posters that Kriss is sort of approaching the Geeks-MOPs-Sociopaths dynamic but he's confusingly renamed "geeks" as "hipsters" and "MOPs" as "nerds", which is weird because to me a "hipster" was someone who specifically builds their personality around liking obscure things.
(see e.g. the classic flex of: "You probably haven't heard of them" as a retort to the question of: "What are you listening to?")
So, something like Marvel is an example of a once nerdy/geeky thing that has now been overrun by MOPs and sociopaths, which makes it all the more confusing that Kriss uses it as quintessential
I’m totally onboard with the idea that some people are strongly motivated by social status, and others much more weakly so. But classing nerds as almost always closer to the non-statusy side doesn’t match my experiences.
I’ve seen plenty of nerds trying to one-up one another about who is most skilled at intricate rules interpretations, obscure lore, logical puzzles etc. Or even just who has the most rare and expensive cards/figurines/books/whatever. Status games that don’t translate well into mainstream status are still status games, no?
Yeah I stick by position that the main thing “nerd” was at least in the 80/90s was an alternative status hierarchy. For kids who interest wasn’t sports/partying.
Yeah - less "people who don't care about status" and more "people who have been kicked to the bottom of the status hierarchy, so they break off into their own clique, within which they can be high status and find shared agreement that 'normal' society's status system us unfair, bunk, illogical, and dumb."
I graduated in 1980 from one of the first public-school-system alternative high schools in the U.S., and from firsthand immersion I wholly endorse this description.
The claim is that nerds’ conception of status is largely orthogonal to the mainstream conception. They care (to different extents) what like-minded people think about them, but those like-minded people value things differently from the mainstream.
The quality of fiction is primarily in the style and I don’t really think anyone would seriously contest this. Take Shakespeare as an example. His plots are mostly lifted from other contemporary plays. What makes him exceptional is precisely his use of language. Or take another example: Ulysses. There is absolutely nothing exceptional or even interesting in a single bland day in the life of some random Irish dude at the turn of the century. The entire merit of that piece of fiction rests on the style of prose. When it comes down to it, there really aren’t that many different types of plots. Plots are the skeleton and the art is what you build on top of them.
Beg to differ a bit on Ulysses. Obviously it is not a plot-based novel, but it is certainly great for more reasons than just its prose style"s" (part of its stylistic charm is that nearly every chapter is written in a completely different style). The psychological exploration of character is, to my mind, unparalleled in modern fiction, and there is plenty of underlying political and allegorical meaning stuffed in there as well.
Yeah, I've read a bit of Marlowe, and I can tell the difference. "The Merchant of Venice" is a very different beast than "The Jew of Malta", and the latter is far more MCU-like in my opinion.
I wasn't attacking the MCU! I actually enjoyed it, at least up through the Infinity War saga, where I stopped watching.
But, well, I'll just quote Wikipedia's summary of "The Jew of Malta":
> Barabas begins the play in his counting-house. Stripped of all he has for protesting the Governor of Malta's seizure of the wealth of the country's whole Jewish population to pay off the warring Turks, he develops a murderous streak by, with the help of his slave Ithamore, tricking the Governor's son and his friend into fighting over the affections of his daughter, Abigall. When they both die in a duel, he becomes further incensed when Abigall, horrified at what her father has done, runs away to become a Christian nun. In retribution, Barabas then goes on to poison her along with the whole of the nunnery, strangles an old friar (Barnadine) who tries to make him repent for his sins and then frames another friar (Jacomo) for the first friar's murder. After Ithamore falls in love with a prostitute who conspires with her criminal friend to blackmail and expose him (after Ithamore drunkenly tells them everything his master has done), Barabas poisons all three of them. When he is caught, he drinks "of poppy and cold mandrake juice" so that he will be left for dead, and then plots with the enemy Turks to besiege the city.
> When at last Barabas is nominated governor by his new allies, he switches sides to the Christians once again. Having devised a trap for the Turks' galley slaves and soldiers in which they will all be demolished by gunpowder, he then sets a trap for the Turkish prince himself and his men, hoping to boil them alive in a hidden cauldron. Just at the key moment, however, the former governor double-crosses him and causes him to fall into his own trap. The play ends with the Christian governor holding the Turkish prince hostage until reparations are paid. Barabas curses them as he burns.
That's just kinda awesome, like the first few seasons of "Game of Thrones".
Whereas Shakespeare in "The Merchant of Venice" pulled off something that might have been unmatched until "Paradise Lost", taking the ostensible villain and exposing how that villainy derives from his humanity, not simply making the villain sympathetic but making us identify with him. It's a very different sort of awesome.
That's exactly why I said Joyce's exploration of character was unparalleled in *modern* fiction. Indeed Shakespeare probably wins the overall prize for this.
I think "primarily" is going too far. I can think of movies that I've seen that have amazing directing, beautiful sets, and talented actors, but fail to succeed because the plot is so dumb ("Krull," "Legend," and "Prometheus" all come to mind). On the opposite end I've seen movies with compelling enough plots and characters that they overcame low production values and pedestrian directing. The same is true for books, I've read some beautifully written stuff with no depth, but also some poorly written stuff with compelling ideas (I'm quite fond of old pulp magazines from the 30s).
Still, I quite agree that lots of style can elevate a work with a solid skeleton, and let you overlook flaws in something less solid.
This is a pretty divisive take, and I think tons of people (maybe the majority of fiction readers would contest this) - arguably this is the divide between the "literature" folks and the other types of readers who tend to be a lot more plot motivated.
Like, Brandon Sanderson is a *huge* name in books, built almost entirely on the "plot" side of things, with deliberately simple prose. (And not surprisingly there's a lot of disdain from the "literature" crowd)
It seems like caring about plot is "low status" in book circles, but I think it's still the majority view.
Hard agree that plot is king. When it comes to this stuff, I always think about Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera. From Jim Butcher’s wiki page: ‘The inspiration for the series came from a bet Butcher was challenged to by a member of the Del Rey Online Writer's Workshop. The challenger bet that Butcher could not write a good story based on a lame idea, and he countered that he could do it using two lame ideas of the challenger's choosing. The "lame" ideas given were "Lost Roman Legion", and "Pokémon".’
Even if you start with a bed of crap, you can still use it to write a best-seller if the plot is good.
I enjoy Sanderson's books - largely for their creative plots - but I think they would be better if he focused a bit more on elevating his prose. I know he has deliberately stated he tries to get the prose 'out of the way' of the story, and I can respect that. (He has written more NYT bestsellers than I have, plus he teaches a class and has his own convention based on his stories.)
However, one thing I enjoy in a well-written book is when the plot comes together in a single moment of poignancy, and the author drops a quotable truth bomb right there. Better if it's at multiple places.
In my view, this is what a lot of people who hew to the literary style are looking for in their books. They love when story and style come together just right. But they don't always come together, even in literary fiction. I've read a lot of literary books with garbage plots, dumb characters, and boring settings. They're not good books, and don't hold a candle up to what Sanderson can do. If he decided to do literary, Sanderson would probably churn out something memorable.
I think he has the talent for it, from the hints he has given in books where he plays around with elevated prose, but he just doesn't have the patience to take his books to the next level. I don't think he's interested in writing something like that at this point in his career. He seems more interested in telling as many stories as he can and spinning them out faster than even his biggest fans expect. Maybe some day.
"except when you’re right; if you take a stand against Trump in rural Kentucky, or against wokeness in San Francisco, you can claim as much specialness as you want"
Au contraire: this guy is the worst. The politics-brain vindicated by genuine contrarianism manages in a painful proportion of cases to be the lowest-tier case possible, a terminal obsessive whose every waking moment is warped by the obsession that his neighbours are about to shoot him in the head. #2 tends to be a little worse -- the Kentuckian resistance lib generally does have some potential community elsewhere if the stars aligned to leave rural Kentucky, while the SF conservative would be called a "fuckin' commie" in all other parts of the world, and accordingly has a whacked idea of the Overton window -- but I've met many of both, and I'd rank the whole thing low indeed. (I see some tendencies of it in myself, and they aren't pretty either.)
That said, I think ranking okay-tier as 'okay-tier' and not 'oh my god kill me' is mostly a game for people who have not spent sufficient time using dating apps and seeing that this is 99.repeating% of the population, in all demographics, forever. (SF and NYC seem to have different dating app scenes to other large cities so may not count, but it's possible people only screenshot the profiles that aren't completely mind-numbing.)
> I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching!
See, I like sports precisely because every "episode" is different and unpredictable. Basically all fiction rehashes the same plot archetypes over and over again, and I'm not particularly interested in watching "the hero's journey" for the thousandth time.
The suspense from a movie can't come close to the totally unscripted, unpredictable rollercoaster of emotions from a high profile soccer game. Sports don't respect narrative rules, so when beautiful narratives emerge from the chaos it is all the sweeter.
Right, scripted fiction is best when the hero's triumphs feel "earned". It feels heroic when Sam declares "I can't carry it for you Mr Frodo, but I can carry you", precisely because we've spent a long time following Frodo and Sam's endless journey and seeing the increasing toll of the ring on Frodo, only for him to collapse as they finally near their destination. Sam has been convincingly sold to us as not superhuman - he's a humble hobbit gardener way way out of his depth. If a near godlike figure like Aragorn were to carry Frodo it wouldn't be impressive, of course he could carry a malnourished hobbit. If Sam were to defeat Sauron in single combat, it would feel absurd and unbelievable. But Sam carrying Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom feels both believable and convincingly difficult. The heroism of the moment is earned.
What makes sports great to watch is that *every moment is earned*. It's always believable, because it's happening for real, live in front of you. It's always difficult, because there's a team of highly trained athletes doing everything they can to defeat the heroes.
It's not as flashy as a marvel movie where everyone is shooting bright coloured beams at each other and being punched through buildings. But there's fundamentally a lack of real tension in that kind of entertainment. Spiderman is always going to win in the end (even if he gets disintegrated and needs to get resurrected in the next movie). It's fundamentally the same thing as a fake wrestling match.
Whereas when you watch sport, the knife edge tension is real. There's no scriptwriter there to rescue the heroes when they're in a tough spot. They need to do it themselves. And that in turn makes the triumph and joy so much greater when they do.
(This is also why you *absolutely need* to follow and support a team and get emotionally invested in their successes and failures to really enjoy sport. If you're watching in a detached way not really caring if team A or team B win, yeah it's gonna be boring)
I think the English football promotion/relegation system is a great example of rewarding supporters for investing emotionally in their club. No matter how small or humble a team is, even if it’s just a bunch of amateurs playing for fun, that club has the potential to climb all the way to the top, defeat titans like Man United, and to compete against the best teams in Europe in the Champions League.
That’s obviously not going to happen for most teams. But the fact that it’s possible makes your local club a more compelling thing to care about and get invested in than EG local Australian football clubs, where most of the supporters are direct family members of the players and they mostly serve as breeding grounds for higher leagues to recruit up and coming players from.
It’s basically the story of Ryan and Rob, two guys with a lot of money who decide they’d like to become soccer nerds and do so by buying a down on its luck team from a charming little down on its luck town and absolutely immersing themselves in it. It’s the most advanced cosplay of all time, because it’s both an adopted, somewhat artificial identity, and also one they have adopted wholeheartedly and genuinely.
You put your finger on why I'd rather watch unedited coverage of a biathlon or a debate in the Senate than play video games. Knowing that the whole thing has been scripted out ahead of time, that it's just a fixed maze with the lights off, and the only thing to do is figure out how to get through it makes it unbearably tedious. I've never been able to play a video game for more than about 20 minutes before I get bored and would rather do almost anything else -- something where the outcome is uncertain, unknown, depends on someone's thoughts and decisions, where brilliant saves and tragic error are both alive and possible. Of course, I recognize most people feel quite differently -- certainly my kids did -- so I try to understand why it can be absorbing, but I really don't think I do, yet.
Yes, I think that's definitely part of it. Most of the long-time gamers I know seem to end up gravitating to those, and feel a sense of comradeship with their frequent in-game collaborators. This makes more sense to me, in that, even if you're still in an artificial maze designed by somebody else, you have various ways in which the group can divide up the job of solving the maze, and there are interpersonal dynamics that are real-world, and aren't that dissimilar to being on a sports (or military) team. It makes sense to me intellectually, but in the end it's still way less interesting to me than even playing a pick-up softball or baseball game, which is equally arbitrary as to goals.
I *would* just airily dismiss the puzzle as "this is just how people are" except that clearly it isn't, since so many people find MM video games much more interesting than a softball game after work. So there's....some other reason, and I wonder whether it's nature or nurture.
I was into one briefly, to keep in touch with a friend, and I think the big pull is the other people you play cooperatively with. Guilds, more or less. The people you chat with, plan with, and execute the plans with. It's like the opposite of the "Bowling Alone" thing; in this case you physically stay in your own home, but you're interacting with people online.
Regarding your parenthetical though, the exception is if what you're watching is professionals playing a sport that you play yourself recreationally. As a longtime amateur ice hockey player I enjoy watching NHL games without needing to have a rooting interest; I know enough about the sport's intricacies to spot and enjoy the game-within-the-game storylines.
(Which is true even though as an aging amateur I stopped personally identifying with those guys long ago, having long since realized that what I do in skates bears only a superficial resemblance to what they can.)
I dunno, I watch a decent # of NBA games/F1 Races and they definitely have predictable "plot" points. One annoying example is that if there's less than a minute left in a close basketball game you know you're in for a bunch of time-outs being called. Or take this weekend's F1 race, it'll very likely be a Red Bull 1-2 finish with Verstappen winning. Every now and then you get a truly unpredictable game/season, but most games are fairly predictable.
These are two of what I would consider the most boring sports, for that reason 😄. But I assume fans are getting something out of them that I don't see.
I mostly watch soccer which doesn't feel predictable to me most of the time. Being low scoring is key for a watchable sport for me because it's usually possible for the underdog to take advantage of a slip up or have a moment of brilliance that changes the result.
I think I like the idea of Formula 1 a lot more than I like actual Formula 1 races. The idea of the fastest cars in the world, built with huge budgets, raced by the best drivers in the world, travelling the whole world to race in a variety of exotic locations, is really cool.
The only problem is that in reality one car is always 0.25% faster than any other car, which enables them to run away with the championship. Still, you can get occasional thrills from watching F1. Maybe something interesting will happen this weekend and someone else might win a race! You never know. This is why I can watch F1 without rooting for any particular team; I'm just rooting for _anything_ interesting to happen, please let someone who isn't Max Verstappen win the damn race!
"Sports don't respect narrative rules, so when beautiful narratives emerge from the chaos it is all the sweeter."
There's value in unpredictability, sure, but this just makes it sound like a hero's journey with a Skinner box attached. Will anything interesting happen this game? Dunno, better watch all of it just in case!
Well, I got bitten in the behind by that for ISTANBUL THE BEAUTIFUL DREAM THE MIRACLE 2005.
Half-time in the Champions League Final. Liverpool versus AC Milan. 3-0 down. "That's it",. I say to myself. "We're not coming back from this. The way we played in the first half? And it's Milan, if they just feel compassionate to us in the second half and don't bother scoring another one or two goals, it'll be amazing. I don't need to watch the second half of this game, I don't need to inflict that masochistic misery on myself".
Which means of course I missed the miracle come-back in the second half and just tuned back in in time to see the presentation, when I went "What????"
I remember Liverpool fans crying at half-time in the pub I was watching that game at. I didn't really have any skin in the game so I kept watching. Indeed one of the greatest comebacks of all time!
Knew a lady who left an NHL game five minutes early to beat the traffic, thus missing the straggling team scoring two goals to tie and then fifteen minutes of high-stakes brilliant overtime play.
Ice hockey definitely has an unusual combination of "relatively low-scoring" and "the puck can travel the length of the ice and score within 5 seconds".
I wouldn't really disagree with that description, except to say that it's a skinner box that you open over 90 minutes and every action of the game affects whether it will be good or bad. That's where the tension comes from.
It's not just about the end result either, individual runs at goal, shots attempted and saved, fouls, ref decisions all form sub-narratives. Then there's meta-narratives like "X scores their first goal for Y", "Z is improving every game", "W got away with a sneaky foul again".
You don't always get the payoff but the journey is usually entertaining, and when you do get the payoff it feels absolutely serendipitous. Improv comedy can feel the same way. Nothing scripted can though.
Plots have different levels of detail of abstraction, as do sports. Saying that all stories are the same because they all follow the hero's journey is like saying all basketball games are the same because they all follow the rules of basketball. In both fiction and basketball what is interesting are the smaller scale details, not the overarching rules. How will the hero complete their journey? How will they get the ball to go into the basket? What strategies will be used?
In response to the four tiers at the end of the post.
People are preoccupied - dare I say, obsessed - with identity these days, but they almost invariably define a person's identity in terms of copulas. "I AM a woman", "I AM trans", "I AM bisexual", "I AM black", "I AM bipolar" etc.
"Describe yourself: your traits, qualities, both good and bad.
Do not use the word ‘am.’
Practice this."
I think an identity built on copulas is the most shallow and unstable kind of identity going. Identity isn't something you ARE, it's something you DO. "We are who we choose to be" - Green Goblin, Spider-Man (2002).
Looking at the tiers, I note that copula-based identity foundations (race, sex, sexuality, tribal affiliation) are concentrated in the lower tiers, and action-based identity foundations (complex intellectual endeavours which require a serious investment of discipline and mental energy, underwater gardening) are concentrated in the upper tiers.
A harebrained theory: copula-based identity foundations are the most unstable and shallow. Identity foundations based on something you DO (creating things from the ether; mastering a craft, skill or discipline; raising a child; charitable activities) are very stable and deep. In the middle you have identity foundations which are kind of LIKE doing things (passive consumption of media; intense identification with a sports team), but not really meaningful enough in their own right. It may be sort of a second-hand thing, where you're subconsciously hoping that intense engagement with the people who DO things (or the things they have done) will reflect on you and help to compensate for the fact that you yourself don't really DO anything noteworthy. (See SMBC on the difference between scientists and fans of science: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-30)
To have an identity to call your own, you need to actually do things. Intense but purely consumptive engagement with a thing you enjoy will only help to fill the void up to a point. If you really want to, you can tell me your race, gender, sexuality, tribal affiliation and the list of mental illnesses you've been diagnosed with, but you haven't really told me anything about yourself - you haven't told me anything that you DO.
I think that's wrong. Those attributes I would typically describe with a copula include the most stable and deepest parts of my identity: my species, my race, my sex & my basic personality traits. I might also use a copula to describe some less stable attributes, such as hunger, thirst, tiredness & location. In Spanish, one would use different copulae for those two use cases (ser vs estar). In general, grammatical structure is not a good guide to semantics.
Do you really think your species, race and sex provide me much insight into who YOU are, as a person? Or the fact that you are currently hungry, thirsty or sleepy?
To clarify, my point is that whether I describe it as "I am a human" (i.e. with a copula) or as "I belong to the human species" (i.e. without a copula) does not change the amount of insight.
Yes, you can come up with contrived circumlocutions which ostensibly undermine my point, but this is idle linguistic pedantry. Back in the real world, no one says "I belong to the male sex/gender and exclusively find other members of that sex/gender romantically and/or sexually desirable": they say "I am gay". Although they COULD, in principle, use other verbs, in practice people only ever use the copula when describing their own sexual orientation. Likewise race, gender identity, Zodiac sign etc.
And counter to your point, the use of the copula can itself be rather telling. You might think the phrases "I perform and/or compose and/or record and release musical compositions" and "I am a musician" to be equivalent, right? Wrong. I know at least two people personally who describe themselves as musicians despite not having performed or recorded music in years. Likewise people who say "I am a writer" despite never having written anything.
If people who never hiked habitually described themselves as hikers, there would be an important distinction to be drawn between the statements "I am a hiker" and "I routinely go hiking at the weekend". I'm not aware of this being a common thing, for the simple reason that being a "hiker" doesn't raise one's status the way that being a "musician" or a "writer" would (or is intended to). Hence, I interpret the statements "I am a hiker" and "I routinely go hiking at the weekend" as interchangeable, in a way that I definitely DON'T with the statements "I am a musician" and "I perform and/or compose and/or record and release musical compositions".
(For what it's worth, it's an old joke about Tinder, and dating apps generally, that lots of people claim to enjoy hiking but never actually partake in it.)
This BEING/LIKING/DOING scheme is very nice and rings true.
It strikes me that there is a symbiosis between the doers and the likers. I depend on people who like (as part of their identity) what I do (as part of my identity) -- and vice versa. E.g., I go to the bar and “like” (in a sort of geeky way) what the bartender (great mixologist) does; they, in turn, as it happens, have a partial “like” for the kind of science I do.
A sort of gentle game recognize game thing, perhaps.
That's true, in many fields doers are dependent on likers. The ideal would be that one can wear many hats, being a doer in some contexts and a liker in others. But you can't do without being a doer at all.
To some degree, isn't this a matter of perspective? For example, sometimes being a homosexual Earthling is irrelevant, but sometimes it's very relevant to understanding who a person is and where they're coming from.
I think that the things *shouldn't* be important, in the sense that in a better world they would have less effect on us and would say less about us. And that's the world I try to create. But I still come across as a mammalian chauvinist to one of my more insect-oriented friends.
Being a “gay man” doesn’t just “male sexually attracted to males”. It includes a collage of life experiences such as childhood or adolescence feeling alienated from your peers:
>> I knew I was gay from a very young age, probably 7 or 8, or even earlier, though I didn’t know the word gay. At that time, the word poofta (or poofter) was a commonly used Australian term for a gay male. I understood that in some ways this term meant me. I was also very aware that, for many people, being gay was akin to being a prostitute or being immoral. It was also very clear to me that being gay only meant sex; it had nothing to do with love, as I had no gay role models and I had never met a gay person.
At age 11, I left home to attend an all-boys boarding school. This saved me but also drove me deeper into the darkness of the closet. It saved me because it opened a whole world that I did not know about, exposing me to students from all over the South Pacific, along with cultures and ideas that were not available during my life on a sheep station. It also opened a door to a darker side; I was so terrified of being outed that I sometimes acted as the loudest bully toward others suspected of being gay. Every day I wore a mask to hide who I really was. This inner battle became a daily struggle: Deep down, I knew that everything about the way in which I presented my identity was a lie. When I had crushes on other boys, I had to keep them hidden, unfulfilled, when all around me, peers were getting so excited about romance and love. All I could do is dream that one day I would have friends who would be happy when I had my first boyfriend.
teenage years fearing rejection from your family and peers, including potential homelessness or physical violence:
>> In August of last year, Daniel Pierce was kicked out of his home and disowned by his family for being gay. He recorded the confrontation on camera and the footage was later uploaded to YouTube. Daniel received help from Lost N Found Youth, an Atlanta organization that helps homeless LGBT youth get off the streets, along with other services.
>> Oct. 28, 2011— -- An Ohio high school student waited in a classroom to attack a 15-year-old gay classmate, beating him repeatedly in a vicious assault captured by a bystander on a cellphone.
"I covered myself and shielded my body, and he kept hitting," the gay student, who did not want to be identified, told ABC's affiliate WSYX in Ohio. "Nobody did anything."
It may have included years of emotional repression, shame or religious guilt, depression and/or suicidality
>> In November, the Mormon Church decreed that people in same-sex marriages are “apostates,” who can be excommunicated, and their children may not be baptized or blessed until they’re of “legal age,” don’t live with a parent in a same-sex relationship, and have committed to the teachings of the church and disavowed “the practice of same-gender cohabitation and marriage.” …
Since that announcement, 32 LGBT Mormons between the ages of 14 and 20 have committed suicide, according to a report from Mama Dragons, a support group for Mormon parents of LGBT kids. According to co-founder Wendy Williams Montgomery’s husband, Thomas, the families of these victims — 27 male, three female, and two transgender — reported the suicides to the couple personally, and the news was also shared with another Mormon LGBT support group, Affirmation.
It may have included an increased risk of exposure to deadly diseases, and/or different behavioral and cultural expectations about healthcare and interactions with the healthcare system
>> To be gay is to get used to blood tests. If you are positive, you do them to monitor your HIV status. If you are negative and on PrEP, a daily medication that helps prevent HIV, you do them to ensure it’s working. If you are negative and not on PrEP, you do them to maintain your sanity. Every gay person has their own rhythm to testing, defined by their relationship to HIV, their sexual practices and their neuroses. No matter your status, waiting for test results is never easy. You count the minutes until you hear via text, in person, over the phone, in an app: your body is OK for now.
For many men sexually attracted to men “I am a gay man” represents a wholistic representation of these shared lived experiences. And how these lived experienced have been and continue to be distinct from the cultural, religious, economic, educational, healthcare etc majority.
Further, it is distinct from other minority experiences such as “I am a lesbian woman” and “I am a gay black man” and “I am a straight Deaf man” - this is the fundamental concept of intersectional identity formation.
Why would all this be considered a “unstable and shallow” ??
If you think I can just infer all of the above from someone telling me that they're gay, I think that's absurd. Surely you don't seriously think "your parents throwing you out of your house because of your sexuality" is an experience common to ALL (or even a majority) of gay men?
If you tell me specific experiences that you've had, you've given me some insight into you as a person. If you tell me "I'm gay" and hope I'll take that as shorthand for everything you just said, I think that's silly and a poor way to express yourself.
There are experiences that are common to many members of a particular identity group, but simply ASSUMING that a given member of that group MUST have had those experiences on the basis of their membership in said group seems functionally indistinguishable from stereotyping, which I thought was bad.
And yeah, being bullied sucks and can be deeply traumatizing, but if someone in their mid-thirties (or older) still has a chip on their shoulder about getting bullied as an adolescent and thinks of that experience as a core part of their identity - I think that reflects poorly on them, and I would think they have a pronounced victimhood complex.
>>If you think I can just infer all of the above from someone telling me that they're gay, I think that's absurd.
I didn't make that claim. I merely provided what I consider to be a number of compelling personal, relational, and/or cultural experiences which are common among a group of people who all self-identify in the same way. Those people believe, to some extent, that these are shared experiences amongst their group. These experiences, or the history of these experiences, or the threat of these experiences, may shape how they interpret their own lives, and the ways in which they relate to other individuals, groups, and society as a whole. That shaping of interpretation and shaping of expectations, to me, is largely what a Capital I Identity *is*
>>If you tell me specific experiences that you've had, you've given me some insight into you as a person. If you tell me "I'm gay" and hope I'll take that as shorthand for everything you just said, I think that's silly and a poor way to express yourself.
I think that you may be undervaluing social context / discourse pragmatics.
Would I know all the exact particulars of their life story? No. But for me, if I was told that, it would help me to understand "who a person is and where they're coming from", as Moon Moth also explained. If you prefer the framing common in the Astral Codex community, we could say that a collection of priors about "Average Human Default Life" exist in your mind, and a man saying "I'm gay" significantly changes some of those priors about the particular man - for example, the likelihood he has a wife would be moved to near Zero, while the likelihood that he lives with HIV may be increased from about 2% to about ~15-20%, among many other life experiences.
Further, we can consider from pragmatics that the content of a message is also informed by the context and the method of transmission.
Consider encountering a new man randomly at a party and asking them "Do you have a girlfriend" and that man responding "No" or that man responding "No, I'm gay". The man is actively choosing to reveal something about himself with the second answer. It may be benign, or it may not be. Is the man at a work function or a personal function? Is the man at a party of people he knows well, or is he a newcomer? Is this a general gathering or a specific event for LGBTQ+ people? The context would interact with the content.
Consider another encounter between two 18 year old freshman who have randomly been assigned as roommates. Roommate A asks the other, "Do you have a girlfriend?" And the Roommate B responds "No, I'm gay". Roommate A could potentially respond with "Ok cool." Or he could respond with "Ok man, I'm cool, but don't tell my parents, they're very religious". Or Roommate A could potentially respond with "Oh that's cool, how long have you been out?"
The second and third responses only meaningfully connect to "I'm gay" if we acknowledge that saying "I'm gay" imparts more information about that person's relation to society than just "I'm only sexually attracted to other men". Roommate A knows his parents are very religious - perhaps he knows they have expressed explicit homophobic views. Or Roommate A knows that our society assumes all humans are heterosexual, unless and until a particular human explicitly denies it.
>>And yeah, being bullied sucks and can be deeply traumatizing, but if someone in their mid-thirties (or older) still has a chip on their shoulder about getting bullied as an adolescent and thinks of that experience as a core part of their identity - I think that reflects poorly on them, and I would think they have a pronounced victimhood complex.
I would refer you to significant psycho-social, cognitive/psychological and neuroscience research that indicates experiences during development, and particularly during teenage years, do have a tendency to impart lifelong mood and behavioral patterns and that acknowledging these influences as formative and recognizing their outcomes is not "victimhood".
And I am not just considering extremely abusive and traumatizing situations - ALL experiences -positive, negative, boring, surprising, - interact with biological factors to lead to adult personalities and cultural/social patterns.
Thanks for answering here. I'd been putting off responding because it'd take a lot of time to write a serious response, and then I found that you'd done it better than I could.
I can see we're not going to agree on this point. All I can say is that I think a person's sexual orientation is one of the least interesting things about them as a person, and in my personal experience (anecdotes are not data and all that), people who define themselves principally in reference to their sexual orientation tend to be dull or insufferable.
I also think that vastly updating your estimate that a person has HIV because they told you you're gay, while statistically accurate, would in other contexts be considered homophobic stereotyping, and you don't seem to be acknowledging that.
>And I am not just considering extremely abusive and traumatizing situations - ALL experiences -positive, negative, boring, surprising, - interact with biological factors to lead to adult personalities and cultural/social patterns.
Yes, but this is true of everyone, not just gay men. If you talk about specific experiences YOU have experienced, you've told me more about YOURSELF. I'm not simply going to assume that every gay man I meet has been the victim of homophobic bullying, and gay men don't have a monopoly on bullying or abuse.
I would entirely agree with that. The first thing I ask of any new acquaintance is usually "What do you do?" because that interests me the most. And if I think about what defines me, it always comes down to what I do, what I like doing and don't like doing, why I do this instead of that, et cetera. Things that were born to me -- my sex, age, nationality, hair color, height, weight, that I like girls -- I mostly couldn't care less about this, either in me or in other people.
But this is not the Zeitgeist, I think, and that mystifies me a little why that should be so. I would hate to be defined by random external characteristics, things that are passively true or false, rather than by my actions.
Also, in a void (or desert island, whatever) all the checkmarks become meaningless. Many of them are pretty meaningless for most even on an everyday basis (young men are desperate to be a couple inches taller, later in life, zero relevance for almost all), but without a specific society around you, doesn't matter if you're X, Y, Z. Which basically means the checkmark are a way to let society define you, which seems like a losing proposition.
These are some great points, and I think they provide another framework to help understand nerds. I think that nerds differ from the rest of the population is that they blur the LIKE and DO lines. They engage with things that most people just LIKE in a way that is more like DOing.
Nerds often engage with media that other people passively consume in a very active, DOing type way. They spend huge amounts of time thinking about little details of the plot and world and commiserating with other people about it. They contribute to online forum discussions. They edit fan wikis. They go to conventions and attend panels on media. They write fanfiction. It isn't quite like your canonical examples of DOing something, but it isn't passive consumption either. They are engaging with media in a way that is more constructive, thoughtful, and social than is normal.
This could explain why nerds seem extremely attached to things they LIKE in ways that seem strange and unreasonable to other people. They are able to form stronger and more fulfilling identities around things they LIKE than other people, because they are able to engage with them in ways that are more like DOing.
My wife and I have debated the importance of “what you do” for a person understanding you, and for her, “what you do” often means almost nothing. Scott’s top tier would probably be lower tier for her in importance. Why? Because it says nothing about what kind of a person they are and how they relate to the people around them. There are some “what you do” cases that at least get some small adjustments, like being a healthcare worker or a teacher, but someone doing advanced abstract math gives us no information, or possibly a negative prior, because this person may live in an ivory tower and look down on others. Until she finds out if this person is the type to show concern for a friend, or not be stingy with tipping their waitress, or any other interaction that indicates “is this person a kind and moral person,” then the rest of those things are just window dressing for the actually important aspects of a person’s identity.
We’ve managed to meet more in the middle, I definitely often felt misunderstood because people didn’t understand or care much about what I do, and she definitely helped me realize that a lot of people just aren’t wired that way. I feel like a lot of this focus on the tiers kind of ignores the elephant in the room, that if you’re an asshole, none of these “things to build your identity around” really matter all that much, because you’ll be alone and friendless.
But isn't "being an asshole" really just a shorthand for "doing a lot of asshole things?" I mean, you can have asshole thoughts inside your head and not act on them, indeed you can feel like being an asshole but actually be a considerate and reasonable person, via your conscience and will. Certainly happens to me. And does it matter if you're an asshole on the inside, so long as you're not one on the outside?
I feel like there needs to be some kind of Harry Flashman quip here.
"Showing concern for a friend", "not being stingy when tipping" are examples of things that you DO, not things that you ARE. As I said above, we are who we choose to be. The fact that someone is gay, or depressed, or a Libra, tells me virtually nothing about them. The fact that they make the decision to tip a waitress speaks volumes.
>if you’re an asshole, none of these “things to build your identity around” really matter all that much, because you’ll be alone and friendless.
In my framework, "being an asshole" also means "making the conscious decision to do asshole things", which is also something you DO rather than something you ARE. I wish I could say I believed that assholes always end up alone and friendless, but frankly, I don't believe that: I think that being "likeable" and being "good" are orthogonal to one another. But that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
I think the comments to my post helped me to think about how to clarify this. I think if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty, you can argue that there’s very few things that you actually are, almost everything is something that you do. That said, I think there’s high-level what you do (e.g. your occupation, your hobbies), and low-level what you do (e.g. how you relate to your coworkers, whether you’re a good or sore loser when playing board games with friends). I think my wife would say she doesn’t think the high-level what you do is very useful, except in the case that it gives you some reliable signal about the low-level what you do. Thanks for the comments back, this will definitely inform the inevitable next round of debate my wife and I have about this!
If you're an asshole, that *is* your identity. Or at least a major load-bearing pillar of it. But you probably won't admit that part, at least not explicitly, which means there isn't a simple question you can ask other people to get them to admit that they are assholes.
A large part of quality is virtuosity and the qualities we imagine the artist must had. People who like sports usually value the moments of incredible performance. A Marvell movie is such a corporate product that the personalities behind it are lost, whereas in an art movie the personality of the director is more visible.
A large part of nerdery is being into fictional worlds. Fans are often more into characters.
I don't think it's that a Marvel movie is a generic corporate product, it's that it is trying to tell a serialized story. That means that directors sometimes need to compromise their vision in order to make the product fit into the larger narrative. They are less like traditional movie directors and more like the directors of TV show episodes. Directors have less power in the MCU compared to writers, again more like TV.
A lot of movie directors don't like this, because they are used to directors being in charge and writers being disposable hired guns. But, in my view, they need to get over it, because the serialized and connected nature of the MCU is one reason it is popular. If you want to get to direct something incredibly popular you can't immediately start complaining that your directorial style clashes with one of the main things that makes it popular.
The MCU films are formulaic in a way spears from their serialised nature. The most recent Ant-Man film had very little connection to films outside the Ant-Man trilogy, but it still felt very much like a Marvel film.
> Top-tier: Intellectual subfields, especially obscure ones or ones involving pure abstract math. If you can say “I’m really into trans-finite 8-dimensional Hoffdorf groups” and justify this with a discussion of how innately beautiful they are, you’ve got it made.
I have a (slightly crackpot-ish) theory about what nerds are.
Scott links nerdiness to class here, in that upper class people and nerds both cultivate refined interests that are inaccessible to the general population.
SSC has a post about "the science of nerds" linking nerdiness to Jewishness, in that there's overlap in traits between the stereotypical Jew and the stereotypical nerd.
Of course there's also a connection between Jews and economic class, they're on average unusually well off, if you believe Cochran, because Jews have undergone selection to fit a finance/office work/white collar economic niche.
The basic elements of human psychology are adapted to a hunter-gatherer existence, but success in the modern world often depends on having psychological traits that weren't selected for in the HG world. Self discipline, and the ability to focus on what would seem like incredibly boring stimuli to a hg, spreadsheets, writing code etc.
It's interesting that Scott's list of respectable interests boils down to will power and I guess less instinctually compelling things, like tribalism. Being the kind of person who's interested in pure maths probably isn't adaptive in the HG world, but someone like that could be very successful in the more bureaucratic niches that civilisation creates, like finance.
I think nerds are people with psychological traits that are useful in a bureaucratic/office-work niche, as opposed to the majority of the population who have traits selected for hunter-gather or farming life.
Sports are the archetypical non-nerd interest, and they're basically tribal contest of physical might, which feels very hunter-gathered/primitive farmer-ish to me.
Obviously a lot of nerds end up working various kinds of desk jobs, like software, engineering, physics etc., and often are financially successful.
The class signalling around more cultured and less cultured interests is a way to advertise that you have the psychological traits that predict success in civilisation.
I mentioned in the other thread that you could fairly accurately predict the characteristics of the archetypical "traditional" 20th-century nerd by looking at the intersection of "intellectual" and "masculine-coded."
I think you're getting at something similar here, but you're missing the gendered element, which is very important. Traditional femininity - the characteristics that make people good at managing a household, supervising children, doing repetitive chores every day, and concentrating on textile work like embroidery or weaving - is very well-suited to the modern office, and yet these have always been the antithesis of nerdiness. It's specifically masculine-coded traits like numeracy and curiosity that got the original "nerd" label.
But this, and your observation as well, still only applies to the 20th-century nerd. Most people here seem to be using an entirely different operational definition, which I can only describe as "trying very very hard not to say the 'a' word."
The problem with slang terms like "nerds" and "hipsters" is that they change meaning every generation. That's what slang does, because slang is language that is in fashion. When my dad called someone a "nerd" he meant that that guy was an asshole. I haven't heard anyone else nerd to mean that, but apparently it meant that once. I think I've heard "nerd" deployed to mean a dozen different things over the years. All we can be sure of is that whatever it means today, it will mean something else in 15 years.
Similarly, when William S. Burroughs uses the term "hipster" he means a drug user or someone who looks like one.
I think you underestimate the complexity of hunter-gatherer existence. Plant nerds could be extremely useful if you want to know where to find a particularly rare fruit tree and when it's ripe. Animal nerds could predict the migration patterns of common prey animals or identify behavioral quirks that could be used to lead prey into a trap. Rock nerds could identify the highest quality material to craft arrowheads out of. And so on.
Perhaps most important, sky/star nerds, who could predict the weather, navigate across oceans, etc. (while engaging in very non-nerdish related physical pursuits).
One useful concept to solve the "quality" problem is "upmarket" and "downmarket."
Things that are upmarket are aimed at a smaller market that has high discernment. Things that are downmarket are aimed at a larger market with low discernment.
With something like speakers, downmarket speakers are functional, but may not give the clarity of upmarket speakers. Meanwhile, people who purchase downmarket speakers may believe that people who purchase upmarket speakers are falling for marketing rather than actually enjoying more quality.
The same applies to cultural products.
The MCU is aimed downmarket. To speak to as many people as possible. This does not mean its plot is bad—lots of things are easily accessible but flop big-time—But that it requires little effort or skill to appreciate.
Meanwhile, a movie like Portrait De La Jeune Fille En Feu has no soundtrack, no action scenes, and is in French: it requires a significant amount of skill to understand and enjoy.
Does this mean it's better?
Not necessarily. Sometimes, things move upmarket just by adding meaningless complexity (difficult diction, or nonsense in the case of Ern Malley) or by removing emotional cues (not using music in a movie, like the example above). Sometimes, things move upmarket because they are adding meaningful complexity, like deep themes.
So, let's go back to your feeling about quality: that things too upmarket for you are meaningless complexity, but things that are downmarket of your taste are shallow. This can be a meaningful statement, where you like things that add meaningful complexity, while something like Finnegan's Wake is meaningless complexity.
It's also true that adding complexity can require more close attention and skill, and that can actually make someone enjoy something more. Removing music from a movie or adding bits of nonsense to a poem means you have to pay closer attention, which means that you will get more out of it I unironically like Ern Malley's poetry, a position that is actually quite common. Revealing it was written as a hoax does not change the fact that it has a more emotional effect on me than any of the other poems the creators wrote. I get more out of it.
But I still refuse to pick up Finnegan's Wake, because it goes too far: the complexity is designed to take a lifetime to read, and while James Joyce was really, really smart, he was not smart enough to spend a lifetime on.
So, in summary:
1) Upmarket and downmarket are better terms because they allow that what is upmarket is not always better (but always has higher barriers to entry)
2) What is upmarket does require more attention and understanding, which can legitimately increase enjoyment and engagement
3. Some of this complexity can be meaningful (e.x. deeper themes) and some can be meaningless (e.x. removing music). Meaningless, however, is not always bad because #2
4. There is a point where something becomes too complex for reasonable enjoyment (e.x. Finnegan's Wake). But it is difficult to know whether this complexity is for meaningful reasons or meaningless.
Nerds, generally, take something that is in a medium that's traditionally seen as downmarket (e.x. animation) and find upmarket examples of it. This is why you have Sci-Fi nerds but literature geeks.
(The ideal piece of art, in my mind, is something that can be enjoyed both downmarket and upmarket. That is, it is immediately enjoyable, but also rewards increased attention with deeper meanings. Like Jurassic Park, which uses very subtle symbolism to create narrative meaning and character resonance while also being a dinosaur action flick)
>With something like speakers, downmarket speakers are functional, but may not give the clarity of upmarket speakers. Meanwhile, people who purchase downmarket speakers may believe that people who purchase upmarket speakers are falling for marketing rather than actually enjoying more quality.
Speakers might not be the best example, but some people - even self-identified sommeliers - literally cannot tell the difference between e.g. cheap wine and expensive wine, or French wine and Californian wine, despite professing a preference for expensive wine over cheap wine.
Buying upmarket speakers also serves a secondary function from the perspective of conspicuous consumption, obviously. If you don't have a good ear, conspicuous consumption may in fact be the primary (even sole) purpose of buying Bang & Olufsen rather than Phillips.
Regarding Coagulopath's comment: "In general, I am creeped out by effusive public adoration for things that are near-universally loved. Like The Beatles. Or bacon. Or dogs. Or science.
The similarly creepy but inverse phenomenon is the effusive public hatred of things that are nearly universally hated, such as gender violence, racism etc. (in other words, virtue signalling)
Fantasy and SF demonstrate that the whole thing is fractal.
Star Wars isn't even SF or fantasy; Star Trek and The Expanse series are low class, Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer are a tier above, perhaps; enthusiasm for The Dispossessed or Dhalgren definitely; mastery of Philip K. Dick's canon and, say, early Pynchon is impressive. And then there's being able to be insightful about the commonalities and differences in Harlan Ellison, N. K. Jemisin, and Stanislaw Lem.
Much of the cannon is basically sci-fi/speculative/fantasy fiction. Frankenstein, Dracula, Wells, 1984, BNW, Clockwork, Slaughterhouse 5, 451, etc. E.g., if you go down guardians top 100, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 are speculative, depending how you define term. E.g., why isn't Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, Master and Margarita fantasy? Same with Odyssey, Beowulf, etc. Realistic fiction is the odd one out, probably because it's inherently boring (we all know unhappy people in unhappy relationships, who wants to read about that as a leisure time activity?). And in terms of what sells, also dominated by speculative: King, Rowling, etc., basically destroying the competition. Funny thing a few years back when everyone was writing apocalypse stories.
Something that struck me while looking over this paper:
> Although girls preferred relationships and fairytales/folktales more than boys did (t(4768) = 2.75 and 3.08, ps < .001), both genders shared almost similar taste in other types of fiction, except for mysteries (t(4768) = 4.09, p < .001). This points to greater convergence in boys’ and girls’ reading preferences by genre.
It takes a special kind of dedication to look at data that says "big differences in genre fiction preference by gender in 3 out of 8 categories" and conclude "the genders are very similar, except for the relationships / fairy tales / mysteries categories". Are they just hoping no one realizes there are only 8 rows in their table?
I think you might be making a category error in regards to the 'quality' thing. MCU absolutely *has* quality. I wouldn't watch it, but defining it as the low end of the quality scale is causing a lot of confusion for you. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnosaur_(film) is closer to the bottom end of the movie quality scale by far than the MCU stuff (potentially touching the "so bad it's good" effect for some people). I've not seen any of the MCU movies and don't really plan to (superhero is not really my genre), but I imagine they have a lot of production value. The plot is probably glib, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily more glib than, say, Jurassic Park, which a lot of people loved and doesn't seem to have much of a backlash (beside the whole "those aren't Velociraptors" style complaints).
Similarly, I *think* you might be making a category error about sci-fi or RPGs being "very popular". You can't really walk up to a random person in the street and have a high chance of them being into either of these things. Sci-fi, as far as I'm aware, is less popular than fantasy, and fantasy is less popular than dramas and thrillers. I would describe it as very niche! There are things that are *even more* niche (e.g. horror I believe is one of those genres, and definitely surrealist fiction), but I'd not put "very" infront of "popular". Yes, there are a lot of people who have seen Star Wars, and for a large amount of them, that'll be all the sci-fi they want. (And arguably it's space fantasy and not sci-fi, but I'll leave the sci-fi definition uncontested here so I don't make my life too easy.)
>I *think* you might be making a category error about sci-fi or RPGs being "very popular". You can't really walk up to a random person in the street and have a high chance of them being into either of these things. Sci-fi, as far as I'm aware, is less popular than fantasy, and fantasy is less popular than dramas and thrillers.
I agree that RPGs are a much more niche interest than Scott is presenting them as, but hard disagree on the rest. With regards to sci-fi, Avatar is the highest-grossing film ever made, the MCU (which sort of straddles the line between sci-fi and fantasy) is a massive multimedia juggernaut, Star Wars has been one of the biggest media franchises in the world for fifty years, likewise Star Trek, Jurassic World is the 8th-highest grossing film and so on and so on. With regards to fantasy: Lord of the Rings is the third bestselling book ever (and the film adaptations are among the highest-grossing films ever AND swept the Oscars), Harry Potter has been a huge media franchise for the last twenty-five years, Game of Thrones and ASoIaF are huge etc. While some science fiction or fantasy works are obscure (as in every genre), the genres as a whole are not niche or obscure by any stretch of the imagination. I think the last time this was true was like fifty years ago.
I'm going to disagree with this. That a number of big-budget science fiction films were popular doesn't necessarily translate into science fiction being popular; these films could be popular despite being science fiction.
To go with a sports example: American football is a popular sport (in America). The Super Bowl gets something like 100 million viewers. The average NFL football game viewership seems to be between 15 and 18 million people. Broadcast big name college football games get enough viewers to make the game worth broadcasting. For most sports, however, that the very top end championship gets a lot of viewers says nothing about the number of viewers that the regular events will draw. Let's switch sports to women's gymnastics. The Olympic women's gymnastics championship got around 40 million viewers. What number of viewers would a weekly women's gymnastics sports program draw? I know which way I would bet.
This is important if you're a film-maker going on to make a movie. If you think you have the next Avatar science fiction blockbuster that isn't a big name IP, and your name isn't James Cameron (or another household name like Lucas or Spielberg), you're likely to be very disappointed at the box-office results. Viewers like big budget action movies; that those movies happen to be some flavor of science fiction is incidental to their popularity except in that special effects are a good use of budget in getting people into theaters. (I think viewers are more interested in science fiction than they used to be, but all else being equal, science fiction will turn away more viewers than it will attract).
Another quibble: the MCU isn't really a MULTIMEDIA juggernaut; it might have qualified when the TV shows were getting decent viewers, but even that seems to have dropped off. That MCU viewers were attracted to big budget movies and not superheroes (science fiction + fantasy) is demonstrated by the continuing failure of Marvel comics.
I don't think the MCU is completely without quality or artistic merit. The early movies in the series (which worked from a proven base of time-tested comics) took decent directing, talented actors matched to time-tested characters, and time-tested stories mated with cutting edge special effects and produced a number of great movies. There's demonstrable artistic merit in the successful transition from one media to another alone. But as the well of good and translatable comics have run dry and the corporate pressure has increased, the quality has dropped significantly.
Do you think most of the people who went to see Avatar went to see it specifically because they knew James Cameron directed it? I don't think so. Consider the fact that it did amazing numbers in China, and several of Cameron's previous films (e.g. Terminator 2) were never released there theatrically. You can say "people only went to see it because of the name recognition of the director", but even Spielberg has had flops (many, in fact). You can say "people only went to see it because they like big budget movies", but a) history is littered with examples of big budget films that flopped - a big budget is no guarantor of commercial success and b) there are plenty of more modestly-budgeted science fiction films which had impressive commercial returns, many of which are still widely beloved entries in the pop cultural canon to this day - Robocop ($13 million), The Terminator ($6 million), ET ($10 million), Star Wars ($11 million), Rollerball ($6 million), Alien ($11 million), Back to the Future ($19 million) (these figures are not inflation-adjusted). Sure you'll tell me that "people only liked these movies in spite of their being sci-fi, not because they're sci-fi - they only went to see them because they like big budgets/explosions/director with name recognition/actor with name recognition", but like - when you have numerous examples of successful science fiction films which were modestly budgeted, were not wall-to-wall action (several of the above were even pretty restrained when it came to special effects), were directed by virtual unknowns and starred virtual unknowns, what exactly would it take to prove that actually there IS a huge mainstream market for science fiction films? (Excluding a bunch of special pleading; "Back to the Future is more of a teen comedy anyway".) Not to mention the converse - it isn't hard to find examples of big budget movies starring and/or directed by household names, which bombed anyway (Tomorrowland, Cutthroat Island), some of which were even franchise entries/remakes/adaptations with name recognition (The Lone Ranger, Pan, The 13th Warrior, Mulan [2020]).
>the MCU isn't really a MULTIMEDIA juggernaut; it might have qualified when the TV shows were getting decent viewers, but even that seems to have dropped off
Sorry, no. WandaVision was "the most viewed title of January 2021 across all major U.S. streaming and advertising video on demand services" - and this is a TV show which is a pastiche of 50s sitcoms, not big-budget explosions and special effects. "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the most-viewed series of April 2021". "Moon Knight had the most in-demand United States series premiere in the first quarter of 2022. It had 33.4 times the average demand of all other series in the U.S. during its first 30 days." There are 7 new MCU TV shows due to be released in 2023 and 2024. MCU's TV shows are still in rude health.
In addition to that there were a bunch of MCU tie-in video games, hence the "multimedia" part.
Where are you getting your streaming numbers? I can find Nielsen's numbers, and they do include Disney+, but WandaVision is #14 for 2021, and no MCU show makes it in 2022.
As far as video games goes, none of the MCU tie-ins have been particularly successful, unless you count the PlayStation Spider-Man games, and counting those as MCU is a bit of a stretch due to the whole 'what do you mean we licensed our most popular characters to Sony?' debacle.
To get to my main point, if I want to persuade someone I don't know to go see a movie, the phrase "science fiction" doesn't enter my vocabulary. "It stars [X]" or "it's by the director of [Y] and [Z]" or (in the case of China) "it's a big American movie that made it past the censors" are the phrases I consider using. If it's got nothing else, I show the trailer and hope whoever put it together did a good enough job of doing whiz-bang special effects without spoiling the film.
I think this is a change from the 70s and 80s because there wasn't any competition. The original Star Wars stood out because there were only a few big screen special effects blockbusters each year. 1983, the year Return of the Jedi came out, the other films in the top four are Tootsie, Flashdance, and Trading Places. 2019, the year before COVID, the top 8 are three Marvel movies, two Disney animated sequels, two Disney live action remakes of animated films, and one Star Wars film.
"This MCU TV show was the 14th most popular TV show of the year before last" does not scream "MCU's TV shows are failing" to me.
>none of the MCU tie-ins have been particularly successful
Agreed.
>To get to my main point, if I want to persuade someone I don't know to go see a movie, the phrase "science fiction" doesn't enter my vocabulary.
Fair enough, but I don't think the way you try to get your friends to see movies is necessarily indicative of any broader cultural trend. Nor do I think that it in any way contradicts the objective fact that there have been dozens of sci-fi films in the last fifty years (including sci-fi films made on modest budgets, restrained in their use of special effects, without marketable stars and directed by relative unknowns) which were enormously critically and/or commercially successful. And maybe you don't use the specific phrase "science fiction", but I'm sure if you show your friends the trailer they can make a reasonable inference as to which genre it falls under.
>2019, the year before COVID, the top 8 are three Marvel movies, two Disney animated sequels, two Disney live action remakes of animated films, and one Star Wars film.
So you're saying in 2019, of the top 8 highest-grossing films, only one WASN'T either science fiction, fantasy, or that intermediate space between sci-fi and fantasy that superhero films occupy - and this is meant to UNDERMINE my argument that science fiction and fantasy are extremely popular, mainstream, commercially viable genres?
I enjoy science fiction. I would like to continue to enjoy science fiction across multiple media. I'm not a picky consumer, at least with regards to the definition of science fiction; I don't consider Star Wars to be some separate 'science fantasy' category. The problem is that all my mental heuristics point to 'less enjoyable science fiction in the forseeable future'.
In the style of ACX, I'll make a number of predictions. For the sake of clarity, I rate each of these at at least 75%.
1. The quality of MCU movies, as measured by domestic box office gross or by audience score, will continue to trend downward. That doesn't mean that some movies might be better than others, but the overall trend is downward. The low hanging fruit has been harvested.
2. The next Star Wars movie may make the Top 10 for the year, but it will not have the domestic box office (adjusted for inflation) of Top Gun: Maverick or Avatar 2.
3. Over 75% of the movies on the top 10 lists during the next five years will be Disney (including Disney owned IP produced by others such as Sony), non-Disney animated, DC, or Avatar. There will be no new science fiction movies from a new IP or existing untapped IP that make any presence in the top 10 movies list during that period.
The problem is that movies are only part of the pipeline, and they're mostly the outlying end. There's almost no sources of new viable IP, at least nothing that studios are going to take a risk on throwing down for a blockbuster. The last Black Swan multimedia IP was Harry Potter. It took four years for that to generate a movie, which lead to the brief and now pretty much finished YA IP boom. Science Fiction is still doing ok over in Video Game land, though any attempts to move from there to the wider media system have not had good results (see Halo). It's holding on in TV land, through middling quality Star Trek series (including the Orville), Star Wars series, and the Expanse.
The only 'gray swans' (not entirely unforseeable) I see are:
For the MCU, Deadpool 3. Ryan Reynolds is a creator willing to take risks to make a product for fans, and he's produced results despite opposition from the corporate side. If anything bucks the MCU trend, it's most likely to be him.
For movies: now that Sonic and Mario have shown that animated video game movies can work if they cater to the fans, Nintendo has a stack of potential IP floating around, and (for all the issues with their business model) defending the integrity of their IP is one thing they're known for. I just wager that any future Nintendo projects will be animated and intended primarily for kids.
Fantasy is its own separate problem. Telling me "there are a lot of great fantasy movies coming out soon... go watch [the next MCU film] or Frozen III!" doesn't work. There's talk of another ASoIaF TV series, but the botched ending to the last series kinda dampened any enthusiasm for that. The Witcher had another Creator with a passionate need to see the series done justice, and they effectively fired him for it. LotR has been discussed here to death. If there was an existing viable multimedia fantasy IP that hadn't been touched, I would figure someone would have grabbed it back when fantasy TV series were trendy.
A comic book costs five dollars for MAYBE fifteen minutes of entertainment. The story will either be completely confined to that one issue, or will be stretched out over months.
For example, I can get a trade paperback of Watchment for $35. If printed as individual issues it'd easily run me $40-60, over the space of a year.
Nothing is needed to explain the unpopularity of comic books beyond that.
Under 'comics', I'd include any similar visual storytelling, such as graphic novels.
Graphic novels for kids are doing great. Imported graphics novels are doing great. Domestic graphic novels from domestic publishers that once had massive audiences (and can tie them in to blockbuster movies)? Not doing great.
For what it's worth I rather liked "House of the Dragon", once I figured out that it was a cross between "The Crown" and various Shakespeare histories. We know where it goes - doom, civil war, no more dragons - and the process of getting there is helped by some good performances by the actors. Plus hot dragon-on-dragon action, as it were.
> Nothing is needed to explain the unpopularity of comic books beyond that
Disagree, the unpopularity of comic books has little to do with economics. Most people (like me) who'd never consider buying a comic book have no idea what they cost or how long they are.
The unpopularity of comic books is almost entirely about the social stigma associated with them. Comic books are perhaps _the_ most uncool thing that there is, and owning even one is a threat to your social status.
Or comic books are really, really boring to many? You've got a couple panels a page, plus some text. You can "read" them in a couple minutes. Basically, a weird way to tell a story.
The Marvel stuff from 2008's "Iron Man" onward for 5 or 10 years was strikingly good for comic book movies in terms of quantity with respectable quality. They put out a lot of pretty decent comic book movies in a short time. Comic book movies weren't good at all until the 1978 "Superman," and that was highly erratic. For decades afterwards, comic book movies remained hit or miss. Marvel eventually briefly got down a formula where they could consistently make decent comic book movies. D.C., in contrast, never figured out a formula.
I haven't paid much attention lately, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'd gotten lousier lately. In any case, you'll get bored with a formula after awhile.
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)."
That is not a "plot", that is a premise.
Each "episode" (game/match) of whatever sport has its own plot, with dramatic twists galore.
I'm not even a sports fan, but Scott is being unfair.
I can't blame voice recognition - I do that to myself somehow, my brain seems to classify words along how they sound, and even though I know intellectually which one is which, I'll put down the wrong one if I'm in a hurry.
This is an internal difference. In my native American English, there is a clear difference in the second vowel. "Access" uses the DRESS vowel; "axis" has a reduced vowel.
(Other English speakers may distinguish between a reduced KIT and a schwa. Not me.)
I'm really glad to hear someone else say this, because I've noticed myself making pronunciation-based typos (some which even seem to involve the replacement of vowels based on my regional accent), and now I have more than one data point to start speculating about what this means about how the mind handles verbal vs. written language. What I should speculate I don't know, but it certainly seems to imply something interesting is going on.
(Example from this very post! I originally wrote certainly as "certainle," which I think was because it ends in the sound that's used for the name of the letter "e")
“Top-tier: Intellectual subfields, especially obscure ones or ones involving pure abstract math. If you can say “I’m really into trans-finite 8-dimensional Hoffdorf groups” and justify this with a discussion of how innately beautiful they are, you’ve got it made.”
As an academic, I know people like this (not all academics are, some fields have this more than others, etc) and I can tell you that this kind of identity construct does *not* age well. At 20, it’s great (there’s a lovely sense of calm that radiates from them); at 30, it’s fine (but starts to seem a little childish); at 40, it seems sad and it is almost always confined to the ex-child prodigy third-tier Hoffdorf theorists.
Notably, and maybe this is my message to ACX readers, the best people at Hoffdorf groups *don’t* do this. The best Hoffdorf people do, actually, have personalities that are load-bearing. This is true even in pure mathematics.
In some fields that require intense and sometimes unpleasant work, being Hoffdorf guy/girl in your 20s can help. Here I’m thinking more of certain parts of the humanities that require reading lots of badly-written secondary sources and getting up on the higher gossip.
But the people who don’t move beyond that lose out in a number of ways:
1. They can’t connect to others, even others in their field. They miss out on the wider experiences, including the intellectual experiences that would make them better at Hoffdorf groups. There’s something deeply incurious about them. Imagine a Shakespeare scholar who would rather know 0.02% more about Two Gentlemen of Verona than read, say, John Donne, or who only cares about John Donne because he illuminates some minor aspect of Shakespearean prosody.
2. Mystical take: intellectual achievement comes in part from a connection to a wide unconscious aspect of one’s experience. But identity construction, by contrast, is a conscious act. Being Haffdorf guy is antithetical to learning more about Haffdorf spaces because Haffdorf spaces are in some way bigger than what you can encompass. Haffdorf spaces go low when you want to go high, as it were.
Reading FdB’s load bearing essay, I feel like he gets it right. In high school I knew people who were really in to math, and others who were really in to being gay. Twenty years later, I’m struck by how, for both groups, it was a useful phase to have gone through. Some of the math types became math profs, some of the gay guys became artists (the gay thing was actually a sensitivity/aesthete thing, turns out some weren’t gay, and there were some gay jocks). Others became b-school profs, or lawyers, or died young of cancer.
But that early identification matured and developed, becoming something that was a small part of their present, that they could draw on, but not define themselves by. It’s useful to remember that phase, because if you’re good you’ll encounter plenty of 20 year olds who are really in it, but even most of them realize that you, yourself, should have probably become a person.
I have to second this. I have met people at the bar who want to talk about Category Theory, and I have to refrain myself from saying "why". But, if you look at the person who wrote the book on Category Theory, you will find she spent a year playing professional Aussie-rules football.
I still don't understand what you mean by "personalities that are load-bearing". It sounds like you're saying "not based on anything, just their magical essence of selfhood shining through in an unconditioned way".
Like, which remarks in particular led you to believe I was asserting a “magical essence of selfhood” (some unchanging unitary thing?) that “shines through” (through what?) in an “unconditioned way” (unconditioned by what?)
I truly don’t think any of that and in my remarks I was giving examples of experiences that led me to believe a personality is quite the opposite: an evolving, complex process, with a logic that excludes simple, stable solutions.
I guess I don't understand what it means to have a "load bearing personality" separate from one's personality having specific features like "liking transfinite math", but I feel like if I pointed out someone whose personality had those kinds of specific features, you would say they were using it as an alternative to a load-bearing personality.
I didn't mean to make fun of you, just to try to express the level of my confusion.
It seems like you’re having difficulty engaging with the stories in my original post. Here is something a bit more Spinozan that might help you see what a self might be other than a magical essence unconditioned shining etc.
1. A self is a complex, evolving object.
2. It takes on and assembles itself out of features (like being really in to Haffdorf spaces). These features play a role in its further evolution. Many of the most important properties are emergent, however: not reducible to having this or that subfeature. (Think about the property of water being wet — what specific feature of the molecule does that?)
3. The self is only partially knowable to the self. This is partly a result of #2. Partly a diagonalization thing/cybernetic theorem/X can’t contain a complete model of itself as a subpart. Lots of interesting epistemic stuff here, but I hope this is reasonably intuitive.
4. Because of #3, attempts to define the self through a conscious identification will be at best “usefully wrong”. At worst they are dangerous self-amputations that reduce the intrinsic complexity of the self. In general this is why you should be very wary of thinking you’ve made sense of yourself or someone else by pointing out their properties. (Note that simply having recognizable properties is fine — my original post happily drew attention to some.)
5. Most interesting things in the world (Haffdorf spaces, human relationships, etc) are comprehensible only to complex selves, so there are good reasons to pay attention to the limits of knowability implied by #4.
Maybe a non-load bearing personality trait would be, “I like The Merchant of Venice” and a load-bearing personality trait would be, “I think literature expresses human emotions and helps us be fully human”. The load-bearing one says something about you and how you value things, where the non-load bearing one feels more arbitrary.
People “without load bearing personalities” really do have personalities, but that personally might be “I enjoy working with Hoffdorf spaces, and nothing else has been quite as fun so I’m still interested in them”. That personality rests on how fun something is, so it’ll change if something more fun comes along. The “human emotions” thing is grounded in being fully human, so it won’t change next time something fun comes along. That person would (hypothetically) only switch to something else equally good at expressing human emotions.
Meanwhile I'm trying to figure out if this was just meant to be a plausible-sounding made-up example (probably!) or a sideways wink at Hausdorff spaces...
The description of sports as a thousand episodes of a series with the same plot is highly illustrative. I appreciate sports (even moreso chess, go and modern board games) as a realm in which true drama emerges in a relatively natural proportion, as opposed to letting screenwriters artfully pull my marionette strings. The older I get, the more I tire of long serial fiction.
How can someone possibly like literature, when everything that happens is entirely predetermined by some dude or gal that arbitrarily chose the sequence of events and what everyone would do, say, and even think? In sports, the protagonists are making decisions for themselves while exhibiting high levels of skill, and they're even real people! And the more you're into the sport, the more you understand the challenges they face and the choices they make.
> How can someone possibly like literature, when everything that happens is entirely predetermined by some dude or gal that arbitrarily chose the sequence of events and what everyone would do, say, and even think?
I think this is what Eliezer Yudkowsky was trying to say with his rant against arguing from fictional evidence.
And it is a real problem. Something that bothered me in reading The Wheel of Time was the discussion of military tactics. I can't tell whether what the books say is legitimate or total gibberish. And I could never escape the sneaking suspicion that the author might not know either. (I genuinely have no opinion; it's just a question that bothered me that I couldn't resolve.) This has pushed me a little moreover the years towards reading nonfiction.
But I think the rant against arguing from fictional evidence was a mistake, and I also think that the fact that fictional scenarios are contrived by the author doesn't make them useless for learning about analogous scenarios. The author can tell you that something happened and what everyone thought about it. But the author can't make you believe that everyone's reported thoughts are plausible real-world reactions to the same set of events.
In Morgan Llywelyn's historical novel Finn Mac Cool, there is a scene with the following setup:
Finn has grown up in slavery. He belongs to a caste of enslaved military lowlifes. He has become their leader through a combination of the force of his personality and the strength of his arms, and he is working on reforming their (terrible) behavior and reputation.
Cruina is the respectable daughter of a blacksmith. She is not noble, but she is several social classes above Finn.
Finn falls in love with Cruina from afar and attempts a personal study of the laws that would be relevant to marrying her. He also attempts to develop a relationship with her, but things don't go very well.
As a last resort, he comes to her home and delivers a marriage proposal. In this scene, several things are clear:
1. Finn wants to marry Cruina.
2. Cruina wants to marry Finn.
3. Cruina's mother approves of the marriage.
4. Despite the fact that all of them want the same thing, and Finn has openly stated his goal, none of them know how to work with the others to actually arrive at the goal. They do not share a set of social mores and don't know how to react to each other. Finn is awkward with women. Cruina says something snotty to Finn, he balls his fists in distress, and the mother takes this as a sign of anger, panics, and runs out of the room. Cruina turns Finn down and he slinks away never to "bother" her again. Meanwhile, as Finn's star rises higher and higher elsewhere, Cruina turns down several other marriage proposals in the hopes that Finn will come back and try again, publicly letting everyone know that she considers herself engaged to Finn Mac Cool.
So here we have a scene set in a historical-fiction version of a mythological world, with one mythical figure and some characters invented for the novel. None of this features in the real-world mythology on which the novel is based. All of the situations and dialogue and behaviors are the author's invention, though the structure of medieval Irish society is painstakingly researched.
The question is: is this a particularly well-cast example of a kind of thing that happens _all the time_, something people can recognize as plausible human behavior, sympathize with, and perhaps derive useful lessons from, even though none of the events described ever technically happened?
Or is it just so many words that sounded good, a trap to mislead hapless readers into thinking the world works in ways very different than it actually does?
Novels and other fictional evidence definitely exist in both of those categories. But making an argument based on fictional evidence is just saying that you think your fictional evidence belongs to the first of them. It's not a sign that you've lost track of the difference between fiction and reality.
There was a whole lot to read, and not much time to read it. But here is my skimming input.
Nerds meaning has changed over the past few decades. At one time it used to be pretty much synonymous with geek, but over the last few decades it’s become more synonymous with being passionately obsessed over some hobby or subject. And disagreeing with the author... it doesn’t have to be bad.
Now days you can be a car Nerd... though to truly be a nerd you should be very specific... such as being passionate about 1970s mustangs. It also helps if you are passionate about something rather obscure. For instance I am a scooter nerd (Vespas and Lambretta’s) but more specifically I know way to much about German built Vespas from 1955 to 1962.
Obviously there are also nerds into bad stuff, such as Marvel Comics or microbrews (it it was good it would be a major brew), but it’s not a prerequisite.
Also, on behalf of us blue collar workers from flyover country, thank you for shaming Hipsters out of existence... we can finally have out clothing and our beards to ourselves unironically.
I agree that this is the traditional answer, and will note that in traditional communities, it works really well. Drop me into the section of the Plain world I grew up in (which is probably 20,000 people spread over a couple hundred communities), and I will almost certainly find someone to whom I have a "know the same person" connection.
This also works to some extent in smaller professions: I'm an actuary, and if I meet another actuary in my general area of practice, the odds we have worked with some of the same people are incredibly high.
It seems like an important data point that after reading this (very interesting) post, all I can think about is the commenter who claimed that the MCU was one of humanity’s greatest artistic achievements…I feel a tremendous need to explain to them how wrong they are.
That's fascinating. When I saw that, I felt a tremendous need to ask for elaboration. Usually I try to steelman takes I don't understand, but I don't even know what angle to take for that one, it extends beyond the bounds of my imagination. Worst case scenario, they're wrong in a boring way. But maybe you get to experience a novel insight or perspective! Do you not enjoy those? I really enjoy those. It's why I read this blog after all.
Let me try to steelman this take. I'll preface it by noting that my initial take on the MCU was extreme boredom and being somewhat upset that Hollywood kept churning these movies out when they had the chance to make something truly memorable. While I still think there's an argument that Hollywood is less interested in making great movies than in getting a reliable ROI, my take on MCU has shifted.
First, let's get it out of the way that the first MCU film was actually really good cinema. Iron Man was a good movie. Before it came along, the anti-hero was not mainstream (Despicable Me and Megamind were still two years away). In a deeper sense, the idea that the audience could LIKE a protagonist who is an anti-hero - could even cheer for them and want to dress up as them for Halloween - was a foreign concept. Beyond that, if you study storytelling a bit, you can start to accept that Iron Man does a really good job of getting a lot of major storytelling elements right in a satisfying way.
Okay, what about the rest of the MCU? I don't think they're coasting on a quarter century of nostalgia from one good movie. Admittedly, not all the movies are great, but some are still fun to watch. Iron Man making up a new element is clearly dumb, and sometimes the power levels are opaque. But the idea that you could weave elements of one film into another film, while not exactly new, was a bold move. They even added those scenes after the credits to telegraph to the audience that, yes, they were doing this on purpose and would continue to do so in a planned way. Hollywood is fickle and superhero reboots change as often as the casting director changes his underwear, but Marvel decided early on they would be consistent. It was a huge gamble - tying the fortunes of movies in development on other movies that hadn't been released yet - and it made the whole thing pay off. The first Avengers movie was a culmination of this weaving together in a completely new way. Before Avengers, nobody had done anything like this before. Sure, it made a mountain of cash for the creators, but they did something new and bold, took huge storytelling risks, and it paid handsomely.
This is better understood by going back and rewatching the MCU movies in order. My kids are old enough that I figured I had to introduce them to some of this stuff. Not only did they love the movies (they're kids, of course they would - also we mostly skipped the dumb ones that didn't matter), they loved the way the movies came together in culminating arcs across multiple movies. And I admit those arcs are satisfying in a way I didn't quite catch the first time through when I didn't reliably go see every MCU blockbuster the year it came out. (Sometimes I caught them out of order on the tiny screen on the plane, if at all.)
Okay, but other than Iron Man and the 'works as a whole' thing, what about the movies themselves? No series is perfect. Some of the Thor movies were pretty dumb. Some movies tried too hard, because they had a lot to live up to. Many of the movies were just replays of a chase the McGuffin trope, and so were mildly entertaining but otherwise forgettable. But some were truly good.
I struggled to like Infinity War and Endgame the first time through. I still think Thanos is dumb, because as a biologist I think it's stupid to curtail species growth by halving the population - at best that sets everything back one generation. And although Infinity War didn't introduce the idea of a movie that ends in a cliffhanger (because the heroes lose), the MCU had spent the past two decades establishing a nice clean romp where nobody dies and everyone comes back fine in the sequel. Sure, War Machine fell from the sky, but he still didn't die. Yet Infinity War turned all that around and got rid of lots of characters. This set up Endgame, where they killed off other characters who'd been huge money makers for the franchise.
Endgame was written as a 'heist' movie in reverse. Instead of them trying to get the McGuffins OUT of a place, they're trying to get them INTO the 'present day'. It's a time heist, yes, but it only works when all the McGuffins get to the special glove thingy - ergo the 'reverse heist' idea. If you're into storytelling tropes, this is an interesting concept that was at least well executed. It includes the time elements (with lots of handwaving) so of course it has inconsistencies, but so do all time travel stories.
I won't defend anything past Endgame, because I don't think I'm competent to do so, but having given the MCU movies a second chance recently I've revisited my initial snobbery of them and judged it to be at least somewhat misplaced.
I think it's fair to point out flaws in art "they could have done that better", but mainstream art seems to have less of a margin of error before it's judged drivel. If some arthouse film goes too slow so they can pad the runtime, or has bad graphics, or you can tell the props are cheap Chinese knockoffs, they get a pass because "they weren't multimillion-dollar Hollywood films". Except that if they WERE those Hollywood films, attention to all those details wouldn't garner praise despite the fact that those things are tough to do well.
MCU wasn't perfect, sure, but it was a mostly consistent quality endeavor. That's hard to pull off. DC saw all that cash after Avengers and got a lot of investors to throw money their way to try and replicate it. They couldn't. Because, yes, MCU is an unrivaled accomplishment. Compare it to the Shazzam! series as the closest also-ran for reference. This isn't like boy bands in the 90's. It's not as easy as it looks. That it looks easy is evidence it's done well.
Compare/contrast with The Martian? I feel like they hit different aspects of the engineer brain. One is watching progress on impossible tech come to life. The other is working through subtle complications to realistic problems on another planet.
Here’s my attempt to steal man this as an MCU fan.
To me, to understand what makes the MCU great, you should start with “The Avengers” movie.
It manages to be (a) non boring (b) fun (c) engaging, and (d) cool.
These are all distinct things:
By (a) non boring I mean that while watching it you spend very little time being bored. This is true for a few reasons. The biggest advantage MCU films have here is that since they are interconnected with each other, you don’t need to spend a lot of time watching to get to know the characters and start caring about them. You already know them right away so you’re not board. The worst MCU film, “Eternals” tried to introduce too many characters at once and thus was very boring. The other thing that makes MCU films “not boring” is the quips and comedy. People don’t like this sometimes because it makes it feel like the films aren’t taking themselves seriously if it happens too much. But they do give you something to pay attention to, to make you not board. Especially during otherwise boring fight scenes. Obviously a better way to make fight scenes interesting is to just have better fight choreography, less CGI, more like a Jackie Chan film. So that’s a sacrifice the MCU makes in favor of producing more films.
(b) fun
What makes MCU films in general and The Avengers in particular, fun, is the characters and their interactions. This is also helped by interconnecting the movies. Going into The Avengers we already know who Captain America, Iron man, Thor, Natasha, Bruce and Loki are.
The dialogue and arguments between Cap and Iornman is great because we know enough about their personalities from other films to understand why they are saying what they are saying. Natasha tricking Loki is great because we are already familiar with Natasha tricking people (ala tricking Tony in Iron man 2 and in the opening scene of the avengers). For people who like interesting characters interacting, MCU films manage to fit more of that in than most other films because of their interconnectedness
(c) Engaging.
What makes MCU films engaging is that they usually manage to be about more than just “the fight”. And often have many threads of plot to follow.
The avengers is about SHIELD’s secret plans to turn the tesseract into a weapon as well as the distinction between conquering and ruling
Civil War is about the conflict between responsibility to do what you believe VS the imperative to submit to society's rules
Again, this multiple layering of plots is more possible in an interconnected universe since movies can touch on plots without resolving them entirely.
(d) Cool
There's just something really awesome and cool about watching captain america or Natasha single handedly take a bunch of adversaries at once or Thor taking down an army by summoning lightning, or iron man standing up to congress and just not caring what they say like a character from Atlas Shrugged.
The thing is, when you try to pull off so much at once sometimes it doesn’t work. Which is why MCU movies sometimes are great and sometimes suck. But even when they suck, they usually are still enjoyable and when they are great they are extremely enjoyable. Even if they will never be as well crafted and artistically meaningful as something like The Dark Night which doesn’t have the same constraints.
I agree with all of this, but trying to explain the greatness of the MCU on the basis of The Avengers, with reference to the four preceding character movies, is playing on easy mode. "One of Humanity's greatest artistic achievements" is a bit over the top, but there's ten hours of filmmaking there that's hard to beat as a whole.
Then there's everything that has been done in the MCU since, which seems to have been mostly about forgetting what made it great in the first place. More characters, meaning less focus on each and interactions reduced to witty banter. What was once fun and engaging has become boring through repetition, and there is increasingly more focus on the fights than on the reasons for the fights.
"Cool" is ineffable, but I think we're now in a place because things are cool because they're part of the MCU, which means they can't bear the strain of being the reason the MCU is cool.
I think in general the run from Avenger (original) to Endgame was pretty consistently good. Since Endgame there have been 3 major issues in my opinion:
1. The loss of the original cast and a struggle to find new lead characters (I think this is what you are talking about with too many characters and not enough focus)
2. Too wide a scope of topics (combining "grounded" characters like Falcon/Winter Soldier and God like characters) making it hard to know what to care about. At this point it's not really even clear what makes something an MCU movie/show.
As a piece of evidence that there is something kinda interesting/identifiable going on with being a nerd consider the phenomenon of the nerd 'accent.'. Like the gay accent it's far from universal amoung nerds but it's common enough you know it when you hear it.
And, unlike most popular explanations for the gay accent, you can't explain this as an affectation or learned via imitation. When I went to Caltech as a freshman there were tons of people who came in with that 'accent' despite (or more likely because) having been pretty socially isolated and, at that time, lacking any media figures to pattern their speech on.
My hypothesis is that it's largely a result of a certain kind of emotional detachment (eg because your shy/fear being hurt) where you use mastery of facts as a way to converse without having to risk too much emotionally. You then get a kind of lecturing quality but with a sort of hesitance and lack of full throated emotion that ends up kinda nasal. That plus, perhaps, less attention to the social details like the sound of your voice or looks that might prompt another person to alter speech patterns. But that's just a guess.
But my point is that I think there is a psychological natural kind there that isn't just about showing depth of interest.
Never seen the movie and I knew plenty of people with it who have never even heard of it nor with a group for social contangion to happen with. I suspect you are thinking of something far more extreme than what I have in mind.
The nasality and hesitancy/stuttering is there, and it seems clear that this was the accent the Simpson's copied for Professor Frink (albeit in an even more exaggerated form)
I think it may be about a lack of self-confidence. Something to do with breathing shallowly, being hunched over, stretching your lips out as if searching for approval, leads to a certain type of high-pitched nasally voice.
What's the opposite of this? Relax your shoulders, breathe from your diaphragm, and speak with calm authority and you get that one calm deep voice all over the world that utters the words "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking..."
When I first read that (early 1980s) I laughed out loud, because it was 100% true that most airline pilots affected that West Virginia drawl, and it was immediately clear why. But my experience is that this faded long ago, and I can't remember the last time I heard that "pilot voice" from a commercial pilot.
I have been trying really hard not to bring this up; I want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that they really are just trying to talk about a personality type. But in this case, what you're pointing to and attempting to psychoanalyze as an identifying feature of "nerds" is actually a well-known and empirically-validated feature of autism spectrum disorders:
Well I didn't know that. As someone who has always had that quality to my speech (and not particularly liked it) that's an interesting thing to learn.
Though I don't think there is anything contradictory in saying that it's a feature of people with a certain kind of nueroatypicality and that it goes along with a personality type. After all there are lots of shared personality features of people with ASDs.
Anyway, my point was that the very fact this is part of the nerd stereotype shows that it was always picking out something deeper than just proving membership in a social group via depth of knowledge.
Fair enough. My point is just that it's really annoying when people speculate baselessly about environmental/social/psychological causes. (This kind of speculation has caused a lot of harm to both autistic and LGBT kids.)
And yes, the whole discussion is getting at something deeper. The modern "nerd" stereotype *is*, fundamentally, the outwardly-visible characteristics of adults and teens with ASD: social awkwardness, atypical prosody, intense special interests, poor physical coordination, even subtle things like an association with allergies, asthma, eczema, and digestive issues. I don't think anyone's studied this, but I would bet actual money that if you asked people to pick out "nerds" in neutral AI-generated photos, they would identify the distinctive facial features of ASD.
Also, I'd like to push back on this idea that looking for social reasons people like things somehow isn't taking the idea of liking them seriously.
It's no different than trying to understand the sociology of religion. You don't need to doubt the sincerity or depth of people's religious convictions to notice that the best predictor of what religious beliefs you hold isn't their abstract philosophical plausibility, evidence or usefulness. It's often social factors like what church you grow up in or what beliefs your peer group has that determine what you believe.
The same thing is going on with being into various fandoms. It's not an accident that the people who tend to be into popular stuff tend to be into the same stuff as their peers. Many (most?) people enjoy content more when they can talk about it with peers. OTOH some people seem to be just the opposite and like content less if others in their social circle like it.
There isn't any reason to doubt people like the stuff they like but it's clear that what people like is influenced by social factors and it's interesting to understand how.
I think most things people think of as 'quality' in the status sense meet, or appear to meet, the following criteria:
1) Specialised production (expertise is needed to produce the good; most people couldn't do it and you can't just throw money at it)
2) Specialised consumption (Expertise is needed to consume and enjoy consuming the good to its maximum potential.)
3) A group of high status people already like it (otherwise the thing is weird rather than high quality). I see this as random nucleation rather than something that says much about the thing itself (beyond it being likeable in principle)
Obviously this has a lot to do with affordability, because in a capitalist economy that kind of thing is usually expensive – but cost alone isn't sufficient to count as specialised production/consumption: it's not quality because it's expensive (dear me no), it's quality because it's _aged in hand carved barrels in a single remote village in the Highlands by Jack, our master distiller).
Most attacks and defenses on quality tend to revolve around whether (1) and (2) are truly met. "Sure Marvel is _visually impressive_, but that's just because big studios threw money at it, and I'd rather watch something a bit more refined than 90 minutes or explosions anyway".
Similarly people that are sports _snobs_ are pretty dismissive of rich billionaires buying up players to form teams, and care much more about the performance of specific players, coaching and strategy, etc – things that are perceived as requiring talent to execute and to appreciate.
I did not see this anywhere so thought to share- my parents, who both were teenagers in the 1950's, told me that nerd was actually Drunk spelled backwards, as in a teen boy who doesn't drink and therefore is not in the in-crowd (Ritchie or Potsie on Happy Days, I guess). Square would be another one, but not as mainstream now. Unfortunately my father passed but I think he was the one who told me that. I was never called a nerd to my face as a kid in the 1970's although all the stuff applied to me (except not drinking...). I think when Bill Gates got rich, the tables turned.
FWIW, this is mentioned as an RPI oral tradition in Wikipedia's discussion of the word nerd's origin. The same source credits Dr. Seuss for the word's first appearance in print, but that's apparently because if you make up enough funny-sounding letter combinations, you'll get lucky sometimes.
"A lot of people’s default personality, if they just do exactly what comes naturally and don’t put any effort into self-presentation or cultivation, is to browse Reddit and play video games. Most people realize this on some level and try to cultivate some personality beyond this, but I think that makes it extra unfair to say “Just use your natural true self!” The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
This struck me as odd. Does this seem true to anyone? I know maybe one or two people who fit this description; everyone else I know likes specific things with a weird, obsessive level of interest, and I'm pretty convinced they would continue to do so if the thing was unpopular. But I could also self select for people like that, so I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts.
100% true for me. Im passionate about things but I consciously have to decide to do something productive multiple times a day or I will do nothing except work, sleep, play video games, and masturbate. Its a serious effort for me to remain engaged in anything, no matter how interesting it is.
Definitely strikes me as strange, maybe coming from a place of curious detachment. I get restless when things get easy and comfortable, and feel increasing pressure to Do Something New. Learn some biochemistry or Magyar, try to ski some moguls or juggle 3 oranges, whatever other people can do that I can't, or go someplace new and talk to people I've never met before. Holing up with just me and the computer screen, trundling down the same ruts, feels like some kind of living mummification, even thinking about it gives me the willies.
And yet you clearly spend enormous amounts of time on this blog, and its predecessor, and have chosen to be way more engaged with a much wider public than most people. My impression is that the fact that it pays is not at all why you do it, too.
A few of your posts do read like they are coming from some feeling of obligation, I promised to do this and so now I must. But most of the time they read like you really want to get something or other said. I can't tell how much it matters to you that other people fully grok what you're saying, and it doesn't seem to matter all that much if they agree or find it pleasing. It seems more like it just matters to you that some particular concept, thought, observation, or idea gets set down in a clear and rational and complete way.
It reminds me of Tom Robbins's definition of being an artist in "Skinny Legs And All" where the nascent artist says something like "art happens when you have something inside you that you really want to get outside you, so you can look at it." That is, my impression is that you write for similar reasons as an artist paints, or musician composes, to have the work of art actually exist rather than remain a vague potential inside your mind.
Interesting responses. I relate most to Carl--if I stop doing things I'm passionate about, it feels like a sort of pressure is building up inside me until it just overrides everything else--sort of like if you are fasting, eventually eating will become your top priority.
I talked to a few friends, and people generally fell into one of two categories: "Prefer to sit around play video games and just be happy", and "my brain is trapped by a specific special interest that oftentimes no one cares about and I can just mine for infinite joy". It's an interesting division. Two of my friends are writers. If you threw them onto desert islands, I'm convinced one would stop writing. The other I'm pretty sure would be carving novels into the bark of trees, because they just feel like they have to do that. Maybe at some point a reward (social status, candy, satisfaction) was given for successfully completing one of these tasks, and that reward has sort of backpropogated into not only the task, but even just thinking about doing the task or things adjacent to it. Or maybe people's brains just end up in specific shapes where certain sorts of tasks are just inordinately appealing, and for some people those are video game and for some people that's installing doom on AO3.
Anyway I think I socially select for people who tend towards "I will carve this novel into a tree just to get it out of my head", so I found Scott's statements surprising.
> "A lot of people’s default personality, if they just do exactly what comes naturally and don’t put any effort into self-presentation or cultivation, is to browse Reddit and play video games.
Sounds about right. As I understand it, If you're depressed, you have no energy or will to do any of the things that would usually be an expression of your personality. But non-depressed people will usually find something to engage with more deeply, even if that's just one youtube channel or one subreddit, and explore that interest from there.
But putting no effort into cultivation also implies making no attempt to think about what you like and why, so from a position of ignorance, the activity you'll most likely spend your free time on is the first thing that captures your attention, which today is one of like five online content feeds. Thus, the 'default personality'.
This seems like an unusually dreary existence, to be sure, and I assume that most people don't actually have such a complete lack of self-awareness when it comes to what they value in their lives. But judging by how many social media influencers and game studios can keep themselves afloat by publishing nothing but utter dreck, I can't help but think that the 'default personality' people are a substantial part of the population.
In "What universal human experiences are you missing?" (I think) Scott mentioned someone who, up until recently, did not have any idea what sort of foods he liked and just ate whatever. If someone can be ignorant of their preferences on something as basic and universal as food, I have absolutely no doubt that people can be equally ignorant of what they enjoy and value in other aspects of life.
There's still something there regardless: people will gravitate to the kind of online content they like just out of a Pavlovian response, without ever needing to realize what it is they actually like. But to the outside world, someone whose obsessive level of interest centers on one youtube channel is indistinguishable from someone who just watches whatever the youtube algorithm throws at them.
I think "browse Reddit and play video games" sounds boring the way it's written, but isn't necessarily. What are you browsing on Reddit? I've read so many fascinating things on Reddit, and I haven't even read it that much. What videogames are you playing? What incredible triumphs have you had? What are some of the coolest examples of emergent gameplay that you've seen?
Someone who is at all observant and thoughtful could make browsing Reddit and playing videogames all day sound entrancing. My friends and I have spent hours on end entertaining each other with stories about our experiences playing videogames, or about fascinating things that we've read on the Internet.
This post and the previous one reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about regarding the word “basic”.
These days, I don’t hear it used much — I think I’m actually more likely to hear someone criticizing the concept than actually using it. “The term ‘basic’ is misogynistic! It’s just a way of shaming women for liking feminine things!”
And in the context of “basic b$&*%” or “basic white b%*$&@“ (not sure what the Substack moderation filter is like): yeah, maybe. But I’ve long thought that it should be expanded. That men liking football or Breaking Bad is just as basic as women liking pumpkin spice lattes.
When someone just likes all the TV, movies, music, hobbies, etc. that are most popular in their subculture, which is more likely: that they have tried lots of things and just so happened to only like the ones that are the most socially acceptable to the people around them, or that they just didn’t bother to try anything else and/or dismissed the more unusual stuff out of hand? “Low openness to experience” is one way of putting it, but colloquially, why not say “basic”?
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
I'm a little confused by this "hoax" - the example poem on Wikipedia seems perfectly competent. Like, I don't get very excited about most poems, but there's nothing making me say "ugh, this guy just doesn't understand poetry" or "this poem sounds profound but it's not saying anything." It's free verse, but it's clearly divided up with intention. It has weird imagery, but coherent ones. If you asked me what the poem was about, I would have an answer and a justification. "Great poetry" is subjective, but at the very least, it's not a *bad* poem.
Sure, the authors of the hoax *say* that they just slapped these poems together with no thought or effort, but effort does not correlate with success! I'm a software developer and I often feel that most my code could be slapped together by a monkey with access to Stack Overflow, but apparently that not-very-difficulty-feeling work is worth six figures to the right people.
The wiki article goes on to note that some people liked the poem even knowing that Ern Malley didn't exist!
Another hoaxer who actually produced a lot of good poetry: Thomas Chatterton. He even had a fan base of "real" poets (who knew the deception—by this point, Chatterton had long since been found out and committed suicide), despite everything he wrote being complete fraud. Wordsworth and Shelley (in verse) mourned his death. Keats dedicated Endymion to Chatterton.
My favorite was the Dutch dude who faked Vermeers during WWII, got them verified by academic experts and sold his fake but verified Old Masters to Nazi bigwigs for some fat stacks.
After the war, the artiste was arrested and threatened with the death penalty for selling the Dutch cultural heritage to the occupiers, and it took some work for him to convince the court that the paintings were fake, because he made them himself. This was also highly embarrassing to the supposed experts who had vouched for the Lost Vermeers.
So, if the paintings were a testament to the human spirit before, was that only when they were Bonafide Vermeers and not the work of some ripoff artist who liked to live the high life? Why aren't they hanging in museums now?
This feels like that thing where some people who want to write “the smart character” into a fantasy story will depict the character giving modern opinions about the old state of the world. Being smart enough to arrive at those opinions independently would mean the character was smart. If an author writing in historical times had written a character with those viewpoints, that character probably would be really intelligent. But if someone writes a character with those opinions today, it doesn’t mean that author is necessarily good at predicting what a smart person would say - the author might just be putting what they learned from their parents into he character’s mouth.
So the character might not actually be all that smart in other ways, even though the story contains sections which would mean the character was smart, if the story had been written a long time ago.
It’s hard to say whether a character is actually smart, and is making a decision because the author is smarter than you, or is actually not all that smart, and is making a mistake you would avoid. Humility means it’s really hard to answer that question for someone roughly the same level as yourself. So instead, you have to look for evidence, and that can be faked.
A personal gripe of mine is when authors, screenwriters, etc. insert speeches in the mouths of historical characters that could have come straight from a 21st century progressive.
To be fair, I don't think the authors' goal was to claim "this is obviously an unlikable poem." It was to point out that you can slap any old shit together and people in the modern art community will praise it as brilliant if you prime them right.
A noticeable amount of good creative work is produced when the creator is confident it wont be taken seriously. In other words they have no fear that their status as a serious creative person will be tied to the obviously "joke" works. The metal music soundtrack to the cartoon Metalocalypse comes to mind. The show's creator is a music school grad with a "serious" portfolio; a cartoon metal band is obviously a non serious thing. Its probably the best music he's ever made.
This is referenced in the wiki article for Malley as well: "that in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody". In my opinion its the removal of the Self from the creative process, which tends to only hinder and bind.
"I think the traditional answer is that you should build your identity around social relationships (I’m the son of X, husband of Y, friend of Z), career, and maybe a few hobbies."
No, the traditional answer (i.e for most of human history) was that identity was built from family, place (neighborhood/region), language, food, religion, music, custom. Identity was first socially mediated.
Individuality is a separate particular function of identity: a matrix of what/who do I like, one's virtue (a good child, sibling, friend, neighbor, spouse, parent), one's skills (techne), occupation, and one's calling (I am reminded of Arendt treatment of arbeit and beruf).
The universal questions: Who am I and to whom do I belong?
Alienation is not knowing how to the answer these persistent 2 related questions.
Fetishized life collapses identity into individuality and the preference of the individual connected with commodities (to be bought and horded) and increasingly as Debord noted with the commodification of our time in furtherance of fetishized consumption and consumerism.
The fetishized individual then seeks to answer the "to whom do I belong" question by seeking similarly fetishized individuals. Granfallooning. (See also slapstick: Lonesome no more)
The old way of socially created identity first and individuality second was not without its problems. Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan. The levi and the priest with clear social identities walk on by because their "identity" is too narrow to see the neighbor.
But the new way of individuality first can never really work, because it is temporary solution in which the social aspect is just an add on. It is not an organic process that recognizes the essential and proper social first development of identity.
The traditional way is not very helpful to unbridled capitalism and consumerism. Novelty seeking (new products to buy consume and horde) is essential to the individuality first fetishized person aided by affluence -(maybe we should investigate the unintended consequences of child allowances which facilitate the process of fetishized consumerism over social integration).
Third generation what? Maybe start with food and language and place and the religious traditions of your grandparents. (Or your spouse's familial traditions.)
Do you have enough roots to answer the questions: who am I and to whom do I belong.
Being cosmopolitan doesn't mean rootless. It means you are comfortable being a multi-cultural pluralist. Having wings is not the opposite of having roots it's the complement. Identity is not static but it's not just a creation of self directed hobbies or obessions.
”But the new way of individuality first can never really work, because it is temporary solution in which the social aspect is just an add on. It is not an organic process that recognizes the essential and proper social first development of identity.”
Is there an argument here? '... the essential and proper social first development of identity' sounds to me like a long way round to saying 'how I think people should be'. I don't see why this or that form of relationship between the community and the individual that worked for one group of people in one place for one period of time should have any bearing except as a generalized data point. Human society has been in flux since day one and I doubt there is any natural way of doing things, or that if there were it would be best simply for being natural.
I think we are social creatures, even while autonomy is necessary feature.
There is an ongoing post-industrial problem of alienation. It's not just a problem of being alienated from our labor. (Marx in his muddle and economic reductionist way got this wrong.) We are suffering an alienation from ourselves and our social nature.
Hobbies, buying and collecting stuff (consumerism), fetishes of time and interests - are not real nor satisfying "identities" because they are not organically created from family, place, food, culture. They are manufactured granfalloons when we really need some kind of karrasses. A person can't socialize or domesticate one's self.
Some granfalloons are benign so long as we understand that they are granfalloons (being a Cubs fan, cheering for Notre Dame, being a Hoosier or from Baltimore or whereever, being a jazz musician, etc) but some granfalloons are not (e.g. joining gangs, putting on a MAGA hat, etc. to try to cure loneliness and alienation).
To say there is "no natural way" of doing things is ridiculous. We are basically genetically the same for at least 100,000 years - social beings with semiotic capacities and a childhood that requires nurturing. There is no need for language, math, logic, music, art (symbolic activities) without a tether to some social construct, even while we are also autonomous creatures.
You are not sua sponte, even if you are uniquely you.
Vonnegut probably had a good insight: you're identity must also allow for someone to tell you "to go take a flying f at the mooooon."
Real, as opposed to self-directed and manuafactured, identity is a cure for loneliness and narcissism.
Fair enough - 'no natural way' is certainly an exaggeration; we can not suddenly elect a preference for oxygen-free environments, and I grant there there are also (weaker) social requirements without which we can not do (at present, and subject to changes which are probably as unimaginable in advance as our ways of living now would be to our distant ancestors). But it is an exaggeration in response to what I also see as an exaggerated and unfounded distinction between authentic (natural) and manufactured ways of socially being. I don't think it adds value to any one form of identity construction to call it organic, any more than it makes this or that food or hand lotion healthy and natural to slap an organic label on it...
I'm using "manufactured" in juxtaposition with the "new things" created by industrialization and consumerism and the commodification of life.
I'm using organic in a way to invoke the biology and essence (which in addition to the noetic (biology) includes the poetic and pneumatic nature) of our being.
Sure - I think I got the associations you're making. I just doubt they point to anything - I am skeptical of essentialist arguments in general, which seem to me born of the same marketing impulse to slap a 100% natural & organic label on something as though that in itself were enough to distinguish hemlock from parsley.
>There is an ongoing post-industrial problem of alienation. It's not just a problem of being alienated from our labor. (Marx in his muddle and economic reductionist way got this wrong.) We are suffering an alienation from ourselves and our social nature.
Look. I realize what you're doing. You want to employ a useful concept, you realize the concept's origins are haram in the predominant ideology of this space, so you preemptively diss said origins to signal your allegiance to said ideology and prevent summary dismissal of your arguments on that basis alone.
But you're talking about a guy who laid foundations for modern SOCIOlogy and rallied against economic reductionism all his life, as did other SOCIALists before and after him. I'll mostly skip the part about how easy it is to check what the concept's scope was, because then it'd sound like I'm nitpicking, and that's not the point, the point is, this is epistemically harmful.
And look, I understand the point of doing as Romans do while in Rome, I try to use the local conceptual apparatus as much as possible. But when something is only expressible in the language of its ideological adversaries, I'd prefer there to be norms that let me use the latter and not be bashful about it. If somebody's repulsed - their problem, I can only worry about them up to a point, and that point lies somewhere before pretending things are the exact opposite of what they actually are. Because that, again, would be epistemically harmful, to an extreme degree.
Who are you saying rallied against economic reductionism and laid foundation for modern sociology? If you are saying Marx, (which is the only named person in the quotation): you don't know what you are talking about.
And, honestly, I wrote the preceding reply because I tried to avoid being the person who just goes "you don't know what you are talking about", but, well.
Again, this is easy to check, if your goal is being correct rather than status-signaling. That "we are suffering an alienation from ourselves and our social nature" is fundamental to Marx's point. And consider his perhaps most to-the-point description of alienation, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" - the whole thing is essentially one long rant against classical economists seeing men only as economic inputs, followed by a similarly long call to restore their (men's) humanity by making them social beings doing social activity. It couldn't be any more clear cut on that front.
I mean, it's possible to disagree with any of the man's reasoning slash arguments slash conclusions and, you know, not fundamentally misrepresent what they are.
Marx thought alienation was the separation of the worker from his product.
But alienation is more than this. His meaning of "social nature" excluded culture. Consider his derision of so-called lumpen.
He was against the reduction of man to an "economic input". But his key point was the objection to being reduced to an "input". He was an economic determinist!
His materialism and scientism prevented him from seeing that our "social" experience is not just material, it is also poetic and pneumatic. Marx was an ideologue not a philosopher nor social scientist. See Voegelin.
Marx as foundation of modern sociology? What? (Are people still making this claim?) How does he consider how family, language, food, custom, place and religion are important necessary aspects of social life.
Gramsci was the first to try to reform the blatant deficiencies of Marx's economic determinism.
What Marx also had wrong was that the fundamental unit of economics is not the individual, it is the family. See for example, Msgr. Ryan's work.
I think Your experiment in part 1 is actually useful for explaining why a lot of Marvel Fans think that the MCU has gotten a lot worse. I would argue that the first Ant man movie would pass the first experiment. At its core, it's a story about a poor but intelligent man who stole from the rich to feed his family, and ended up imprisoned. His wife moved on and married one of the sheriff's that arrested him. A wise Sage enlists him to steal a magical artifact that the sage created, but is now possessed by an evil wizard who was once his partner. The Hero uses the Sages magic and defeats the evil wizard, bringing him to justice, and rekindling his relationship with his estranged daughter.
The most recent Ant-Man is in category 4. Trying to translate it into a medieval story would result in gibberish, and not have anything relatable to the human condition. I think that's one of the main reasons many fans feel that the MCU has gotten worse
One thing I didn't see mentioned. While "the death of hipsters" might have come to pass, but I think that "death of nerds", or, rather, "death of recommendation algorithms" sounds contrary to everything I see. Algorithms that recommend the same thing to everyone are BAD algorithms. They're bad AI. And what we have right now is the growth in AI. Therefore, I believe that instead of removing algorithms from the loop, we will get better and more personalized algorithms.
I, for one, feel very much in need of one, because I often want to request for example "a song with vocals close to that other song", but it's impossible right now. Algorithms still mostly work in a "if you like blues-rock I'll give you more of blues-rock" - which is still a huge improvement from previous "if you like that one song by a 70's rock band I'll give you other songs by 70's rock bands that sound nothing like it and are actually in a completely different style of rock". If you compare 00's Last.fm recommendations with Spotify's algorithm, it's noticeable.
And modern algorithms can even recommend more obscure bands and tracks - I was pleasantly surprised recently hearing a nice track from a German singer-songwriter that I had never heard about before (admittedly, he's well-known - in Germany, but not in the rest of the world, and I don't live in Germany and only listen to a few German bands that have nothing in common with his music).
Modern algorithms, though, still mostly rely on people, and give you songs that other people who have similar tastes to you listen to - they make no judgement themselves. But with advances in AI, I wonder if it will be soon(-ish) possible for an algorithm to "listen" to the song, and get a feeling for its components, and recommend things to me that sounds like things I love, picking up every little detail from my previous listens (or give me something unexpected, if I ask it to). If so, there will be no death of algorithms, and no death of nerds.
Also, would you care to share the German singer-songwriter you found? I've been trying to get Spotify to recommend more German music to me but all it gives me is Rammstein (and their only song I love is "Rauchen Toetet." Admittedly, I do listen to a lot of death metal.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krr2nWif65Q - Hubert Kah, another super-kitchy video. I actually like cover of this song by Boppin' B more, but the original is worth watching at least for laughs
I found asking Bard/Chat GPT for bands like a band you like works pretty well and is a much better experience than using Pandora 10 years ago (the last time I used Pandora). Especially because you can be specific on the attributes you like.
Hm, it would be interesting to try, but I have no access to either. Maybe someday. Then again, I feel like it still would work on a superficial level - a LLM cannot understand music, it only understand textual description of music from reviews and other sources. Ideally, I'd like to have a model pre-trained on all available music in the world and then fine-tuned to my own tastes, a model that *gets* me, if you like :)
Ah, Star Wars CCG... I got a starter box for Christmas one year, but until I met a friend who actually knew how to play it, it was pretty background to my Star Wars fanaticism.
Once I started playing, though, it became what I spent all of my money on for several years and consumed a great deal of my free time.
I like to think of fiction as being a song, and the audience is the instrument. And not every song sounds good played on every instrument.
Fiction evokes emotions and experiences we've had in our lives. As we encounter different situations through life, different things resonate with us. Stuff that I would have found boring as a younger man makes me cry now. Stuff that I thought was fun and exciting as a kid makes me roll my eyes now. The products haven't changed, I have.
So it shouldn't be weird that some popular stuff leaves you cold. It's not bad, it's just hitting a note that you don't have at the moment. And that's ok.
It would be interesting to do this analysis for politically active people. There are "hipsters" who plumb the ideological depths searching for a new spin on old ideas, and there are "nerds" who consume and replicate the ideas the hipsters deliver.
These are episode of the week procedurals and they’re very popular!
“Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching!”
I think that the mass-marketing of things like the MCU or Star Trek has hollowed them out as nerd items. Part of what made them nerd-fodder is that they dealt with deep subjects, frequently in a low-quality medium due to limited finances.
The work to popularize them involved upping the "production quality" substantially. But it also involved cutting out the deep subjects. The Star Trek television shows frequently dealt with complex subjects about dignity, discrimination, identity and growth. Most of the movies are generic action stuff.
I feel like the philosophical complexity of Star Trek is often very overstated. At best, it will gesture vaguely in the direction of a big philosophical problem but without saying anything interesting about it.
I knew he was a hoax before I read him, but I have to say, I think Ern Malley is pretty good, and occasionally excellent. Take this piece, for example: https://allpoetry.com/Drer:-Innsbruck-1495
I'm not a big sports fan, but for the record every sporting event is just people trying to get a ball in a hole in the way that every historic battle is just dudes trying to walk past each other.
I think it's fair to look at a lot of sports fandom as, not *forming* identity, but as *expressing* identity, and since the reason why this is so is fairly clear with sports, I think it helps understand a lot of other types of fandom.
I actually get the intrinsic appeal of sports. Each game of basketball has the same "plot," but that's only in the sense that each heroic novel has the same plot, or each romantic comedy does— it's the details that matter. Since the details matter, each game has the potential to have a lot of drama, even besides the wonder of watching skilled people do hard things. That said, even fanatics generally admit there are *bad games*, so there are aesthetic criteria being applied even to sports!
But, the intrinsic appeal doesn't explain most sports fandom, the shared experience does. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. Nearly everyone was a University of Kentucky (UK) basketball fan. If UK had an NCAA tournament game during school hours, we stopped school to watch it. Kids and adults both cared about who the players were, how the team was doing, etc. It wasn't just a default topic for conversation, either— caring about the thing alongside other people gives a real sense of commonality. This sense of commonality is why, despite not having lived anywhere near Cincinnati in over a decade, I remain a Cincinnati Bengals fan. It's something I share with friends and family. We can get excited about the same things, get frustrated by the same things, etc. If I couldn't share the experience, I probably wouldn't care. Now that I live in a big metro, I can go to a bar where fans of the Cincinnati Bengals congregate and get an instant sense of community for seventeen or more games a year.
My drive to be a fan of any particular team is pretty low, even if I can enjoy any "good" game of football. Without these social experiences, I wouldn't care about football that much— I'd probably just watch the playoffs, and watch some college games with my dad when I visit back home. I like that I have this connection— not just to family & friends, but also to a region I come from while being a typically transient (for an American of my class).
A lot of MCU fandom probably works like this on a different level. I've had strangers ask me about the latest MCU movie, or want to talk about MCU news (assuming I'd like these things because everyone does), and each time I feel a little bad that I find these movies to be pretty bad and not worth my time. I like having conversations with strangers! I like sharing things with people! And I don't even score highly on agreeableness!
The bigger issues about "identity" is that it's not really a thing. Choosing anything to "base an identity" on is a sure way to wind up miserable, alone, and a prime target for propaganda.
Take the rationalist community for instance. They "community" is based on high ideals of studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues. But the "identity" marker is "being part of the community." Trust me as a dude who spent most of his 20s trying to do this: Absent the community, studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues is just as annoying as being a marvel fan, and just as useless as browsing reddit and playing video games.
Modern culture hates all communities everywhere. It thinks they're lame and annoying and sometimes genuinely dangerous. I don't think this is a conspiracy but I do think various powers that influence culture have strong incentive to keep things this way. If folks must join a community it should be as large as possible with as little member-to-member contact as possible.
This means that people tend to tokenize their identities and their communities: Just wearing Star Wars t-shirts and getting excited about Star Wars online sublimates that need for real community while also ensuring your identity is still mostly about products. Such a person would be happier and healthier if they went to Star Wars conventions and met with other Star Wars people in person and had Star Wars viewing parties, and such. But the more they did that, the less it would be about Star Wars, and the more it would become about the other people in that dude's network.
For a *fantastic* illustration of this, see the Doctor Who Episode "Love and Monsters." A group is formed by people obsessed with searching for the Doctor but ultimately end up basically doing normie things like falling in love and showing off their creative projects. The creative projects are still vaguely Doctor-obsessed but the point is no longer the fetish, it's the other folks involved.
Yeah, I feel that "constructing an identity" is a relic from high school where people (stereotypically) formed cliques based on what they did, and for some reason this issue is extended into adulthood for more and more people.
I have difficulty understanding what is at stake in these discussions about what the exact meaning of "nerd" is (or is there anything at stake?)
I think what's at stake is people's self-worth. The implication that folks are somehow "lesser" for liking Marvel vs. liking medieval poetry is deeply hurtful if most of who you are is "someone who likes Marvel."
To be clear though, that's not what I'm saying - Liking Marvel and liking medieval poetry are both first steps on a path to being the best version of yourself (if we assume Scott's right, and everyone natural inclination is to be deeply boring, think of "finding an interest" as step one). The question is what you do with that enjoyment. Does it lead you somewhere interesting. Does it lead you to a life you'd be proud of? Or do you signal that you're "the medieval poetry" guy as a substitution for actually deriving any value from medieval poetry, connecting with others through the medium of medieval poetry, and using your knowledge of medieval poetry to bring something unique and interesting to your community.
I might think it's more likely that you can do those things with medieval poetry as a starting point than with Marvel movies as a starting point, but that's me being a snob.
As for the semantic argument about "geek" vs. "nerd" I think it's a rhetorical dodge. Being a geek who was super into Star Wars went from being this quirky thing smart guys did to being criticized for all the mindless consumption and toxicity. So this is a rebranding. But I'm not entirely opposed anyway - the rebrand is that "nerds," unlike "geeks" are also into difficult academic topics, and if the goal is to brand "learning stuff" as aspirational then good.
I think you make a lot of good points. Although I am personally less convinced that liking medieval poetry generally has (in any direct way) the kind of utility that you describe. It depends on context of course. (And I am a snob too, in the sense that I appreciate it more than liking superhero movies.)
(I think liking medieval poetry is more likely to awaken what is called "the life of the mind", but what the function or status of that is another thing.)
Someone who feels that "someone who likes Marvel" is most of what he is, that is poignant.
I feel, also from personal experience, that people tend to "identify" with qualities in a way that limits them. So someone might identify with being an introvert (or a nerd) in a way that limits their idea of what they can do.
Some of the discussion of status here confuses me (that people choose what they do based on status). There are some things that give people status, like being a lawyer. But does a high brow lawyer who understands fine wine have "higher status" in society compared to an equally competent lawyer who likes going on fishing trips and eating hot dogs? Outside of some very specific context?
I feel like the only people who try to construct an identity around something are people who are uncomfortable with the default identity that society would otherwise give them.
So for instance, being "that guy who is really into ska" is preferable to being "the fat guy with the lazy eye" or "the guy who pooped his pants that one time in eighth grade and never managed to live it down".
I see what you're getting at, but building an identity for yourself and building a community to be a part of are very different things, and what works for one is no guarantee of working for the other.
Yeah, I'm trying to equivocate less in my comments, first to keep them from getting super long and second because I'm told they're deeply unpersuasive and annoying otherwise. A more honest comment would be something like "Community, role within a community, and personal expression are all important components of who you are, and I feel like as a culture we focus on personal expression and neglect the other two."
> Modern culture hates all communities everywhere. It thinks they're lame and annoying and sometimes genuinely dangerous.
I would like to hear more about this, because it seems like it could tie into "seeing like a state" - the powers that be struggle with huge numbers of atomized, distinct communities and would prefer a giant, even mass of similarity, perhaps.
I apparently need to read this, that's exactly what I mean.
I don't think it's quite "TPTB want everyone to be a mindless zombie that thinks exactly the same way." I don't even think this would be preferable for those in charge for a bunch of reasons I can go into if you want. But I do think those who seek power on a massive scale prefer to be able to treat large groups of people as units. If they need to respond to the preferences of 300 million people they...I mean, they can't. But they can respond to a few dozen interest groups, and assuming those interest groups are in the power-having game they have incentive to push their *own* members to simplify their preferences.
And this can work itself all the way down to the individual level - you *could* insist that to be complete you need varied interests, a community willing to explore those interests with you, a niche inside that community that makes you distinct from the other members, and a careful balance of both novelty and comfort. But you're demanding a lot, both from yourself and those around you. It's much easier to just buy Star Wars figurines or post online abous socialism a lot and be a bit sad all the time.
This probably sounds like a nitpick, but it's really conceptually important, I feel: "even mass of similarity" is what atomization looks like. That's not to mean "this chemistry metaphor fails if taken literally", it's to mean "this chemistry metaphor is extremely accurate and perfectly demonstrates the implications of social atomization as bemoaned by its critics". Distinct communities EOR atomized, the two are contradictory.
I find the points about MCU being the point where people figured out how to market comic book superhero stories to a mass market interesting. I agree, but also, isn't this what Shakespeare mostly did? His plays were media for the common people of his day and time, many of them retelling old stories. He filled them with fight scenes to keep things exciting. His actors raced through lines to keep the total time way down compared to modern productions of the same plays. (All of this might be wrong, but it's what I was taught in high school).
None of that is a dig against Shakespeare, but it is a dig against glorifying Shakespeare while vilifying the MCU (Note: not personally a fan of either, except I like things written in more archaic language sometimes). I can imagine a world where 300 years from now, literature professors are expounding upon how the MCU combines the styles of mythmaking and epic poetry (large casts of mighty beings beyond our ken, each with many stories about them that the audience already knows), civic religion (Superman is an immigrant, Captain America is a patriot,, etc.), sci-fi/fantasy, and maybe a few others. Maybe Ant-Man is typically experienced as a non-optional day-long interactive holodeck-equivalent story for educating fifth graders on the fundamental nature of quantum physics and its relation to the human-scale world, and maybe historians think the original publication was inspired by the discovery of the laser or fear of falling behind the Russians in technology advancement or something.
In the 19th century, as printing became cheaper and literacy more common (and so there was a true "mass audience" in a sense there wasn't before), they had these cheap publications called penny dreadfuls, stories that were often about crime and vampires and the like. Someone back then could have made the same argument you made and said "ah, aren't these doing just what Shakespeare did? etc. In the future people will think these penny dreadfuls have great literary quality." But no one nowadays thinks that the penny dreadfuls have great literary quality, and while they are no doubt studied by some scholars, it isn't for that reason (just because academicians study something doesn't mean they think it is good).
I'm not making any claim about MCU, by the way (I know nothing about it).
That's true, but many of the 19th century novels that are studied as literature today were also published initially as serials, including works by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Madame Bovary, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov were also all published as serials, though I'm not sure if some of them might have been serialized after initial publication?
And even if much of the MCU got glossed over in my hypothetical future, or some 2040s-era retelling (or another big, complicated blockbuster saga) got remembered instead, well, the modern world has forgotten most of the Epic Cycle, and our oldest versions of the Iliad and Odyssey are from a millennium or more after it was written, and we often gloss over obvious fan service sections like the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships, and we forgive quirks of the oral poetry format like calling characters by epithets that don't match their current actions just because it fits the meter and is easy to remember.
So you're right, maybe the future will forget the MCU entirely or never think of it as great art. But pointing to the format and mass market popularity as a reason for that being likely just doesn't make sense to me. If this conversation had been about Star Trek instead of the MCU, I would think it was totally fair to say that maybe 90% of TOS, TNG, Voyager, and DS9, and much more of everything else, would never be remembered, but the remainder could be seen as important and impactful literature, and as a reflection of society grappling with current and expected future issues in meaningful and novel ways. When we someday start having (hopefully legal and metaphorical) battles over the rights of AI, I could easily see TNG's "Measure of a Man" and Voyager's "Latent Image" episodes having pride of place beside Asimov's "I, Robot" in discussions of past thought about the topic.
My comment about that might need a little more historical context to distinguish it from Shakespeare:
Superheroes started as a mass-market entertainment medium in 1930s comics. They appealed to a wide range of people. Most early superhero stories were continuity-lite stories where the conflict was resolved at the end of the comic. As time passed, publishers noticed that they could increase the appeal to dedicated fans by having more serialization, crossovers, recurring characters, and more continuity references.
As time passed, superhero comics started to lose popularity, partly due to competition from television, and partly because of weird content restrictions created by a moral panic in the 1950s. Publishers noticed that they were losing casual readers, but keeping long-term fans who were dedicated to continuous, serialized stories. Soon this type of story became the default story-telling option in superhero comics. It has become common for superhero comics to feature epic stories with huge crossover casts that reference plot elements from decade-old stories. These stories have less mainstream appeal, but have great appeal to people with nerdy personalities that love to keep track of decades of storytelling.
Superhero live-action movie adaptations have been around since there have been superhero comics, and there have been successful adaptations like the 70s Superman and 80s Batman movies. However, these in many ways followed the continuity-lite, nonserialized nature of earlier superhero comics. They didn't try to tell long storylines that took place over multiple movies and included crossovers. Producers were afraid it would alienate audiences who hadn't seen everything.
What the MCU did was find a way to tell serialized stories with a lot of crossovers and continuity in a way that appealed to mainstream audiences. There were superhero movies before the MCU, but there wasn't something like "Infinity War" that tied together plot and character threads from multiple movies. That kind of storytelling was de rigeur for comics, it's an adaptation of "Infinity Gauntlet," a story from 1991. But something like that had never been tried in film before, especially not big budget live action film.
So it isn't just that they were able to make things exciting, it's that they were able to adapt a form of storytelling that was previously only found in a niche medium for dedicated fans, into a crowd-pleasing box office smash.
What's interesting is that the whole MCU thing peaked with Infinity War and has been on a downhill slide ever since, in both popularity and quality. It turns out that the mainstream audience had an appetite for this kind of thing exactly once (or maybe once in a generation), and aren't really on board for doing the whole thing all over again. If you were excited by Thanos, just wait to see how bored you'll be by Kang!
The other thing that happened with comic books after they lost popularity is that they became obsessed with their own continuity, which led inevitably into complicated multiverses. This is the path that comic book movies are going down now, and it's too damn nerdy for mainstream audiences.
I don't know for sure that it's the complicated multiverse that's doing the harm. Of the recent Marvel movies, the two most successful have been "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" and "Spider-man No Way Home." Both of those movies leaned heavily into the multiverse concept, but outperformed more contained works like "Eternals," "Thor Love and Thunder," and "Shang Chi." I think the main reason Phase IV is underperforming is because of weak scripts compared to previous phases.
In general I don't think continuity is as big a deal to audiences as most people think. One of the most popular animated series in the world is "Dragon Ball Z," which is a direct sequel to a 150+ episode show called "Dragon Ball." "Z" was released in the USA prior to "Dragon Ball" and became a smash hit, even though "Dragon Ball" was not released in the USA until years later. And it's not like it's a continuity-lite show, it references events and characters from "Dragon Ball" a LOT. In spite of this, audiences ate it up. They were able to follow along, even if they didn't quite know who everyone was and what all their deals were.
To be fair, continuity or not, DBZ is also a show where you can see every dozenth episode and still be in the middle of the same fight, or at least figure out the gist of what you missed. Also you open and end with "previously" reviews and "next time" look-ahead segments to make it easier to keep up.
According to the late Samuel Crowell in "William Fortyhands", the real Shakespeare was an extremely successful producer who took fancy-pants plays which appeal to your English teacher, written by poor scriveners for cheap, then ripped out the boring bits and added stuff like music/dancing/animals that Samuel Pepys wrote about in his diaries. Thus, his actual work that made him rich is now referred to as the "bad quartos" while the output of relative nobodies is lauded and attributed to him.
The concept of authenticity explains a few of the puzzles here, I think. The original Mona Lisa is higher-status than a copy of it, even if they're undistinguishable to the untrained eye, because the former is authentic. Likewise, the Mabinogion-Ant-Man crossover wouldn't be as authentic as the original Mabinogion, and therefore less interesting. (So it's true that "the “quality” of the Mabinogion comes from something outside the text, like the fact that it’s old".)
Sports are enjoyable because they're not fiction: it's true that no one would watch a sitcom that would be formatted as a sports season, but the difference is that the sitcom wouldn't be authentic. Repetitive though they are, sports come with real stakes and real people playing a real game somewhere in the world.
In general, intellectual or scientific topics are somewhat authentic, because they are closely linked to reality; whereas video games or movie franchises aren't. An interest in an unusual topic is often authentic because no you have to investigate it yourself rather than follow someone else's lead, whereas a "common' topic like culture war politics or the MCU contains a lot of inauthentic ready-made stuff.
As for collecting, it's higher status to collect butterflies (which really exist independently of human actions) than to complete the Pokédex. Stamps are somewhat authentic because they're made for a real purpose, not just for collecting; but baseball cards or NFT profile pictures are intended for collecting and are therefore lower-status, to a first approximation.
Why do we care about authenticity? That is a good question in itself. Maybe it's some sort of culturally evolved defence against people tricking us.
First, I think a fair bit of disagreement on these threads really comes down to whether the MCU is Good or Bad. From the movies I've watched I'm on team "MCU is Bad" but I can't say I've watched them enough to say that definitively about the whole series. But it does seem like an important distinction, if we're going to group Star Wars and the MCU as analogous in this discussion, that the original Star Wars trilogy is pretty universally seen as Good and the MCU is seen by many as Bad.
Second, different reactions people have to levels of engagement in popular things. I.e. how can people claim to be socially oppressed for liking [major media franchise]? I was thinking about this in regards to Zelda. With an upcoming game coming out, three types of Zelda fans I've seen recently:
* casual fans who say "oh I played the original so much! I just saw they're making a new one, I'm gonna waste so much time my spouse is gonna hate me lol"
* people on the internet with really strong opinions on the "Zelda timeline" and encyclopedic knowledge about what all the enemies are called and shit and have played every Zelda game even though you have to own like 10 different Nintendo consoles to do this
* hot chick on Instagram I saw recently with a bunch of tattoos, one of which was a Zelda tattoo
So why is it that average people (group 1) and people with some claim to higher popularity (group 3) both are Zelda fans, but the big time Zelda fans (group 2) are lower popularity?
My hypothesis is that by getting really into it, you are on some level admitting to a ... flatness of personal experience. Where your life is uninteresting enough that the thing that everyone else enjoys in passing and then moves on from, becomes a personality trait for you.
It would be different if getting that into it produced a qualitatively different experience, but for something like consumption of a media franchise people assume that it's not that deep ... you're watching the same movies as them.
As for group 3 ... sex appeal aside, it matters that this girl had a lot of tattoos. Scans differently from someone who only had one tattoo and it was Zelda related. If it's one of many it has a similar effect to a comedian mentioning a life experience many people have but don't normally talk about (don't you hate when you hate to fart but you're on a date and hold it in for hours?), and they get cool points for saying it aloud.
Zelda is just a better name. Actually Daenerys isn't inherently a bad name phonetically - it's pretty similar to the old female name Damaris - but it suffers from phantasie vowelles, and now people have seen the TV show finale, so...
[snark]I think other factors to consider is are willpower and depth. Group 2 are obviously the only group that has enough willpower to focus on objectively interesting things like Zelda monsters instead of getting distracted by dumb things. People in groups 1 and 3 just don't have the willpower. Also, groups 1 and 3 do not have the rich depth of personality needed to appreciate the subtle differences between different Zelda games on different systems. [/end snark]
You are reminding me of the fallacy where ordinary people assume that intellectuals must have extremely boring personalities because they are into boring things like math and science, instead of interesting things like gossip, fashion, sportsball, and getting plastered. The idea that other people could find different things interesting doesn't occur to them so they assume the uninterestingness must be a quality of the people. Similarly, you can't imagine liking Zelda that much, so you assume it must be that people's lives must be so boring that there is nothing else but Zelda.
People find different things fascinating. I believe the main reason group 2 is low popularity is that being popular takes effort, and they are so fascinated by things like Zelda that they expend effort on that instead. Popularity just isn't worth as much to them as it is to others. I can personally attest that I have had ample opportunities to engage with more normal activities in my life, but had to stop because they were excruciatingly boring when compared to nerdy activities.
Your hypothesis also doesn't make predictions as well as mine does. According to your hypothesis there should be no celebrity nerds since celebrities tend to lead exciting lives. My hypothesis predicts that celebrity nerds should be somewhat rare since nerds don't work as hard at popularity, but that some nerds might get lucky and become popular anyway. As it happens, there are some celebrities with nerdy interests/.
This is definitely the better hypothesis but I would point out that for the most part absolute popularity doesn't really matter after high school and what we are really discussing is whether people have enjoyable personalities and are able to find and make friends. There are lots of people in group 2 who are locally popular however as you point out being popular provides opportunities (requires time/effort) to do things that lower them from group 2 towards group 1.
I think as nerd culture goes mainstream some people with exceptional personalities (celeberties) will like nerd culture. Liking MCU, Magic The Gathering, or Video Games no longer marks you as a nerd.
I'm a big film-analysis nerd who loves shit like Citizen Kane and obscure foreign arthouse films. I read and write super pretentious film criticism. I have all the bona-fides of a snob.
I love the MCU, because it's really god damn good. I've seen every single film in theaters. I've had long debates about how Shang Chi uses the Kishotenketsu 4-act structure and simultaneously fits into a standard western 3-act structure, and whether this means it constitutes a new act-structure or proves that acts are subjective.
A common failure of analysis that supports claims like "the MCU is bad" is to collapse "good-bad" to a single axis, when it obviously is made up of many orthogonal axes. We usually trust the listener to know which axis we mean.
"So bad it's good" is a great example. Some movies are so bad you'd rather gouge out your eyes than watch them. But "so bad it's good" movies are generally well-written and have a lot of soul, but the production value is cheap and they don't take themselves seriously or have complicated themes. Even something like "production value" isn't linear, since something like Lawrence of Arabia simultaneously reads as "holy shit the care that went into getting these colors to look right, it cost untold millions" and "wow they really sucked at makeup back in the 60s, this would be unfathomably bad in a modern movie but it's quaint."
“Emotionally, everyone who likes things more prestigious than what I like is a snob who’s faking it, and everyone who likes things less prestigious than what I like is a boor who doesn’t understand true art.”
"I’m not up to date on what goes on in academic literature departments, but Freddie de Boer says they’re increasingly offering “Spiderman Studies” classes in attempts to stay culturally relevant; probably Spiderman professors engage with Spiderman on the same deep level that Shakespeare professors engage with Shakespeare."
Probably for the best. I always thought it was pretty bizarre how we treat analysis of old high status art few people engage with as a normal and reasonable humanities major (fine art, English lit) while analysis of our actual culture is kind of niche.
> People “are constantly meeting strangers and having to communicate their identity to them quickly.”
This is a very strange and foreign concept to me. Why exactly do I have to do this? What is the negative consequence to me if strangers I meet don’t get an instant tutorial on who I am as a person?
I live a life where the way people get to know me is to, ya know, actually get to know me, over time.
Well, in situations where people feel they have to establish contact with people quickly. If you are satisfied with your social life, then there aren't any negative consequences. But a dating site (or social media) might be an example of a place where this becomes a perceived need.
"The film's plot chronicles a group of nerds at the fictional Adams College trying to stop the ongoing harassment by the jock fraternity, the Alpha Betas, in addition to the latter's sister sorority, Pi Delta Pi."
This has been a remarkable exchange, and the Krissian 'low quality' bit did less to highlight for me why I have always disliked nerds than the responses to his thesis did.
A ctrl-f on both this and the comments to the original response turn up zero hits for "Berkson", and I believe this is the crucial point. Scott's matrix of quality vs status is a useful step and jogged my memory: 'nerds' are victims of Berkson's paradox because they are people who assume that being attractive, fit, athletic, and socially capable actually and literally are negatively correlated with intelligence. This is not the case, but it is a common illusion which has been reinforced by Hollywood (E.g. Revenge of the Nerds). Note that Hollywood writers/etc were themselves the first victims of this (with resultant expressions going as far back as that awful movie about people with dwarfism before the code imposed more mainstream values on the place). Anyhow, 'nerds' are people who are not particularly (or at least, usefully) intelligent but assume they must be due to their not having other, more socially-rewarded traits. One of the traits they don't have is being able to select things that are high quality/status (that's a 'prestige hierarchy' move) -- note that the people who fell for Ern Malley were the kind of dreadful nerds who run a magazine about garbage non-art.
Producing lower-quality/status things is easier, and at some point saturated the market. This caused people who are not actual nerds in the sense I have outlined above to become interested in them, leading to a confusion where some of the actually usefully intelligent and successful people who comment on this substack falsely think of themselves as nerds and defend the category.
There's nothing 'wrong' with being socially undesirable and also a midwit. It's not anyone's fault. It's not even his fault if he thinks he's smarter than he is because he wears glasses and can't throw a ball. It's not a moral failing. But defending this category as "good" is absurd and morally incoherent.
I don't think the nerd's assumption is wrong, it's just a little more complicated than they often think. There is definitely a weak negative correlation between intellectual achievement and social capability/popularity. This is simply because engaging in social signaling and status games, especially in the more toxic communities, can take a lot of time, effort, and brainpower. As a result, popular people are often less intellectually accomplished than nerds.
The same is true of athletics and attractiveness. There is some inherent attractiveness and athletic ability, but a lot of it also comes down to practice, either in athletics, or in paying attention to fashion and makeup. Some people can do those things and also be intellectual, but some can't, so there is a weak negative correlation between those and intellectual achievement.
I don't think that nerds want to be able to select high-quality/status things, but make mistakes and can't. It isn't actually that hard to select high-quality/status things, you just need to pay a little attention to things like critic scores and sales numbers. Nerds just don't want to select for those things, they want to select things that they like, things that are interesting. You are making the same mistake I was talking about in my comments on the previous post, where you literally can't imagine liking something for reasons that are independent of status.
That's why I can't help but like nerds. They are trying to live good lives instead of chasing popularity. They recognize on some level that popularity is a game where the only way to win is to not play. And they are often quite intelligent in whatever subject fascinates them, because they put so much effort and thought into it. I think a lot of people who read this substack definitely are nerds, because they do put lots of thought and effort into intellectual topics without regard to popularity.
I don't know if a lot of nerds are "midwits," when it comes to things outside their area of expertise, but that seems fine. Most smart people are outside of the areas they choose to focus their efforts in. The concept reminds me strongly of the "Valley of Bad Rationality" concept Scott introduced on Less Wrong a while ago and, like that concept, it is only true for a few limited issues. Most of the time smarter people do better at things than less smart people, even though there might be even smarter people elsewhere.
I've never understood why people who are bad at sports imagine that being good at sports takes all of a person's time. Going to the Olympics certainly takes a lot of time, but natural athleticism isn't exactly much of a time sink.
As for the main point, actual status correlates with quality. We're not talking about doing high quality things for the sake of chasing status. We're talking about using prestige as a filter. And this has nothing to do with sales rank. I absolutely do not care how many Star Wars minifigs Lego sells, collecting them is still useless and absolutely no good for a person doing it. On the other side, although I personally don't have the attention span for golf, at least it gets people outside and walking around and talking to other human beings who are capable of doing things like going outside and walking around.
It doesn't need to take all of a person's time to not be worth it. It just needs to be less worthwhile than other activities. I know that I could probably become good at soccer or basketball with a few hours of practice a week. I wouldn't have to give up all my nerdy interests, just dial them back a bit. That is irrelevant to me because soccer and basketball are boring as all hell. Spending any time on them at all is not worthwhile. What really made me become more athletic is audiobooks, now I can go on walks or to the gym without feeling like I am not accomplishing anything.
Collecting Star Wars minifigs and Legos, by contrast, is quite useful. A lot of the newer figurines are of immensely high quality, by many metrics of quality. They are beautifully made with incredible detail. They look awesome. They don't need to do anything else, looking awesome is its own reward. But collectors often do meet and form communities. Assembling complex Legos takes patience and effort, and it creates a feeling of accomplishment that is rewarding in itself.
The problem with the idea that prestige is being used as a filter is that many high-quality things do not need to be filtered. In a market economy, greater demand for stuff will increase the supply, given time. If there is more demand for gyms, they'll build more. If there's more demand for amateur sports clubs, people will found more. For things like movies, the writing of cultural critics are available free online. If nerds wanted to do these things they could. They choose not to, not because they are ignorant of the benefits, but because they care more about their own interests than they care about those benefits.
I think it makes more sense to postulate that nerds like things because they are cool and fascinating, and are more indifferent to status than the typical person. For this reason they often have trouble obtaining status because they are unwilling to make compromises with their interests in order to do so. Other people like things because they are cool and fascinating, but are more likely to hide/suppress their interests for conformity and status signaling. They are also less likely to become fascinated in depth with things, which leads to them having shallow interests that they fail to master.
Also, why do you keep listing going outside as a reason things like golf is high quality. There are bugs outside! You can get sunburned. Outside is gross :)
I wasn't really trolling. I really believe everything I wrote in my reply. I was just exaggerating it in the final paragraph to be funny. Outside is nice in the spring and fall when it isn't too hot, cold, snowy, or buggy, but I prefer the gym and mall walking at other times. I was just trying to humorously illustrate that a lot of things that you are treating as measures of quality might actually be unpleasant for some people.
I guess if I do find myself surrounded by a lot of people criticizing nerds and nerd culture I do find myself starting to turn into an unabashed defender of it, but that isn't a conscious thing.
"But the southwest square could be “writes a wacky Shakespeare fanfiction, Romeo & Juliet II, in blank verse and period-appropriate language”
We already have this! From Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" to the various movies about Shakespeare, and even a sitcom from 2016-2018:
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)"
But that's pretty much what sitcoms *are*! You have a cast of familiar characters who each episode get into wacky hi-jinks and end the episode pretty much as they began, and over the arc of the season even if we learn more about them, they don't really change that much or are affected by what happens. Think of "Friends", it ran for ten seasons and eventually ended up with Ross and Rachel together, as had been heavily hinted at since the first season. Everything changed, yet nothing did.
"Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant (ironically, Sam Kriss is probably the single person alive most qualified to do this)."
We need to stop fooling around, stop looking at funny pictures of cats on the internet or whatever, and put our collective funds together to commission Sam Kriss to produce this Magnum Opus on behalf of humanity.
"The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful."
Am I the only cat who remembers "She" by J.T. LeRoy? I remember European hipsters getting taken in by this, hook line and sinker.
I grew up in a barn, so I read about three pages of "She" before I called bullshit. I managed to finish the book, but only after I decided that I would view it as a sort of a crude form of magical realism and not anything like an actual autobiography. Still, my hipster friends gave me grief, said I was "victim blaming" and even when it came out that J.T. LeRoy didn't actually exist and "She" was a hoax they weren't inclined to forgive.
It ain't just literature, yo. Shortly after the election of Trump, the German magazine "Der Spiegel" published a piece on Fergus Falls, Minnesota, describing the sort of town where people vote for the Orange Buffoon. Needless to say, it came out that, like "She", the piece was entirely fabricated, but because (also like "She") it was fabricated in a way that fully confirmed the prejudices of the readership, it ran and was celebrated for a while.
Re: Ant-Man and the Mabinogion, I was led to understand the problem is that the latest Ant-Man movie is an unholy mess due to several reasons, so that may be an unfair comparison.
As for adaptations of old myths, let me quote from Tumblr:
"Old Welsh lit: Dave punched Steve. This incurred a fine of twelve cattle and a nine-inch rod of silver and is known as one of the Three Mildly Annoying Blows of the Isle of Britain
Old Irish lit: Dave punched Steve so that the top of his skull came out of his chin, and gore flooded the house, and he drove his fists down the street performing his battle-feats so that the corpses were so numerous there was no room for them to fall down. It was like “the fox among the hens” and “the oncoming tide” and “that time Emily had eight drinks when we all know she should stop at six”
Old English lit: Dave, the hard man, the fierce man, the fist-man, gave Steve such a blow the like has not been seen since the feud between the Hylfings and the Wends. Thus it is rightly said that violence only begets more violence, unless of course it is particularly sicknasty. Amen. "
I think the problem is that the Marvel movies are based on comic books; and comic books are essentially the foundational myths of our modern culture. As such, the stories that have stood the test of time are relatively short and to the point; their power derives from packing a lot of emotional engagement into a very efficient package.
But if you're Disney, your goal is not to provide a gut-punch of emotional engagement in a focused strike akin to a laser beam to the soul; rather, it's to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. So, what do you do ? That's right, you incessantly dilute the material with quippy jokes and visual gags and pop culture references and CGI effects. Thus you end up with homeopathic mythology, which works about as well as the regular kind of homeopathy.
> the Three Mildly Annoying Blows of the Isle of Britain
Ah, good, someone else recognizes the listiness of early British history/mythology. I was wondering about this in the open thread, speculating that it might have been some ancient Indo-European thing if it wound up shared between Celts and Indians.
It is a little unfair maybe to the Brits, who really only have the Matter of Britain and half of that is Norman-French, but this is precisely why Tolkien started writing his mythologies:
"But the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914-18 war. The Fall of Gondolin (and the birth of Eärendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The kernel of the mythology, the matter of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren, arose from a small woodland glade filled with 'hemlocks' (or other white umbellifers) near Roos on the Holderness peninsula – to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber Garrison in 1918."
"Thank you very much for your kind and encouraging letter. Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still the undarkened heart and mind.
It has been a considerable labour, beginning really as soon as I was able to begin anything, but effectively beginning when I was an undergraduate and began to explore my own linguistic aesthetic in language-composition. It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing 'legends' of the same 'taste'. The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918 – when time allowed. But I think a lot of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even 'sleeping'. I have long ceased to invent (though even patronizing or sneering critics on the side praise my 'invention'): I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself. Thus, though I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere far down the Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the point, and wrote the 'Treebeard' chapter without any recollection of any previous thought: just as it now is. And then I saw that, of course, it had not happened to Frodo at all."
"Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. (I am speaking, of course, of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, which you read.)
Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd."
"while possessing the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic, it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry."
Regarding sports, I will try to explain two reasons to actually watch sports from my own experience (in response to "It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.")
One is that they provide a sense of connection or continuity. While a college student I attended (American aka gridiron) football games with friends, mostly as a social activity. Shortly after I completed my undergraduate studies I moved across the country for grad school. Living far from my old college community, I enjoyed going to a sports bar where the alumni association would gather to watch our alma mater's football games. It was a way to connect with others with whom I had things in common and to feel connected with a community I had been part of during my formative years (and happily, this occurred during a period of significant improvement by the football team, so each season offered the prospect of new heights). Work eventually brought me back to the state in which I had attended college, and since then my interest in watching football has declined somewhat -- I still do, but not as regularly, probably in part because I don't need it for that connection anymore.
The other reason I sometimes watch sporting events is indeed to appreciate the pure athleticism involved. I don't normally watch the local NBA team, but when they make the playoffs I may watch a game or two, since the playoffs pit the best teams against each other, and in an era of load management you are more likely to see the best players on the court during a playoff game than during a regular season game. Similarly, while I certainly don't even attempt to watch most of the Olympics, there are a few sports that I enjoy watching (at least once they have winnowed the field down to the final round or two). These mostly skew towards sports where even a non-expert in the sport can't help but be wowed by the displays of athleticism: gymnastics, various swimming events, freestyle skiing, et cetera, and because it is only once every four years it doesn't feel like a repetitive exercise in watching the same thing over and over.
There are of course other reasons many people watch sports, not all of which I understand. I just wanted to illustrate two that I have experienced to hopefully bring some clarity to the mystery of why some people actually watch sports.
This has me wondering: what are the topics that the social outcasts flock to today? Do they have their own things or are all the kids interested in the same stuff now? I really have no idea or any idea how to find out.
Depends why you’re an outcast. If it’s due to some component of your identity, identity communities are a common outlet. Gaming is a *huge* one, of course. Obscure music and fandoms are still a thing as well
>The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person.
This is probably spoken like a narcissist, or maybe just a naturally interesting person with a lot of interests and personal quirks.
But there is absolutely nothing "boring" about my true self and I don't think I have ever thought so. To the extent I posture or pose, or hide, or construct a false front on top of my true self, it is almost always to hide facets I find undesirable, or to impress someone, or whatever.
It is pretty much never because I think they would find me uninteresting, I am super interesting, too interesting in ways.
I will say, if I ever found anyone currently living who liked Jonson more than Shakespeare, I would be *very* interested to hear them out! (Same deal for Marlowe, although that would be a little more understandable.) Jonson and Marlowe fans are not exactly the outgroup relative to Shakespeare fans! And almost all dislike I hear of Shakespeare is based on difficulty in understanding the language, so it would be very interesting to hear a criticism from someone who wasn't put off by that at all -- Jonson's most famous plays are full of contemporary cultural references that make them IMO even harder for a modern audience than most Shakespeare.
I am a Shakespeare is super overrated person. I tend to most like literature for plot not style, and so all the style stuff doesn't hit me as hard as it does others. And i find the plots pretty "meh", just your typical soap opera drama you can find anywhere.
Of course he gets huge points for being "first", but I don't think that if you just had random Shakespeare level pieces released today anyone would notice. They would not be held up as all time classics. Their value is in their cultural history and place, not their abstract quality.
I also think there is a big issue of "gods goodness" about them. Where people have been taught "this is the good" for literally generations, so they believe it is good. But when you try and get them out of that box to be like "what is good about it that isn't just "this is like Shakespeare", they often have a hard time coming up with examples.
IDK I read most of the plays when I was a kid, and again in my 20s, and just found it kind of underwhelming compared to the continual treatment of it as ambrosia.
I mentioned Samuel Crowell's "William Fortyhands" above, which is definitely in the Shakespeare-is-overrated camp (he uses the term "bardolatry"). Unfortunately, he's dead now so you can't ask him anything.
This makes me think that some modern director should do a film adaptation of Webster's tragedies "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfi". Quentin Tarantino would be good for the gory murders, but I don't know if he would get the sophisticated plotting right. Any suggestions?
I love the Duchess of Malfi and I’m lucky to have seen it produced once in a very solid regional production. Alex Cox did a great, imaginative, funny, bloody take on The Revengers Tragedy featuring Eddie Izzard, among others — which isn’t the best play ever but I think his movie of it is the best that could ever be made, if you haven’t seen it and like this kind of thing check it out. Julie Taymor’s movie of Titus Andronicus is pretty good too and in a kind of similar style. I actually think The Duchess of Malfi has maybe too much of a genuine emotional core / is too good of a play for a totally gonzo take like those two movies though.
The once-shared-culture top-40 era yielded thousands of songs that many if not most Americans - if specific to their decade, and by "decade" I mean about fifteen or 20 years - could sing some portion of the lyrics of. This is almost like a faint signal from the past, of the role of music pre-recording. To me anyway. But you need not accept that claim to realize that the "work of digging out the obscure" fails on that metric, in the same way that those endless pop songs perhaps fail, many of them, in terms of "quality", to the musically-gifted or musically-purist. But it further fails in that I doubt many of the musical hipsters will one day burst into their own equivalent of "Under the Redwood Tree" which so happened to be the earworm in my head last evening as I was cooking dinner.
>But it further fails in that I doubt many of the musical hipsters will one day burst into their own equivalent of "Under the Redwood Tree" which so happened to be the earworm in my head last evening as I was cooking dinner.
There are plenty of obscure "hipster" songs I'll randomly get stuck in my head or start singing, I fail to see how whether or not a song is generally popular has much bearing on if it's one of your own personal earworms, or part of your regular humming repertoire. What self-respecting hipster doesn't occasionally break into a shout of "I LOVE YOU JESUS CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTT," after all? (which incidentally, is from a song that's part of what could be described as a hipster alternative to the top 40 canon, if your main point had to do with the social function of having a familiar, codified grouping of songs that multiple people share)
Whatever "obscure" songs you reference - apart from the musical hairshirts - would probably have been a hit pre-1990, or the work of somebody that produced hits, like "Redwood Tree".
Even I, old person, might have heard your song.
I'm not sure people have figured out a way to think/talk about the fact that "popular" music used to be much more varied. Perhaps this is the way: "my" music is obscure/the Beatles? - I don't hear a hit!, etc.
Why on earth are people talking about the Beatles in 2023? Why are the Beatles still the competition? In the 70s people didn't sit around saying, "Actually, 'Swanee' really sucks" and "Fats Waller wasn't really very talented, he was just the beneficiary of technological change".
"Your" special music, that sets you apart, would not have set you apart fifty years ago.
The fact that people keep referring back to the Beatles as if they were current, as if the White Album just came out and they ran down to the record store to get their numbered copy - indicates a discomfort with the hegemony of rap, its anointment at the top of the musical totem pole; or at the very least that they - unlike the New Yorker ;-) - don't find all that much left to say about it.
As much as the song is exactly what you describe it is (and as much as I occasionally start singing it myself), it still speaks lots about hipsterism that out of many hits in its alternative shared consciousness this is the one example that immediately sprung to your mind. As much as ItAotS is a great record, let's face it, that particular passage's fame comes purely from its widely recognized abrasiveness. To put it forward as one's rallying call requires self-consciousness that, I believe, has no equivalent in mainstream culture; a classic example of post-ironic defense of one's unconventional tastes (once misconstrued as ironic detachment, a stereotypical hipster characteristic, but it was before post-irony was even recognized, so we should know better nowadays).
Some of the themes touched on here have to do with people being one-dimensional, or presenting themselves as such. "Imagine building your personality around X" has become a staple way to dismiss people online. But no matter how interesting or high-status X is, I really can't understand people who brand themselves around that thing. I've got a lot of hobbies and interests, and I can't imagine wearing a t-shirt or hat or button that says "this one thing is my whole deal" in a general context (if I was specifically doing to a video game convention, I might wear something about a favorite game, or if I am going to a car show I might wear something about a favorite car, but not out in the general public). I kind of want people to get to know me more organically.
I'm not sure how to articulate this, but I think that Ready Player One need to be a part of this conversation. The film pitched itself as a nostalgia-fueled celebration of nerd stuff, but it mostly just mashed-up elements from some of the most financially successful and popular mainstream films of all time. The book pitched itself as an anthem of obscure nerd culture and trivia, but again, it is mostly trivia about those massively successful mainstream movies and games. The author appears to have pursued nerd-dom more as an identity than a true love, since he can only prove his nerd cred by citing endless lists of obscure trivia, but he can't describe his love of the source materials.
That was such a weird book. The whole setup feels like it's going to be a critique of nerd culture, but the shoe never drops and it just winds up as a celebration of it.
To wit: it's the 2040s and the whole real world has gone to shit and everybody is obsessed with virtual world and 1980s nerd trivia. At some point you expect a moral of "and that's why 1980s nerd trivia is stupid and we all really need to move on" but it never quite arrives, the protagonist just wins everything by being the most 1980s nerd trivia obsessed nerd in the world. Good job protagonist.
I don’t think real nerds compete for nerd cred by describing their love of the source materials. I also don’t think the target audience were nerds, so much as normal people who thought in the 80s that some of the things they liked were nerdy. It tells those people that some people who liked those things were nerds in the bad sense, but that it’s possible to grow beyond that and live a fulfilling life even if you do. You’d expect that moral from anyone who can publish a book through a mainstream publisher.
True; nerd cred seems to be driven by knowledge of trivial minutiae, but surely a nerd's interest in that trivia should be driven by a love of the subject, right? If you read Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline expands into trivia from other areas of pop culture just by copying Wikipedia lists, and he describes his main character's rote memorization of these facts as a virtue. And yet that main character's final end goal is to upload his consciousness into a computer loaded with all the entertainment humanity has created to just eternally consume it. It's very weird, and that wierdness seems related to the topic of the article in ways that would be interesting to unpack.
I think learning trivia as described in the books is something that should ultimately derive from a love of the object of that trivia, but engaging with that trivia is pretty different from engaging with the objects themselves, and might easily get to be more fun than the object was. I think that’s the vibe I got from the books. As for the Wikipedia angle, I suspect the lists on Wikipedia appeared there specifically because they were of interest to historical nerds who added them. Maybe Wikipedia contributed to the metamorphosis of visible nerd culture, since the same facts that once needed commitment to learn are now available easily on the internet.
I still don’t think nerds are the target audience of those books. The games have more value if there are nerds who study them, because that suggests other people find them valuable or important. But the point of the books is that you should seek other things as well. Wanting to escape into inward-looking consumerism is the main character’s goal at the beginning of the second book, and then it is a personality flaw. He gives it up at the end, to do something more important.
> When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.
>Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant
If we lived in a timeline where that was real, then if it was good it would have survived the test of time.
Not to rehash others’ comments, but I think you’re deeply wrong about sports in a way that is emblematic of the problem with the entire post. Sports are an incredibly thrilling art form to those who enjoy them, have a rich and ancient history, etc.
My guess is some people derive deep meaning/transcendent joy from MCU movies or watching porn or playing video games, but not many; most just slip into that because it’s easy. Most of those people would experience something they would judge to be superior if they did a harder but more rewarding activity—reading a great book, making great art, gazing at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Any objective analysis of art is silly—the MCU isn’t worse than Tolkien for everyone, and just because you hate Marvel movies and sports doesn’t make them worse than any other leisure hobby. The argument for things being “bad” to base your personality around can only be made with reference to counterfactuals you might find more meaningful.
Sports are bad, because the same things happen over and over every game??? That's a fundamental misunderstanding of sports and why people like them. Also, why is "the same thing happens every time" a knock against sports and not popular "nerd" things like Star Wars/LotR/MCU? They aren't really a shining example of originalness. But anyways I have 4 points of why people like sports:
1. Watching pro sports is a shared experience among everybody in the community - it's no coincidence that US teams represent universities or major US cities. You can feel like you have something in common with your neighbor and common happiness or pain to talk about.
2. If you play a sport, then you'll probably want to watch that sport too, because you can understand what the players are going through physically and mentally, be amazed at how good they are, and try to learn some new techniques.
3. Sports are a great way to get your kids to exercise more, learn to socialize with other kids, learn teamwork, etc. I would argue that no other hobby for kids accomplishes this.
4. Sports are an equal opportunity hobby/sports are very cheap and accessible to play (and watch). Yes football requires lots of equipment and organization... but anyone can buy a soccer ball or basketball and start playing at a public park right away. Other "nerd" entertainment like books, movies, board games, or video games cost more money.
Also I disagree with Scott's implication that an unoriginal thing is bad entertainment by default. He compares sports to a repetitive sitcom with thousands of episodes repeating the same thing... isn't that what actual sitcoms are? I could sketch out the typical setting, plot, and lines of an episode from Friends, The Office, Parks and Rec, Community, Seinfeld, etc. just like I could sketch out the typical plot of a basketball game. Seinfeld is commonly known as "a show about nothing". I really like those shows and I don't think they're bad because they're unoriginal sitcoms. Being original matters a little bit, but it's probably only one small part of being "good" entertainment.
For me, the act of collecting has always required the concept of repurposing or recontextualizing something. I’m a comic book collector, and fanatic enough about it to have spent decades working at a comic book store (that’s where you find your wheat pennies! work retail!), and I like collecting old comics in part because I know they were meant to be disposable—keeping them is in some way subverting their destiny.
Customers would come into the store saying, e.g. “I collect Bowen busts” (little statues of superheroes that used to come out roughly monthly) and I’d be annoyed. I didn’t say it, but what I was thinking was: “You’re not a collector; you just have an implicit contract with Bowen in which they put out a product and your purchase it.” This would go the same for “collectors” of Wolverine appearances or 1 in 100 variants. What’s the point of collecting something with the words “collector’s item” right on it?
I imagine the same thing would apply to coin collecting—getting coins from the mint, slabbed and labeled “for collectors” is no different from buying a box of cereal, while an old buffalo nickle was never intended to leave circulation. I guess you could say that its existence preceded its essence, if you were a existentialist.
Of course, you can also just collect comics because you want to read old series that have not been reprinted, such as Around the Block with Dunc and Lou or Arak Son of Thunder…
"When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me."
Does *playing* sports also seem bad by our usual standards of entertainment? Kids will kick a ball between goals every day without getting bored of it--it seems like that's a more established standard than sitcoms. I play ranked matches in SSBU and I watch pro matches on YouTube sometimes. My own skills and the skills of the pros I watch are continually changing, in addition to the metagame evolving. It doesn't feel repetitive.
> Admit that it would be indistinguishable from other myths, but say that the quality of the Mabinogion is in the style, language, and pacing, not the plot (but most English-speakers enjoy the Mabinogion in translation or summary; does that detract from this claim?)
I think a lot of what makes a story high-quality is in the details. Can the reader/listener/watcher empathize with the characters? Can they understand what's going on? Do the characters behave with some amount of consistency? Does the tone match the plot? Part of what MCU movies get criticism for is factors like these; if you translated the story, but managed to fix those problems, it would probably be considered good, but it's unclear to me how closely it would match the Marvel version.
But, I do think being old and being limited to text or even verbal recitation also is an advantage, because you get credit for creativity for being the first, and you get to avoid criticism like "it's just empty spectacle and bright lights" or "this is just trying to sell me toys." (On the other hand, maybe cynics of the past would say that their myths just exist to prop up the latest warlord who calls himself king, so it's entirely down a shift in perspective and context rather than anything about the story).
I guess the question I would ask is, "*why* are the classics considered the classics?" Is it just that they're just the oldest stories we still have from each culture? Or is there some other reason they survived, that they're actually the best stories from each civilization, and the worst ones were forgotten or we just don't talk about them? For really ancient cultures the former might be the case, but there's plenty of books from e.g. the 1800s that nobody remembers while there's a handful of very famous ones. Ant-Man might just be more like the forgotten morass than A Tale of Two Cities--comparing a 99.9% story to a 75% one doesn't make much sense in the first place.
I think it usually comes down to theme. Most high-brow works have something interesting to say. LOTR in particular strikes me as thematically dense. High-brow stories teach you enduring lessons; low-brow stories arrest your attention with sex and violence.
Obviously, execution is important too. But in the context of high-brow, I think it's more often a prerequisite than the main selling point. Whereas in low-brow, the execution has to carry the story. And there are certainly another class of stories whose main achievement was pioneering.
If sports were pre-scripted to have funny/interesting things happen in them, like a sitcom, they would become much more varied and rich and colourful - ie "good", the way Scott defines "good by the standards of entertainment", here - and not even the most die-hard sports fan would like them. Moreover, I would't imagine they'd appeal to Scott any more for all their added variety and intrigue. I don't think sports are enjoyed for the same reasons as most other forms of entertainment, and can't be measured along the same axes.
....yes, that also goes for reference-class tennis....
[Tried to expand on this below, but I think it sort-of came out more like a love letter to sports-in-general than anything else. Please skip the rest if you don't care why somebody might enjoy sport!]
One one level I think sports can be enjoyed as pure physical spectacle, like a ballet or a Saturn V launch; things that're impossibly far beyond anything you could do yourself and you can't help being impressed/mesmerised by the spectacle.
On another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of chess match, except with eg. lean figures in crash helmets with reaction times like houseflies on amphetamines, big angry-looking muscley men in tights, etc. etc. instead of little black and white figures. On this level it's not about driving the racing car or chasing the ball, it's about how the respective chess players - the race director in a Grand Prix, the hive mind formed from the brain pathways established in countless training sessions - place and move their (loud, brightly-coloured, expensive) pieces, and how their strategies unfold. Beneath the physical spectacle there are multiple striations of chess-like matches, from the speed-chess of a single match (or even a series of manoeuvres within a match) to the drawn-out psychological warfare of a ranked competitive season.
On yet another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of improvisation performance, on a spectrum somewhere between improv. comedy (heavily improvised but largely collaborative) and a tabletop role-playing game (only partially improvised but more adversarial). It's not that a certain thing was said or done so much as that it was said and done "right then!".
I think these factors can trade-off against one another depending on the sport and the observer:
A semiprofessional watching their own club might not derive all that much from the physical spectacle after a decade competing in the sport themself, but they might be much more appreciative of any tactical nuance or grand strategy going on in the underlying chess match.
..whereas a ten-year-old boy seeing their first match might not be able to recognise the feints and bluffs and gambits, but they might have a much stronger sense of "bloody hell, those guys are HUGE! And they're all dressed exactly the same! And look at them RUN!"
..whereas the Bouldering World Cup might have all the strategic depth of a game of Snap but there are some breathtaking feats of improvisation performed by competitors trying to solve a 3.5D geometry problem, on-the-fly, with their bodies.
There's at least one class of sports out there that are scripted for dramatic/funny things to happen: pro wrestling (WWE, AEW, etc). I think sports fans generally look down on this kind of entertainment, and its really only marketed to kids. I think this goes hand in hand with your statement that people like sports for different reasons than other forms of entertainment.
Yeah, I had that in the back of my mind, too! I guess I tend to think of such sports as more a kind of dance - albeit very rough shouty dance performed by very muscley people - or possibly even as a kind of circus act, than as a sport in the traditional sense. I think it nevertheless tends to be categorised as a sport because it evolved from traditional-sense-sports; essentially out of habit.
(Not intended as a criticism of wrestling - there's no reason why my thinking of it as dance/circus should be any more valid than anybody else's thinking of it as sport, of course! And never having seen more than about two minutes' worth of wrestling in my life - if anybody's opinion is less valid, it's probably mine..)
Probably already said by someone else: sports are substitute warfare. In a war, you and some other guys put on uniforms and then go try and beat crap out of some other guys in uniforms from a different town. Amazing how America's most popular sport, football, recreates this dynamic, right? No, no it's not, actually. So I guess there are two ways to look at your aversion to competitive sports, Scott. On the one hand, it probably speaks well for you that you apparently don't have this archaic mental architecture that gets excited by the prospect of defeating/dominating/humiliating other tribes that many of us do. On the other hand, what kind of weirdo doesn't enjoy that prospect at least a little bit?
> Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth ... I can think of a few possible ways to treat this experiment:
This thought experiment just seems very straightforward to me: the answer is Scott's #3. If you genuinely did a good job of this, your product would be a genuinely different work, whose quality could potentially be much higher than that of Ant-Man.
We see something analogous with film adaptations of novels. They are different works, whose quality can be very different from the source material. It is common for a great novel to have a shitty film adaptation. Occasionally, a shitty novel has a great film adaptation (e.g., The Godfather). But either way, there is no paradox.
Hence, Scott is describing as puzzling something that should not be at all puzzling.
Why would its quality be higher than Ant-Man? Why would Ant-Man, set in medieval Wales, naturally be higher quality than Ant-Man, set in the modern US?
It would be better than Ant-Man if you adapted it well and worse than Ant-Man if you adapted it badly. The setting isn't relevant. Translating Ant-Man into a Welsh myth is the same as just making a new Ant-Man movie.
I think I don't agree with you that the Marvel films are competent in execution. The Marvel films are low in quality because they are poorly made in a variety of ways. We don't need to distinguish between "quality" and "competence in execution", they are the same.
Ern Malley is a special case because the Malley poems are actually pretty good - the perpetrators of the hoax tried to write bad ones on purpose and failed. Nobody got tricked - the target of the hoax assessed their quality correctly, although he got a little too excited about it.
My claim is not that they *would* be; my claim is that they *could* be, depending on the skill and craft of the adapter. It has nothing to do with the setting. Mere change of setting wouldn't of itself increase or decrease the quality. The skill of the adapter could certainly change the quality, though.
The example I gave of The Godfather illustrates the point. The source novel is below average for commercial fiction. The film adaptation is well above average for films. The explanation is simple: Francis Ford Coppola is a much better director than Mario Puzo is a novelist. No puzzle, and no evidence that quality isn't real.
There are some interesting aspects to the latest Ant-man that have counterparts either in myth or at least in High Fantasy: we journey to a magical hidden world where one of our companions [Janet Van Dyne] turns out to have been a very important person in the struggles of that land. There's a lot of other stuff that services the Ant-Man comic tone, and the upcoming Kang plot, but that core seems like it could translate to myth.
> The Ern Malley hoax ... makes me even more doubtful.
This is another pseudo-paradox. The whole point of the Ern Malley hoax was that the thing purported to be high-quality (the poetry of Angry Penguins) was not in fact high-quality. In other words, it wasn't simply the Ern Malley poems that were fake, it was the originals being parodied that were also fake, and the purpose of the hoax was precisely to demonstrate that.
I "like" and "enjoy" some things I don't think are "good," which I've long realized doesn't quite make sense.
But to take video games as an example: I've spent quite a bit of time on Cat Cafe, a phone game about cute cats running a cafe. I clearly "like" it. I also "like" Outer Wilds, an indie game whose ending made me weep with sorrowful joy. I enjoy both games, but only one is good.
Outer Wilds is good, and not just enjoyable, because it makes me feel deeper and more complex feelings, because it does what it does in a more interesting way (I could write an essay about it), because it requires more investment (you get better at playing it over time)...
What I was trying to get at with my comment (listing popular 70s-00s superhero movies) was not to quibble about the date that nerdy things became popular, it was to say that superhero movies have never been nerdy.
Nerdiness is more about how you engage with the subject matter than the subject matter itself, and watching a two-hour superhero or sci-fi movie once in a while is the sort of low-commitment engagement that's normal and socially acceptable.
Watching a Batman movie is normal, reading a Batman comic is weird. Watching a Star Wars movie is normal, reading the novelisation of a Star Wars movie is weird. Reading fantasy novels is weird, but watching a TV show based on a fantasy novel is fine (and if the TV show is popular enough it might even make reading the novels normal too, for a while).
Why? Because reading is low-status? No, because deep involvement with shallow material is low status, and reading a book about something shallow is a deeper level of involvement than just seeing the movie.
That's why I have a problem with the MCU movies being one of the central examples of nerdy stuff in the essay -- they're really not that nerdy, which is why they're popular. Superhero material isn't intrinsically nerdy, it's just sufficiently shallow that historically most forms of engagement with the material (ie reading comic books or collecting figurines) have been nerdy.
Older superhero movies went out of their way to not be nerdy. They focused on the handful of characters a mass audience would have heard of, and regularly winked to the audience to remind them that it wasn't taking the subject matter at face value or anything. The 60s Batman movie was one giant wink (though that era was brilliant in being adventure for kids and comedy for their parents). The first Reeve Superman film has bits like Clark doing a double take at the open pay phone when looking for a place to change, comments on his "bad outfit, man", and Lois as the mouthpiece for adult cynicism (who of course is won over by a simple heroism that's intentionally played as strange and out of place).
The MCU starts with some of the same apologetic tone (no one uses the name "Iron Man" till the end of the first film, Thor explaining that Asgardians are aliens and their magic is really science). But once it hits its stride it stops doing that, and presents the salad bowl of weirdness that comics universes became decades earlier, without preliminaries and with much less handholding. Actual magic, space gods for which Earth is a nursery in one case and an egg in another, centuries worth of weirdness, conspiracies, aliens, and superpowers dating from before Tony Stark's comparatively tame technology-based heroing. "I'm a Clarke's Law alien" Thor becomes "I'm the God of Thunder" Thor.
By definition, as blockbusters the movies can't appeal only to nerds. But they made mass audiences appreciate a style of storytelling and worldbuilding that *had* been fundamentally nerdy, and that previous superhero outings had intentionally ignored or watered down to make them palatable.
(Or mass audiences were ready to appreciate it due to changes in the zeitgeist, and the MCU took advantage of that. But the failure of other attempts to click the same way suggests that Kevin Feige et al. know something they don't.)
I feel like the MCU movies have been an experiment in "how far can we push the nerdy shit before the mass audience loses interest?"
Turns out the answer is right around Infinity War. A whole plot based around collecting Magical Bullshit Gems That Can Do Literally Anything is fine, but the whole "Oh look now we've got multiverses" thing was a step too far.
I'm an old school fan of the pre-1986 DC multiverse who definitely feels some multiverse fatigue at this point. (Especially since the DC Berlantiverse treaded a lot of that ground on the small screen already.) But I don't know that that's the central issue.
I think the Infinity Saga as it shaped up is a tough act to follow, especially given the genre's tendency to want to Go Bigger. They've also lost some key talent and had some lackluster outings.
That said, I don't think they're doomed. There's a lot of space between "unpredecented cinematic phenomenon" and unprofitable or uninteresting. And there's still plenty of room for one of the next run of characters to catch the unexpected fire that Tony Stark turned out to have.
And if not? Nothing lasts forever. I'm guessing there'll still be a much bigger space for superheroes without training wheels as a genre than there was before, even if the MCU itself spins its wheels or takes a Star Wars style pause in big releases.
Yeah I think the Marvel movies have started on the long journey to becoming a niche nerd interest.
When you need a whiteboard to explain exactly how the Ant Man 9 continuity fits into the timeline established by Alligator Loki 3 then we'll be fully there.
A little while ago I stumbled on some reviews of the 1982 "Conan the Barbarian" movie. The critics were aghast that it actually took itself seriously. They'd been expecting something campy, deliberately schlocky, filled with sly winks at sophisticated viewers so that everyone important knew not to take it seriously. But instead the movie played it straight, took itself seriously, and the critics viewed this as, ironically, barbarians at the gate.
"A nerd is a geek who would rather be right than get laid." There are fanatics who like their special interest even in a vacuum – call them "geeks." And there is another type of fanatic who uses his interest as a tool of aggression – call him a "nerd" – as in: given the slightest pretext (or, often, apropos of nothing) the nerd will gloat over his superior knowledge of his special interest, apparently deriving more satisfaction from feeling smarter than what he loses by alienating people in the process.
I definitely recognize both types of people you are describing, but don't think that calling the second type a "nerd" matches the common usage of the term.
Hmm. I find all of these categories incomprehensible and not corresponding to any social world I know. Perhaps I'm too old. It just seems like video games and comic books -- things which in my time were associated entirely with childhood -- are now things that many adults like. It makes me feel like there are no adults anymore, but I'm pretty sure it just means I'm old.
I think that's just because it's easier to get kids to adopt new mediums than adults, so often what happens is that a new medium starts making primarily kids' stuff, and then becomes more adult as the initial audience begins to age. There is no intrinsic reason to the medium why sequential pictures that tells a story or games made out of software should only be made for children.
There was at least a lag after the initial audience. I grew up playing Space Invaders, Pac Man, and Donkey Kong, but by the time I was in high school video games seemed childish to most of my peer group. Then some in my cohort picked up playing video games again as adults.
There were plenty of similar genres in the past ... but the source material wasn’t as frequently coming from things more associated with youth. Westerns, Greek/biblical epics, and medieval nights to take a few examples have plenty of parallels to super hero or sci-fi/fantasy movies. One thing that seems to have gone unobserved by more mainstream culture was the wave of “adult” comics as graphical novels starting in the 80s, that actually is the source for much of the current stuff (at least the better parts) rathe than youth targeted materials -but given they often share the same characters that isn’t always apparent
The problem is that you are conflating production quality and social status in the term “quality” sometimes we just have genre preferences... but often this is heavily intwined with social preferences
If you want to find original nerds in the wild, go to a hamfest. I think that might one of the few places where original style 70s nerds still exists and haven't been polluted with the current pop-culture version of nerd.
I can vouch for this, although Texas HAMs are more often a particular kind of good ol' boy than a pure nerd. But certainly the hamfest draws many sorts of people forth from their lab and/or lair.
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
C. S. Lewis had some thoughts related to this, in his essay "Lilies that Fester." The essay was actually taking it from the other end: at the time Lewis was responding, in part, to a society where the fashion was that "high culture" is snobbish and pretentious. But he does spend some time trying to describe what "culture" is, and what it isn't, and compares it directly to enjoying lower forms of art like "Fantasy and Science Fiction" (and he should know, he wrote books in both of those genres).
>"The talk is inimical to the thing talked of, likely to spoil it where it exists
and to prevent its birth where it is unborn.
"Now culture seems to belong to the same class of dangerous and embarrassing words. Whatever else it may mean, it certainly covers deep and genuine enjoyment of literature and the other arts. (By using the word enjoyment 1 do not mean to beg the vexed question about the role of pleasure in our experience of the arts. I mean frui, not delectari; as we speak of a man "enjoying" good health or an estate.) Now if I am certain of anything in the world, I am certain that while a man is, in this sense, enjoying Don Giovanni or the Oresteia he is not caring one farthing about culture. Culture? the irrelevance of it! For just as to be fat or clever means to be fatter or cleverer than most, so to be cultured must mean to be more so than most, and thus the very word carries the mind at once to comparisons, and groupings, and life in society. And what has all that to do with the horns that blow as the statue enters, or Clytaemnestra crying, "Now you have named me aright'? In Howard's End Mr. E. M. Forster excellently describes a girl listening to a symphony. She is not thinking about culture: nor about "Music"; nor even about "this music." She sees the whole world through the music. Culture, like religion, is a name given from outside to activities which are not themselves interested in culture at all, and would be ruined the moment they were."
...
"Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a grocer's. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, "That was a nice cup o' tea, dearie, that was. Did me good." Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
"'The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.'
"I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion; perhaps, even, the wild dog to the over-tame poodle or Peke. "
In the same essay he also makes a good point about seeking out something in order to "develop your personality":
>"At this point some may protest that by culture they do not mean the "enjoyments" themselves, but the whole habit of mind which such experiences, re-acting upon one another, and reflected on, build up as a permanent possession. And some will wish to include the sensitive and enriching social life which, they think, will arise among groups of people who share this habit of mind. But this reinterpretation leaves me with the same difficulty. I can well imagine a lifetime of such enjoyments leading a man to such a habit of mind, but on one condition; namely, that he went to the arts for no such purpose. Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry. For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end. The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience. The desirable habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as a by-product, unsought. The idea of making it one's aim suggests that shattering confidence which Goethe made to Eckermann: "In all my youthful amours the object I had in view was my own ennoblement." To this, I presume, most of us would reply that, even if we believe a love-affair can ennoble a young man, we feel sure that a love-affair undertaken for that purpose would fail of its object. Because of course it wouldn't be a love-affair at all."
If you take someone who likes video games in genre X and force them to review a video game in disliked genre Y, their review is likely to include the criticism that the game in genre Y is "repetitive". In most cases, I think an objective analysis would conclude that genres X and Y are approximately equally repetitive, and I think what's actually going on is that people who are enjoying themselves don't notice (or don't mind) repetition as much.
Complaints that some movies are "pulling your strings" sound a bit similar to me. I bet there's a strong tendency to perceive unsuccessful attempts to engage you as "string-pulling" but successful attempts as "providing actual value" (quality).
I don't want to go too far on this point, because I also think that humans have exploitable bugs that you can use to get them to pay more attention to a thing without actually providing more value/enjoyment/etc, and I think "string-pulling" is a pretty valid criticism of media that does this. (In fact, I wish our culture criticized this more!)
Some things I would consider examples of this: games with daily login rewards; books or TV shows that go out of their way to end every episode/chapter on a cliffhanger; intriguing clues that don't actually point to anything.
Does someone want to argue that the MCU has an unusually-high concentration of "string-pulling" in THAT sense? My first impression is that it doesn't, but I'd be interested to hear arguments that it does.
Eh, the nature of the MCU where you're meant to watch every movie/show so you'll understand the films you actually are about is kinda string-pully. Not the worst offender, but it's there.
I see how that can feel manipulative, but at the same time, that feels a bit like complaining that you can't read only the "good" chapters out of a novel.
Sure, it'd be nice if you could skip parts you're less interested in without that affecting your enjoyment of the other parts. But there are also clear non-manipulative reasons why you might want things to build on each other, and those goals are in tension. It's not obvious to me that the MCU is much off the Pareto-frontier of that tradeoff.
A novel contains, or ought to contain, all the chapters you need to understand and enjoy it. If a novel requires more than its own contents and common knowledge to understand and enjoy, e.g. if it is volume N of a continuity-heavy series or if it is a tie-in to a TV series, it ought to be advertised as such. And usually published novels meet these requirements. Books can in this respect be judged by their cover.
And if the cover says, "to really understand this book, you'll need to have read all the previous books in the series, *and* watched the TV series, and watched these two other series and dozen web shorts and read the following supplementary materials", probably a lot of potential readers are going to be turned off by that.
You and I may understand that the MCU is now at that level. But I'm one of the ones who is turned off by that. Also, the mass-market advertising for MCU products doesn't really explain that part really well. See also Star Wars.
Taking your analysis as a given, it seems like your complaint is some combination of "I don't feel they adequately communicated their level of connectedness" and "I personally don't like this level of connectedness".
I don't want to stop you from making either of those complaints, but I don't feel they fall into the category I'm talking about. I wouldn't describe them as "exploiting bugs in human software to capture attention without offering value in return".
Depends what the thing is. Being a chess grandmaster is quite high status, being really really good at eating baked beans with chopsticks is quite low status.
It’s a continuous thing, you might have “read a few interesting Quanta articles” as your only top-tier thing, have an oil painting you get back to every few months, and go bike riding a little each week.
I agree with the list as a description of the prestige of different activities, but I agree with someone above that Hoffdorf spaces are fine for a while but aren’t a great life passion. I would say a personality arises out of doing things for reasons that are important to you, but I’m biased as someone wishing the time I waste here was worthwhile.
I hung out on the Internet in 1997 when USENET was still a thing and played console RPGs before Final Fantasy 7 made them mainstream. God, I sound like such a hipster...
"The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
What is Scott looking for when he goes to a party and talks with new people? (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party) It seems the driving factor is for something "interesting", which is how he judges his own success at being received. I think that's defined differently depending on what your background is in all the ways Scott complains about some things as 'boring' that others shell out lots of money to be entertained by. It's not that those people are paying money to be bored. It's that Scott's definition of 'interesting' diverges from theirs.
For those who have a difficult time understanding how other people can enjoy sports (while still acknowledging that, somehow, those folks do enjoy sports ...) I would like to suggest spending some time on the YouTube channel "SEC Shorts." This mostly works if one understands football at least a little bit. It works better if one also has some sense for SEC rivalries, but this is not necessary. Being an SEC football fan is *totally* unnecessary.
And the channel is a bunch of short (~5 minutes) FUNNY videos that cover each week of a given SEC season. The videos are comedy gold, but for understanding how folks might care about their local sports-ball team I recommend also reading the comments.
Why do you need to "build an identity" at all? What even is an "identity"? Baffled by the underlying concepts here. I literally don't understand what "building an identity" means, it's just a blur of static. Somebody please explain this to me from first principles.
I think that an "identity" is the thing that you can loudly proclaim you are, because you don't like the conclusions that they would come to if they were left to form their own opinion of you naturally. It's an exoskeleton that you build around your true self to distract people, maybe even yourself, from who you really are. As I wrote in another comment, being "the ska guy" is preferable to being "the fat guy with a lazy eye".
If you don't feel the need to construct an identity it probably just means you're a well-adjusted person who is comfortable with himself. As a grown-ass adult I'm perfectly comfortable with my natural self, but as a teenager I was perhaps not so much.
I think everyone has an idea in their head of what an ideal person would be like. They would do interesting work they enjoy and that has a positive impact on the world; they’d enjoy spending time with other people in their lives, and support them and learn from them; they’d have interesting hobbies; and of course, none of this would go to their heads. That person would have lots of things demanding their time (though they’d take time for themselves sometimes), and they’d have great reasons for the things they do; but they’d be adaptable enough to change their routine at a moment’s notice if something else important came up. They’d know what was important and why.
We aren’t this person, but we want to be. That creates a tension. We want to think we’re at least sort of close to that person, so we have an answer when we ask ourselves how and how much we’re like that person. The answer we give is our identity.
It's marketing, branding, etc. Personally, I like to think of it as an API.
E.g. if you're a man and you put on a skirt, other men might try to court you. If you identify as a computer geek, luddites are going to ask you to put them back "on the line". If you wear a Black Sabbath t-shirt every day, you're more likely to find other metalheads.
The comment about sports having the same plot over and over again is pretty weird, since one of the hallmarks of nerdery is obsessive rewatching. Soccer games that I watch follow a recognizable pattern, for sure, but they’re not nearly as repetitive as each rewatching I’ve done of Star Wars.
It struck me that hipster and nerd activities differ greatly in gender segregation. Male nerds play Magic: The Gathering while female nerds write fan fiction: they don't interact much, and when they do, it's generally bad. I'm not really up to speed on what hipsters do these days, but I understand it's normal for straight people to meet romantic partners there. Trying that at a nerd activity where the sex ratio is 4:1 is a sick joke.
One nerd activity that seems fairly evenly divided in gender is anime. My college anime club was probably about 50:50 in its gender ratio. Admittedly, the type of anime that people like and certain activities within the fandom can be heavily gender-segregated, but the umbrella of "anime" seems able to bring these groups close enough together to have a common identity and community, at least in certain spaces like anime clubs, and there are also plenty of series that both genders almost universally enjoy (if for different reasons, i.e. liking the action vs enjoying shipping the characters). Online anime communities seem to self-segregate a bit more based on these gender-specific interests (yaoi fangirls vs mecha otaku, maybe), but there still seems to be some common ground of cross-gender socializing.
The joke about the last bit is how many early fujoshi were into robot anime... Early Comiket had a ton of women who liked shipping in the Robot Romance shows, Gundam, and especially Godmars.
As someone in the demo to have snooty tastes/interests, I've always pushed back, thinking it's mostly a pose to signal intelligence, wealth, etc. I don't doubt the proponents really do prefer X (whether it's pour over coffee or derida) to Y (sportsball nsync). But still think it's all about signaling, tribalism, etc. Back in the day, it was easy, if you had more than one set of clothes, or they were clean, or you could speak properly, you were elite, anyone could tell. Now everyone has clothes, speaks roughly the same, etc. So you've got digger to make clear your Bay area or NYC intelligentsia with the right kind of education, politics, etc. And I love the folk who don't get that sportsball is the best value for your entertainment attention span dollar. It's like an NFT, unless you sat there in (quasi) real time and watch playoff Jimmy destroy the bucks, you don't get it (it was phenomenal).
> it doesn't seem mysterious that some people eg like Star Wars, or even love Star Wars. What seems mysterious to me is when this expresses itself as desire to buy thousands of dollars of figurines in the original boxes, or memorize the stats of every class of ship in the Imperial Navy, or something else which doesn't seem very fun on its own merits.
With respect, that's just you not understanding what is and isn't fun.
> Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc
For 70s usage of the word "nerd", we have the theme song to Revenge of the Nerds:
𝘔𝘰𝘮 𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴 𝘶𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 '𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘣𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘪𝘳
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘯 𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘨𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘺-𝘥𝘶𝘵𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘉𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘰𝘯-𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘞𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵-𝘈 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴, 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴' 𝘱𝘦𝘵𝘴
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘦'𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘴
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴, 𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘚𝘰 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢 𝘥𝘰𝘳𝘬, 𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘻 𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘨𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘥, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘏𝘦𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘫𝘰𝘬𝘦'𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶, 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴
This is so explicit that it makes me wonder if the movie's audience might not have been expected to be familiar with the term. We learn a lot about nerds:
1. They are primarily defined by their unpopularity and social awkwardness. Girls hate them.
2. They wear terrible clothes and need glasses. They are unattractive in every other way as well; when they laugh, it sounds stupid instead of infectious. Also, girls hate them.
3. They do well in school and are popular with teachers.
4. They are variously referred to as nerds, dorks, spazzes, and geeks; these are either interchangeable terms or ones that frequently cooccur.
5. As a group, they contrast with "jocks" and "beautiful people".
I have to take issue with some assumptions that Scott would like to make - sci-fi fandom, interest in math, interest in computers, maleness, and poor social skills all do still go together. (Nonconformity with mainstream interests can just be considered an example of poor social skills.) Nothing has happened to the nerd cluster. The typical sci-fi fan is only "closer" to being a socially-adept young woman in the sense that they might be slightly more prevalent now than they once were; there are not enough of them to have shifted the average, median, or mode in a noticeable way. [1] Fantasy really has developed a lot of female fans, but not sci-fi.
Something else that probably plays into this is a redefinition of what can be called "sci-fi". Compare what's happened to "roguelike" games, where the genre still exists and is still called roguelike, but if you search for "roguelike" you find a bunch of games that have nothing in common with Rogue or roguelikes, and people think they should be called "roguelike" too.
So, according to me, the nerd cluster is still around, just as obvious and just as unpopular as ever. "Successor clusters" is the wrong way to think about things; the nerds are still around and haven't divided into new clusters - rather, other clusters have been named according to sharing a single common trait with the nerd cluster, as if nerds made up a significant portion of those other clusters. But that was never true; it's a misperception that occurred when the names were applied. (Compare, again, "roguelikes".)
Use of computers should not be confused with interest in computers or with approval of the people who do things with them. For this I'll call on my memory of a story from Hacker News from someone who developed an anonymous chat platform restricted to his high school, which quickly became very popular -- and who immediately learned, by attempting to join random conversations about his platform, that being responsible for creating and maintaining a tool everyone loved didn't mean he could rise above the level of "actively unpopular".
[1] I'm still sore about Scott making the unsupported assertion in an earlier post that "the rich" isn't generally viewed as a pejorative because its usual usage isn't pejorative. I think this is plainly false; I'll leave a followup comment with citations.
OK, "the rich". Here are all the relevant examples from the first 15 web domains that turn up relevant results in the News on the Web corpus. I append my personal interpretation of how pejorative the usage is on a five-point scale from -2 (strongly pejorative) to 2 (strongly approving). 0 is neutral.
(Notes: a "relevant" result is one in which "the rich" refers to a class of people characterized by money. I'm doing this by domain rather than by result in an attempt to balance two concerns: first, doing a set number of results leaves the search wide open to being dominated by a single source with an agenda, which biases usage. But second, doing one result per source would also give an unrealistic picture of the balance of usage: loud people who constantly complain about "the rich" really do contribute more to the balance of usage of the term "the rich" with their numerous complaints than quiet people who mostly talk about other things do.)
1.A. Technically, we have solved a problem by creating another one. Aviation globally is in the business of freedom. Here, we have made it further elitist, and only for the rich that can afford routine trips. [-1]
2.A. I think that this distribution of wealth would even be worse if [the] wealth of the rich concealed in offshore accounts would be included. [-2]
2.B. The recourse to violence should not and cannot be the only solution. But the rich must accept that the consequence of continuing income inequality will result in violence. [-2]
2.C. The usual solution of the rich is to have economic growth which will then allow the whole population to have a more comfortable life. This is the "trickle-down" philosophy which says that as the rich get richer, their wealth will begin to be shared by the rest of the population. This theory has underestimated the selfishness of the wealthy class. [-2]
2.D. In the Philippines, for example, the children of the rich can afford to send their children to the universities with the highest standards like La Salle, UP and Ateneo. Or even send them to foreign universities. The masses either cannot afford tertiary education or must send their children to colleges and universities with inferior quality. This perpetuates the cycle of poverty. [-1]
3.A. I know of one resident in my estate who owns nine cars. The rich will continue buying more cars and leave them idle at home. Is that the best use of a scarce resource? [-2]
4.A. They have a lots of money. It is unfair when the rich can do whateva their want by breaking law and settling it by paying a summons [-2]
5.A. "A Diamond Is Forever" is a legendary slogan that was coined by a copywriter in the 1940s. It went on to be recognised as a fitting slogan as it connected with the rich and reminded that diamonds are a memorial to love and must be treasured forever. [0]
6.A. "Since the pandemic begun to Nov 2022, billionaires in India have seen their wealth surge by 121%, or INR 3608 crore per day in real terms (Around INR 2.5 crore every minute). The rich have done well for themselves, while the number of hungry Indians has increased from 19 crores to 35 crores," an Oxfam report said. Such a predatory shift in India's economic equity and social justice would not have been possible except with the active participation of civil servants at different levels with their newly acquired 'management' skills. [-2]
6.B. Ergo, although in India the poor are becoming richer, the society is also becoming more unequal, that is, the rich are becoming richer much faster. New World Wealth, a Johannesburg-based company, published a report claiming that India is the second-most unequal country in the world, with millionaires controlling 54% of the wealth. [-2]
7.A. While former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said demonetisation disrupted India's growth, former Chief Economic Advisor Dr Krishnamurthy Subramanian, while referring to a research paper, said the move had the effect of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. [0]
7.B. The rich in Pakistan will find ways to convert their cash into gold or USD but they will not declare their true wealth [-2]
8.A. Ethnic and political chauvinism is taking a toll on the lives of ordinary people. The rich amass the lion's share of land and resources, while the poor are silenced with various propaganda slaps. There is oppression and resistance in multiple forms. [-2]
9.A. ...to be incorrect; poor people may pay larger shares of their income than the rich, but it will still be true that the relatively small shares of income paid... [0, article was paywalled]
10.A. To be clear, this work is not about chasing tax avoiders, nor is it about attacking the rich. Wealthy New Zealanders are usually hard-working and creative people who comply with current rules. [-1, the usage explicitly casts "the rich" as targets, while disclaiming that as the speaker's current goal]
10.B. New reports from IRD and the Treasury conclude the obvious: Labour's economic mismanagement has hurt everyday New Zealanders while the rich have got richer, National's Finance spokesperson Nicola Willis says. [-2. Followup: "The Government's decision to embark on a money-printing, borrowing and spending frenzy has led to massive capital gains for some, at the expense of everyday workers"]
9.B. Our tax rules are fair in that the rich do pay tax in New Zealand and in general a person's tax increases as income increases even if income is more widely defined than it is under our income tax legislation [0]
9.C. ...would only go so far towards taxing the rich more (assuming this is the goal). Taxing unrealised gains brings up... [-1, paywalled again]
9.D. ...want to get caught up in tax change they're unequipped to side-step like the rich can. [-2, paywalled]
11.A. Once again I gently suggest that you just buy a house to secure your financial future. No follow-up questions, please. An effective tax rate of 9.5% on annual earnings of $14.6b from just 311 individuals means that any move to bring that effective rate closer to the average earner (32%) would see massive increases in tax revenue each year. As revenue minister David Parker said while presenting the findings, the project was not about "chasing tax avoiders" or "attacking the rich". It's simply a long-overdue step in understanding just how unfair our tax system is. [-1]
12.A. The key findings from that report, prepared by Sapere Research Group, were that the rich pay most of the tax collected in New Zealand. [0]
12.B. Parker said the report was not about chasing tax avoiders or attacking the rich. [-1]
12.C. A poor attempt to demonise the rich. Labour play to a voter base that is blue collar. They will lap-up anything that targets those at the other end of the spectrum. [-1]
-- OK, I'm seeing a lot of news coverage of the same press release about a battle over whether to tax unrealized capital gains in New Zealand. I'm modifying my methods mid-experiment to exclude anything else from New Zealand. --
13.A. This nonsense fills our newspapers. Little wonder. Why would the assorted billionaires who decide what we read each morning want us thinking about taxing the rich so we can fix the mess the Tory Party – which they basically own – made of the country. [-2]
14.A. In some areas, including the rural county where I live, it can take months or even years for homeowners to get a permit to build a garage for their car. But apparently it is permissible for a billionaire to pollute a small city and to cause a number of native species to flee a particularly lovely section of the Rio Grande Valley in search of a quieter and less disruptive new home. F Scott Fitzgerald said that the rich are different from you and me; I suppose it's naive to observe that the rich also seem to have different zoning laws. [-2]
14.B. Every time a SpaceX rocket explodes, I wonder if we should tax the rich more [-1]
15.A. [Biden] then goes on to take aim at his Republican rivals, saying that "around the country MAGA extremists are lining up" to take away personal liberties and cutting social security while lowering taxes for the rich. [-1]
I notice that I have two separate kinds of -1 rating: one for a speaker expressing milder-than-average personal disapproval, and one for a speaker using an expression such as "attack the rich", "tax the rich", or "eat the rich" which, in my view, inherently implies that, in normal idiomatic usage, the rich are bad people who need to get what's coming to them. This second group is informative about usage of the phrase "the rich" while being differently informative about what people think of, or at least what people are currently saying about, rich people.
My sample has 27ish usages from 15 sources. 13 of those are overwhelmingly negative (-2) and 4-5 more are less negative than that, but still negative. 4-5 use a negative idiom targeting the rich. 5 samples are neutral and zero are positive about the rich. Feel free to post your own interpretations.
Thus, the median usage is somewhat disapproving, and comical political caricatures, at 13/27, came very close to being the median usage. The comical caricatures are, by far, the modal usage of the phrase. Two-thirds of usages make it clear that the speaker disapproves of "the rich". "The rich" is, in this sample, NEVER USED in a positive sense, but there are a handful of neutral uses. (In reality, you do see positive uses, almost always cast as explicit defenses against the far more common demonizations.)
I can only conclude that "share of usage in which the term is overtly used as a term of abuse" is irrelevant to whether a term is fit for use in polite company.
The key piece from that song, in my opinion, is that a nerd is not physically attractive. It has very little to do with their interests. And I think that explains a lot about why ugly nerds get offended when attractive people call themselves nerds because they share interests. We can come up with any number of theories about interests or popularity or social status or whatever but when the rubber meets the road, needs are unattractive. Tying your identity to interests is one way to overcome your unattractiveness or find a group of peers where your unattractiveness matters less. If that identity is invaded by attractive people, you will probably not be too happy about it!
Yes that’s true. In my mind “physically” was a stand in for a number of different traits other than “bad at socializing”, but of course I didn’t specify that!
Another thought I just had: so much of what defines a nerd or a jock or a popular person, etc is tied up closely to how those terms are defined during adolescence, specifically high school and some what college. Of course these become less relevant later in life. We all probably know of at least a few people who were nerds in high school but are now successful people with a lovely family and an enviable life very different than what they had during adolescence. And also the opposite- the jock that peaked in high school. Actors are often thought of as very “cool” and they are definitely popular, but so many of them were theater nerds! But money and fame can paper over a lot of those warts. It’s possible the rise of the tech industry is doing the same thing for other categories of nerd.
"For example, Google tells us that among the respondents who read science fiction, fifty-seven percent are male. According to the 2011 U.S. census, the population of internet users is forty-eight percent male, so even after accounting for internet use biases, science fiction readers are ever-so-slightly male. But before we go hog-wild creating male titles, be aware the 2013 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Review tells us women buy more books and spend more per book. In the end, assume your reader is just as likely to be male as female."
As noted by Ross, and implied by the name of the organization he is representing, "science fiction" is often but not always taken as a shorthand for "science fiction and fantasy". So it's not clear what you are measuring when you ask people whether they read "science fiction".
I believe that when the distinction is made explicit, science fiction winds up with a predominantly male audience and fantasy predominately female, but in neither case overwhelmingly so.
Another point in favour of collecting being well and alive: fashion (especially bags and jewellery). I used to lurk on counterfeit fashion reddit (it got nuked in 2021 or so due to being illegal activity). People have amassed huge collections of counterfeit bags.
They know they're fake. They're not trying to pass them off as real. The majority opinion was that sale of a fake as real was scumbag activity, they appreciate fakes as fakes. But a lot of people described the thrill of the chase and a bit of a gambling element - finding a so-and-so from this collection in a seller's album, clandestinely messaging someone on some message app, scrutinising the article for faults and inaccuracies, the chance that your bag would get seized by customs....
I get the impression that a lot of people could afford a couple of genuine articles, but walking into a store and waving the credit card almost feels too easy after you've bought fakes.
The missing piece for understanding love of sport is tribalism. Sport may be boring for a neutral (at least the 50th game in the season may be) but for a tribalistic fan every moment can feel heightened. It may be analogous to having a truckload of money on the result.
The Argentina fans of the most recent world cup were never bored. Even if the games had been uneventful.
Further, we love _live_ sport. It allows mass synchrony. In fact, it's a superstimulis.
Tribalism and mass synchrony can leave the level of the profane and approach the sacred. Many sporting events have a religious feel to them. It can fill our god-shaped hole. Again, imagine the Argentina fans at the last world cup.
I'd cite traditional evo psych arguments for why tribalism and synchrony appeal to us.
Regarding coin collecting and the possibility of finding rare coins in change, I wonder if someone has compared the drop in popularity in America vs Europe/UK.
If we hypothesize that encountering rare coins in the wild is what mints coin collectors, then I'd speculate that American numismatics would be healthier. Every American coin every minted is still legal tender, and since Americans hate change, every denomination has had the same dimensions for the past 157 years(excepting dollar coins). A quarter minted in 1867 would be counted correctly if you tried to buy a bag of chips in a vending machine today. Thus, despite Gresham's law and generations of collectors, there are still coins in circulation with both intrinsic bullion value and coins are 'historic' and exciting, especially when comparing to the age of the country.
A random anecdote from a google search: this dude has obsessively searched through 320,800 nickels(https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=198187) records that he has a 1.3% rate of interesting coins, and a 1/5000 chance of finding a nickel older than the current Jefferson ones. He has found nickels dating back to the 1800s, and calculates that there still are on the order of a million century plus old nickels not sitting dusty in a collection, but actively circulating.
Those odds don't seem hobby killing bad by themselves. I'd expect that if I used cash ever, especially on a daily basis, I'd see at least one rare coin in some denomination every month. And even in my very occasional, once a month use of cash, I think I did get a wheat penny as change in past 5 years. I have an uncle who is one of these coin roll hunters and has found some legitimately historic coins, like 3 cent coins from the 1860s and silver coins from the 1890s.
Contrast this to Europe or the UK, where adopting the Euro/decimalization meant that all older coins were taken out of circulation cause they no longer were legal tender and the sizes of coin rolls and vending machines didn't match up. In Europe there is a close to 0% chance of finding a silver coin worth more than face value, a 0% chance of find a coin that could have been spent by Abraham Lincoln(duh, he never went to Europe, insert historical figure from non-USA country here), only modern coins and the commemorative state-quarter equivalents. Maybe there is some other effect where the deep history of Europe muddle this comparison, so looking at Australia, which is a former English colony but has only coins since 1966 in circulation, might prove our hypothesis whether coin collectors are created by encountering rare coins.
There _is_ a new world for nerd that means essentially all of the same stuff as the 1970s meaning, and it is "neckbeard".
Despised and cancelled, just as the nerds were too awkward to know (or often, care) what to say and when; and of obscure taste (whether obscure because bad or obscure because impenetrable).
Neckbeard take: If you hear that word and immediately think, "no, nerds are nice but misunderstood but a neckbeard is actually an awful person because of..."—then consider that maybe in the 1970's you'd've felt the same about nerds.
I still find myself very confused by the idea of "building an identity" and wanting to "identify with things". I don't deny people do it, clearly they do. I just don't get it. I don't have any urge to reduce myself down to some small lossy set of things, and I don't understand why you would or what problem that solves. It's certainly possible I'm just misunderstanding and this is actually something I do, but I don't think so.
Identity in this sense is basically just “which aspects of your self are you passionate about?” When someone asks “what sort of person are you?” what do you answer? What do you like to do and invest your time in that is not just “generic human”? If you had 30 seconds to describe what makes you interesting, what would you point to?
It rarely, except in truly obsessively-to-a-pathological-fault cases, should look like “reducing yourself to a small lossy sense of things”.
I don't know if your questions are meant to be literal or just illustrate a point, but taking them literally:
> When someone asks “what sort of person are you?” what do you answer?
Nobody has ever asked me that question, or similar, and I would find it pretty weird if they did. When I meet people for the first time usually it's either specific questions like "what do you do?", or just open-ended conversation about whatever. Immediately jumping to a question like that and expecting an answer which fully sums up who I am seems weirdly forward, aggressive and impatient.
> What do you like to do and invest your time in that is not just “generic human”?
A bunch of things, but I don't really "identify" with them. They're just one aspect of me. And they change over time.
> If you had 30 seconds to describe what makes you interesting, what would you point to?
I've never considered this before, because what is the situation in which I would need to do that?
it's advertising, but for individuals rather than megacorps. Coca-Cola doesn't want you to understand the minutia of their business operations. They want you to understand "sweetened acid and cute polarbears".
I agree. Like you and others have mentioned, I think lots of people enjoy their hobby per se. Sam's essay has a lot of stuff to untangle.
I think you misunderstood my point about "megacorps", though. I wasn't claiming that geeks' hobbies are induced/hijacked by companies (though they certainly can be). I was claiming it's useful for an individual to build an identity *for the same reasons* that it's useful for a company to build brand.
(person -> identity -> status)
is analogous to
(company -> brand -> profit)
Melting Asphalt had an essay that goes into more depth I think.
Another angle I think lots of people are missing in this comment section: your identity isn't generated by you; it's generated by the community. Since others will inevitably slap some glib label on you, you might as well try to influence that label to your benefit. Most of the time, this simply manifests as things like bathing regularly and wearing cosmetics.
I'm with you, I don't and never have had a consistently favorite movie or book or TV show. Unless I am looking for a specific piece of info, I have never had the slightest urge to look up fandoms or forums or reviews or anything similar about the media I do like. I can handle a few minutes of convo with friends about stuff they've watched recently, but even the things I love and rewatch often, I have zero desire to talk about or read about or be involved in any sense in discussions about them.
I do have a consistent favorite band, the Violent Femmes, but it never occurred to me until just now that there is probably a discussion forum or subreddit or something for their fans. Aside from looking up lyrics and finding tour dates and stuff, I have no idea why anyone would ever seek something like that.
I think the urge to "identify with" stuff is a spectrum, and we are at one end of it. Maybe it's like those no-interior-monologue people.
Edit: Was just trying to think what I would say if someone forced me to identify myself in some way, and I genuinely can't come up with a response in a vacuum so to speak. If a cop demanded it, I'd identify as law-abiding. If a religious or political extremist demanded, I'd identify as whatever got me out of there. If a random demanded it via email so I knew nothing about them, I'd just choose bland markers unlikely to be offensive to anyone. Asking me to identify myself outside of a specific situation seems as unanswerable as what your favorite color of leprechaun piss is.
> I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y.
Here's how a "normal" person does this - takes turns sharing the broad strokes of their lives, and comparing it to the other person's. I might not know your father, but I recognize the broad archetype of "youngest child, moved away after highschool to a bigger city, etc."
Where nerds differ, is that they don't live their own life, they live a proxy life through media or intellectual pursuits. So the broad strokes of their life boils down to "sat in a room and thought about stuff". Even if they *have* done things, the salient features they care about are the proxies.
To me, nerd behaviour speaks to discomfort with the self. It's safer to hide behind polished stories than to be yourself.
Sports aren't all bad, you're just tone deaf to them. It's okay, I am too. Here are two ways to find tone:
- Sports are stories. I learned this from watching the author John Green tape literally hundreds of short videos of himself playing a soccer video game. As he played, he told the story of his team, and once or twice he stopped to explain that this *was* the point of sports: it's a repeating storytelling vehicle, not unlike an ancient epic. The direct equivalent of "it's just men in shirts chasing a ball for four thousand episodes" is "The Silmarillion is boring, Beowulf is boring, there have been one million historical battles and one million fictional battles, and nothing ever changes and there's always some forgettable warrior who ends up king, I do not *care* which warrior it is".
I do not like or care about soccer, but I *very much* liked the epic story of John Green's Wimbledon Wimbly Womblies, captained by John Green and his husband Other John Green, teammates in love and in life. Althought it played out over hundreds of similar episodes, it was a pretty good story. But this is *exactly* the story sports fans are telling themselves.
- Probably most people resonate with *some* of the sports, but unfortunately we are all forcibly exposed to the lowest common denominator in our area. I am an American, and I think football is the MCU of sports: boring, over packaged, over sold. I like a few other sports here and there a bit. My subjective preferences crossed with the dominant local sports means I've not been a sports fan historically.
But I recently tried Formula 1 (culturally dominant in some parts of the world, but unheard of in America until recently, so, thanks, Netflix!) and it resonates with me: it's a crooked, chaotic evil engineering competition, put in the hands of people with the same personality as fighter pilots, who zoom around experiencing 5 G turns for *hours*, often crashing and sometimes even catching fire. I was lucky to have my first experience of the sport *in person*, standing with my face pressed up to the fence next to the track, and the volume and physical *power* of the cars made me take a *big* involuntary step backwards. Apparently that's the normal reaction. Wow! I'm a fan and I expect I'll watch this sport on and off for the rest of my life.
It sounds like I am describing a situation, but actually I am expressing a subjective preference. "It's just dudes sitting in cars going around in a circle" is also a preference.
To resonate with no sports, it is probably necessary to be a properly non-physical person. If you believe your body is just a vehicle for your head, and you'd rather live in a totally non-physical world, maybe no sport resonates. If you have any physicality, there's probably some sport for you in an ideal world. Maybe you really like the feeling of being on a trampoline, and you just have yet to try Circue du Soleil, or you love to work on your contact juggling, and you've never seen people do it competitively.
Perhaps you have an example otherwise, but I think this predisposition is more or less equivalent to "being physical" in the sense that one feels intrinsic joy from some physical activity.
In my experience, almost every (including me) enjoys at least one of the Olympic sports. The variety allows for a greater chance that one of the sports maps to a person's enjoyments.
:-). Do you have an olympic sport of choice? Mine is swimming. I like to do it in real life, I like to try to be fast, so I like (once in a while, maybe only once every four years) to see the fastest people try to be fast.
Oh, that's definitely the best thing. I no longer live next door to a surfing ocean, but when I did, I did it three mornings a week, and always felt calm and happy outside the water.
As far as I can tell, building your identity around a thing is Kegan stage 3? Depending on where you sit on the people-vs-things spectrum, a Stage 3 identity might be more about the thing itself or the "thing community" (the fandom, for example). It might be less traditional than building your identity around your family, or your community, but it still reads to me like a variation on the same theme.
If that's true, then one answer to Ghatanathoah's question what the alternative is to build your identity around is that it's ok and necessary to go through this phase, but to attain full modern adulthood, at some point you have to progress to Stage 4 where you still have interests and relationships, but you're not defined by them.
The hallmarks of the latter (excessive) connection are defensiveness and boundary overreach. If one is insecure about whether *other* people love the thing, or whether other people fully accept one loving the thing, then it's typically part of one's identity.
I've seen Freaks and Geeks. My apologies if you are old, but the first two paragraphs seem like a young person sort of opinion.
I am in the middle, and I have already seen a number of people hold on to externally dependent, unvalidated identities for *decades*. A lot of people are the <X person> even when everyone around them won't see it, won't validate it, won't support it. Sometimes it even curdles into the bitter <unrecognized X person who remains an X person against all the world>.
Two easy examples are people who insist that they are artists, and people who insist that they are attractive.
I am almost totally sure (sure to a rare degree) that some MCU fans and some sports fans identify with those things, identify as such people, because they've told me so in no uncertain terms. Okay, maybe the MCU people were saying they were *comic book* people, not MCU people specifically, but, like, go look at the MCU subreddit for a little too long. There's identity even there, MCU specific identity.
Identity itself is very easy to define: it's anything that fills the sentence "I am <noun>". The type of identity mostly depends on the audience of the statement (innermost self, more outer self, parents, social group, even "don't dare to voice it to myself" closet identities), and the intensity of identity is the intensity of feeling behind the statement.
Which means "feel that our love for a thing is with other people’s perception of us in mind." isn't necessary to have an identity. You don't need to tell *me* you're a Fencer to have an identity as a Fencer. You just need to tell yourself. If you tell yourself fervently, and don't care if i see it, it's a strong personal identity but still a weak social identity, because the message "I am a Fencer" is leaking out into social space and you're not making any effort to hide it.
Finally, the pressures of social conformity are fractal by social context. The true test of an identity is to put someone with dual social contexts into a situation where conformity pressure for one class goes one way and conformity pressure for the other class goes the other way. Black people write about the social difficulties of code switching when their social worlds collide.
I like to be corrected, but I'm not sure you're correct! Also, wall of text is fine, don't worry, you're among friends here! :-)
Keep back what personal details you must, but they're extremely relevant because they allow me and others to model the perspective of the thinker. If you were non-Chinese, or Western born Chinese, or born in China Chinese, and you were talking about social connections, I would make different models of the thing in your head that you're actually trying to share with me. If you were Chinese born Chinese, I would assume that you had stronger default assumptions about the value of people behaving the same way as each other, and that you were expecting me to infer more from gentler statements. If you were Western born Chinese, I would assume you were working out tensions between two worldviews and/or trying to share a perspective gained by growing up in two cultures (what the Japanese would call a "third culture kid"). If you were Western, my default assumption, I'd assume that you put such high value in individuality that you sometimes forget other cultures dislike it by default. If you were also young, I would assume you don't even know that yet, and be more forgiving and gentle if you didn't account for it in your message.
Similar patterns apply to young and old, as well as sociable and not so sociable, as well as a number of finer grained contextual variations of such.
>"""Your definition of identity seems to be referring to a specific aspect of identity: self-concept. As I understand him, it seems like Scott is also just referring to a specific aspect of identity: social identity"""
Actually, I am explicitly saying that "I am <noun>" statements (internal and external) cover *all* flavors of identity. Every identity can be mapped to an "I am <noun>", and every "I am <noun>" can be mapped to at least a weak identity, more likely a strong one. I believe this map simplifies your graph and your messages enormously.
>"""Most straightforward I was trying to conjecture that not everyone is even *existing* in this domain of identity."""
Because I am a western born math and logic person married into a Chinese family, I am very close to several old people who were born as old fashioned rural farmers (I like to joke that they were born in 1850) and ended up as working scientists, and in a few of the cases, I am often startled by how little introspective or self analytical habit they have. Very smart, very analytical for something like medical device repair, but in certain personal contexts, a switch flips back to a hard rule based system they inherited from farmers. Science, science, science, if you don't eat these dumplings before the flight we're all gonna die, science, science, science.
And yet they have identities! Lots of them! Just as strong as mine. They needn't be verbalized in conversation to map very cleanly to "I am <noun>" statements.
Note that my definition of identity didn't require awareness. Awareness may sharpen and reinforce an identity ("I'm a math guy, so I've got to do more math today"). But closet identities and unverbalized identities are still real identities and they still correspond fairly directly to "I am <noun>" statements that are floating around in the minds (maybe the subconscious minds) of the owners.
>"""Your true test example made me realize I think what you and I have described as ‘true test’ may be better described as ‘queries of self’. """
Queries of self are conscious. One needn't be conscious of the struggle between identities for it to be both real and revealing. If you've ever had a closeted gay friend and watched them act two ways at once, you have probably seen a person unconsciously reveal that they have multiple identities in tension.
Good stuff, thanks for continuing to chat about it.
I find your hierarchy of virtuous interests pretty amusing. On one hand, I think I qualify as having a "top-tier" identity. I'm doing research level pure mathematics: my current study is on families of supersingular hyperelliptic curves over algebraically closed fields of characteristic 2, and I think these mathematical objects are really neat. On the other hand, I also think I qualify as having several "lower-tier" identities. I have a bunch of Pokemon plushies lying around in my room and I wear a Time Gear necklace from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky everywhere I go. I'm also obsessed with the children's book series "Wings of Fire" by Tui T. Sutherland: I go to conventions that the author goes to and listen to all her panels, I have a signed copy of my favorite book in the series on my bookshelf and I've gotten the cover of my Kindle Paperwhite signed by her *twice* (I needed to do it a second time because I bought a new Kindle), I'm in Wings of Fire roleplay servers on Discord where I play as various characters that I spent several hours creating, and I've been actively writing Wings of Fire fanfiction for the past five years.
The funny thing is, I would sooner degrade myself for being a math nerd than for being a Wings of Fire nerd. If someone asks me why I like math so much, my answer is usually "I don't know, something's just wrong with my brain I guess." But if someone asks me why I like Wings of Fire so much, I'll give them a straight answer about how deep and interesting each character in the series is. And even though I'm truly fascinated by pure math, I think I'd sooner try connecting with someone over a shared interest in fantasy dragons than a shared interest in algebraic number theory.
Regarding identity levels: I think it's optimal to have one or more traits on each (except perhaps the lower-tier). A person whose only trait is a love of complex mathematical abstraction may be kinda cool, but it would be very difficult to find contact with him.
It’s odd that a man so interested in humanity and human foibles doesn’t seem to understand why sports are good, even when they are bad.
Objectively a 1-0 soccer game is boring to neutrals but subjectively it’s highly entertaining ,if stressful, to the fans involved, particularly if it’s an important game like a World Cup final. Why? Tribalism. Male bonding. Love of country, or city, or even just the team.
Most team sport is about losing more than winning. Even countries generally successful in the soccer world cup can not expect to win most tournaments. Argentina are the WC champions, and one of the most successful teams in the tournament. Prior to their recent win they last won in 1986.
imagine being a life long Argentinian fan watching the last World Cup final. If you are old enough to remember the last win ( as I said in 1986) you may not realistically expect to be around for the next one. If you are a teenager it’s not likely to happen until you are middle aged or perhaps never, either way a win is extremely important and the game - however ugly or boring to outsiders - is going to be an extraordinary tense and exciting match for the fan, quite possibly an experience he may never have again. That’s what makes it extraordinary.
( As it happened the game was objectively good but that doesn’t matter to the actual fans. In fact a boring 1-0 victory is more stressful to the fans all the way through. When you are drawing the other side’s chances are worrying because they can go ahead, at 1 ahead it is still worrying because you might lose your lead. )
In non team sports the amazement is that people can do extraordinary things in gymnastics, athletics, pole vaulting, etc.
Heh. A man United fan would point you to the table. Or the FA cup.
it’s one of the problems with games that are high scoring. No real upsets. The little guys in soccer can sneak a goal in a 0-0 game easy enough and then defend like crazy.
Part 5 made me appreciate how rationalist/EAs in general, and Scott in particular, overcorrected on Elephant In The Brain. Not *literally everything* people do is about status, despite what the book says. If you stop and think about it for 5 seconds, it becomes kinda obvious that it can't be true. For one, our brains simply cannot be that perfectly optimized for status-seeking even if it was their only job, since nothing in evolution is ever that perfect. But secondly, in the ancestral adaptation environment (unlike in the present day Bay Area) you just can't afford to single-mindedly focus on status - you would get eaten, or starve, or be killed by an invading tribe, or otherwise will have the reality getting back at you.
I think this overcorrection hurts the community as a whole, and is deteriorating for individual mental well-being (unless you're near the very top of your local social ladder, as Scott I assume is).
Could it be that traditionally (in the hunter-gatherer / village) people know you fairly well including the son of X stuff as well as good at Y bad at Z, so there is a base level of connection (I live in a village). In San Fran etc they don't so you have to try harder for connections with other folk.
I legitimately love the current trend of "X-core" or "X aesthetic". I'm not entirely sure how it fits in with this, but it sure does seem pretty close to the "actually enjoying things and not caring about social status" idea(l).
"it doesn’t work for a lot of practical tasks - I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y."
Works like a charm in the sort of small, rural, generational towns I spend my time in.
I feel it's important to note whenever people bring up Star Wars in relation to nerd-ness that all 3 of the original trilogy were the highest grossing movies of their year. Main story Star Wars has *always* been mainstream, and what made Star Wars nerds specifically nerds and not just normal fans was getting into the Extended Universe and knowing the specs for multiple different classes of Star Destroyer, or collecting action figures or what have you.
I think at least part of being a nerd is about doing/knowing/owning things, not about saying things. There have definitely been times that I’ve finished watching a show because I wanted to be able to participate in conversations about it, rather than because I actually enjoyed the thing. If my friends are talking about something, it sometimes feels low-status not to have an opinion, or (in other contexts) to have opinions based on what I’ve heard about something I haven’t seen/read myself.
I have, for a long time, thought about a rather simple experiment in good taste. In Finland, for instance, there is a robust rock music scene (still, to this day, in ways that's probably no longer true in US, at least as a mainstream thing.). Like elsewhere, there exist bands and artists (historical and present) that a hipster would consider mainstream crap and that would be hipster-mark-of-approval critical favorites.
If someone took Finnish mainstream-beloved and hipster-beloved songs and played them to, say, Americans, would they be able to recognize which is which based on sound alone? In this case, even the lyrics wouldn't help, since, they would be unintelligible (in most cases) anyway. If it was possible for some pop music expert to recognize this on sound alone, it would at least prove something about this subject; if it wasn't, it would also be proof of something. I'm not sure exactly what, though; whether there would be an universal hipster quality of music that transcends cultural borders, or that hipster-loved music just sounds weirder than mainstream music, or that it's all just a matter of cultural markers.
Of course, the problem for me is that I'm already 39, and thus hopelessly behind on what the cutting-edge of hipster music at the moment would be (and don't really have the time or desire to follow pop music, either), so I'm not really no longer one to find valid qualifiers for what is hipster-beloved or not.
Of course you could do the same with books, movies etc., but you'd need at least some sort of translation there, probably.
As it happens, I (an American) have listened to and rather like some Eppu Normaali and Ultra Bra. I do not speak Finnish beyond knowing a few random words, but I think it's a pretty-sounding langauge. Some of favorite tracks by these bands include: Vesireittejä, Kirjoituksia, Sokeana Hetkenä, Osa Luonnollista Karsintaa, Afrika, sarvikuonojen maa, Kuumemittari, Olen Tuntenut Sinut. Also I painted the lyrics of the chorus to Jääteloauto on my dorm room door when I was in college (the "Lunta silmaripsissasi katsoit minun ja hymyilit, sanoit / täytyy mennä tansitunille / ja minä jäin seisomaan lumeen" part).
As far as I'm concerned as an American, even being aware of these Finnish bands that exclusively sing in Finnish is a pretty hipster thing to do, in the sense of being deliberately and ostentatiously counter-mainstream; painting the lyrics to one of their songs on my door definitely was. But you can tell me whether my taste is in accordance with Finnish-mainstream tastes, Finnish-hipster tastes, or something else.
(Also if there are any other Finnish rock/pop bands I should listen to, happy to accept recommendations)
Eppu Normaali is probably, at least historically speaking, the biggest rock band in Finland. Not exactly hipster credit material. Ultra Bra was traditionally somewhat more hipster-appreciated despite being a big in the mainstream, though they're also divisive - I like them, but listening to Ultra Bra is basically an instrumental part of the Finnish "blue tribe equivalent" (ie. educated, white-collar, urbanite (most likely a Helsinkian), liberal) stereotype. In other words, within a Finnish context, your taste would be mainstream and probably mark you as a 40-50-year old lib-left type.
If you like Ultra Bra, you should probably check Scandinavian Music Group, the New Order to Ultra Bra's Joy Division (yes, that comparison would probably be offensive to numerous Finns). Leevi & the Leavings is good if you like the sounds of Finnish. If you want some of the stuff I'd listened to a lot, check CMX, Ismo Alanko's work (bands Hassisen Kone, Sielun Veljet and a bunch of groups with the name "Ismo Alanko" in the band name) and Kingston Wall.
One funny way to check what acts might appeal to you would be checking this guy's videos: https://www.youtube.com/@pipoproductions/videos
He creates very fitting style parodies/homages by various Finnish rock artists/groups (the videos starting with "Tehdään biisi niin kuin...", with the name of the group or artist coming after. There's usually a bit of exposition before the song itself, but the song generally occupies the last third of each video. Them being homages actually means they sort of encapsulate an artist's song or career in a way that any individual song by the artist itself can't.
I'm not sure but in general insofar as they've been exposed to it, Americans who lived through the era of rock and roll have a horror of the twinned concepts of rock music, or even pop music, and Europe. This might interfere with a sober appraisal.
That sounds really interesting, can you elaborate on that?
No. Not really.
Modern Eurovision? Europop in general - even the British Isles looked askance at some of the Continental productions, given that we're more tied-in to the American musical genres?
The nadir/zenith of disco? Though to be fair, while a lot of it was trashy, it was glittery trash and when you're young, slightly drunk, and on a sun holiday then something poppy and glam to dance to isn't the worst thing in the world.
And that gives some interesting crossovers, such as this international hit which was a Turkish pop song, covered by Holly Valance (amongst others) and let's face it, it's a banger even if it is Eurotrash pop 😁
Original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkKShvCPrRc
Holly Valance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3wS2tdlZtE
Americans have a horror of Europe + pop and rock music + late 20th century?
Do Americans not like Abba?
Yes, precisely. Abba was the joke that lived.
I think pretty much anyone regardless of culture can recognize that Lordi sucks
Agree with that.
Finnish news media tries to make Lordi a "thing" again at regular intervals, but these always land with a thud.
How is Nightwish perceived over there?
It's big, though not as big as it used to be. I'm a bit biased, since Nightwish originates from my home region, so I was exposed to it from very early on. Of course it's far too mainstream to have any sort of hipster credibility.
Tarja Turunen is/was a well-known celebrity and Tuomas Holopainen and other band members (including Jansen and Olzon) are quite well-known, as well.
I think the elephant in the room is that the mammoth media corporations and associated entities that run our lives figured out that there was gold on the leper colonies, and thought they could take advantage of the gold if they could just drive off all the lepers.
Nerd properties went mainstream and printed money. People still dislike the nerds, because they're nerds.
I think this starts to get into something major, the changing nature of marketing. To finalize your thought, at least for a while, nerds were anti-influencers; having your product associated with nerds would reduce the interest in the item for other people. You want un-trendy people to buy your product but not be associated with it, and nerds are un-trendy. Hipsters, on the other hand, as trend-chasers try to be trendy (though once a particular set of 'hip trends' reaches a stereotype, it's gotten to the point where they are no longer new enough to be a trend).
In the beginning, marketing was making as many people as possible aware of your product. Your advertisement said what your product did, and you tried to get it to as many pairs of eyes as possible. However, your competitors will figure this out and match you. Eventually this runs into diminishing returns when everyone's aware of your product and your competitors product, so if you want to come out on top you have to change your marketing to be more effective.
At some point, things changed when people mastered the skill of gathering information about individual consumption habits with things like focus groups. If you know who is likely to buy your product, you can tailor your advertisement to them, both in the details and in where the advertisement is placed. Eventually, of course, your competitors start doing the same thing.
Beyond tailoring your marketing to people who want to buy your product, there's the step of tailoring your marketing to people that will market your product for you: the influencers. At first, the only influencers are celebrities, but we've now evolved a class of dedicated influencers, and the number grows as more people get the ability to broadcast to the public (such as through social media).
Marketing increasingly consists of targeting influencers because that's the most marketing you can get for your money. Partially, this is because most of the public is inundated with obvious advertisements, and we recognize them as such. The reason we have influencers is because they are marketing launderers (marketing launderers : marketing :: money launderers : money); the most successful advertisement for a product is a recommendation from someone you trust, and influencers trick the mind into believing they are real consumers and not marketing professionals and thus are trustworthy.
> Hipsters, on the other hand, as trend-chasers try to be trendy (though once a particular set of 'hip trends' reaches a stereotype, it's gotten to the point where they are no longer new enough to be a trend).
I don't think this is accurate. Hipsters (in their quintessential Platonic ideal form) are trend-makers, not trend-chasers. They seek out new-to-them, unpopular, obscure things; they insist loudly that their tastes are objectively better than whatever's currently popular; and once they've sold enough people on something that it's no longer unpopular or obscure, they move on to something else.
There's a second, larger group of people who follow hipsters around and copy them. They're properly characterized as trend-chasers, but they're not hipsters; it's just hard to tell them apart from the outside.
Is there any reason hipsters can’t be both trend makers and chasers at the same time? If they gain status from appreciating under-appreciated things, there will be aspects of both making (as other people follow them, possibly eventually even reaching the general public) and chasing (as hipsters identify things that other hipsters have already found and then start appreciating them).
I think a trend-chaser is more properly a scenester than a hipster.
I like what you did to my brain by putting "elephant" and "mammoth" so close together in this comment.
I've known some serious comic book nerds since the 1970s including a number of people in the business or adjacent. It was a niche hobby, but there were 30+ years of narrative from dozens of books each published monthly for years even before the first MCU movie appeared. Just as the opera nerds I knew in high school knew the plot, lyrics and music of just about every opera, these comic nerds knew the world of comic books.
I've also been following computer generated graphics over the same period. I even knew a guy who won an Oscar for his pioneering work in the field, and I've heard my share of production horror stories. I almost joined an CGI shop, but Hollywood was too cutthroat and I didn't like cocaine. Through all this, for decades, computer graphics disappointed me. So much of it had been too well anticipated by the art world in the 1960s. It needed to get beyond this. Still, every year the technology was getting better. We saw glimpses of possibility in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Maybe it was good enough for television, but it wasn't up to projection on an iMax screen.
What happened around 2000 was the CGI finally caught up with the imaginations of artists like Kirby, Sterenko, and Ditko. Only nerds, in the old fashioned sense, and I knew male and female nerds, some more and some less socially awkward, read comic books and followed the stories and characters. Suddenly, it was possible to mine those hundreds, even thousands, of stories and present them as good looking movies. They could be shared. I remember watching the first MCU Thor movie. There was a CGI pan of Asgard, and I sat there thinking that if only Jack Kirby had lived to see this. Then I realized that he already had.
How could sports be interesting? It's just people trying to get the ball from one side of the court to the other, over and over again.
How could reading be interesting? It's just people turning pages of a book, over and over again.
How could debates be interesting? It's just people talking at each other without changing anything, over and over again.
How could tabletop roleplaying games be interesting? It's just sitting around a table with little figurines and telling the same type of stories, over and over again.
Was thinking similarly; a repeating sitcom could get boring, but change it to a drama (which sports are) and you have pretty much every cop show. Law and Order lasted 22 seasons.
I also dislike sport, but I agree with you that Scott's take is uncharitable. If you don't drink whisky you're going to think every whisky tastes like rubbing alcohol. If you don't like sport, you're going to similarly perceive the coarse, obvious features (loud crowds, "I guess that guy is a fast runner who can throw a ball well", advertising) and miss the finer grained details of individual players' style, particularly interesting plays, and higher level strategy.
I don't really enjoy conventional sports, but I got very into watching StarCraft tournaments and all the same features are there – I just found the window dressing interesting enough that I took the time to learn to appreciate the nuance. If instead 8 year old Godshatter had enjoyed kicking a ball around on the playground, I'd probably have given football enough of a chance to learn to appreciate its subtleties too.
Rubbing alcohol? No every whisky taste like bandaids.
For a cat, alcohol smells like urine.
Whose bandaids you been tasting?
Smell is taste? Or maybe taste evokes memory of bandaid? Others have told me same thing? 🤷♂️
Certainly Paul F Tompkins agrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-RYVRzTXN0&t=35s
Ha ha. At least just not me. There's probably a chemical and chemical receptor.
Cilantro - soap and ashtray
That's an oddly apt description of what I don't like of the taste of whiskey, without ever having tasted a bandaid myself.
Yeah, man.
Almost everyone has *a sport* that could resonate with them, because almost everyone enjoys at least one or two physical activities. But unfortunately, almost everyone is forcibly exposed to the dominant local lowest common denominator sport (football, soccer, etc).
In an ideal world, a much wider variety of sports get exposure, and people try watching and/or playing a bunch of them, and you end up with Capture the Flag and professional Rube Goldberging and I end up with fencing and fire juggling.
I don't know. I was quite into various sports when I was at school (as well as being a nerd), but I never could get into watching them (except for cricket, very erratically, ironically one of the few sports I never played in an organised way). But then I later did get quite into watching StarCraft tournaments, especially the Korean Proleague.
So if you had been more into playing sports as a kid I don't think that would have changed things.
Something that might get Scott's attention more: how could forecasting be interesting? It's just people making guesses, over and over again.
How could AI alignment be interesting? It's just the clueless wailing about the unknowable. Over and over again.
None of your analogies are very strong.
First, there's a distinction between the variety of the experience. Reading, debates, and roleplaying games all involve words and narratives with tons of complexity that make them vastly different each time. If they did not, they would quickly get boring. Reading books with the same plot over and over again, having a debate about the exact same topic over and over again, or roleplaying the same adventure over and over again, would very quickly get boring. The first time is fine, the second time can be a new experience. If it's especially deep or compelling you might do it a third or fourth time, but the majority of the time repetition very quickly makes it boring even if there are minor variations. Only weird nerds read the same book twenty times. If people watched a different sport with brand new rules every week, that would be a lot more comparable to someone who reads a new book every week.
Second, there's a distinction between engaging in the activity and observing the activity. Watching someone else read is not interesting. Watching someone else play a roleplaying game is usually not exciting (unless they're especially entertaining people). Debates can be entertaining to watch, but even then it's probably less entertaining than engaging in one yourself. The criticism isn't against people playing sports, it's about people observing second-hand, which is much less exciting.
Personally reading a different book every week is a vastly different concept from observing a new instance of a sports game with the same rules every week.
Part of the appeal of sports is that you can't know what's about to happen: no writer sat down and decided what they would like you to see or hear next. If you have watched the sport with a keen eye, you may begin to be able to make good predictions about what will happen - but that in itself is another rush.
"The defense lined up in press coverage, and there's no secondary defender on the fastest receiver. If the quarterback recognizes it and brings his running back in to chip the blitzer *(note: chipping blitzers is a time-honored tradition in American football, stop laughing)*, then there's a good chance they score a touchdown on this play."
Depending on your level of interest in the visual aspects of the sport, you might then develop an interest in watching replays to learn why things happened the way they did. It's possible to work backwards to find the cause. "Oh, I see why this receiver was wide open. The defense gambled with a blitz, and they put the corners in press coverage to try to keep the quarterback from being able to get right of the ball quickly while the blitz was coming. But the running back was able to help block for just long enough for the wide receiver to run past the defender."
Of course, this is heavily the province of the sports nerd (or the sports pro, whose job depends on knowing what happened and why). Most sports fans (as I understand them) are more on the level of "What did Johnson think he was doing on that play?? Kick him off the team! Fire the coach!"
Sport is more fun to engage with emotionally than intellectually. You pick a side, and you hope they win. You get to experience the joy of victory and the agony of defeat and the smug satisfaction of drubbing an opponent and the tension of hoping for a come-from-behind win.
You get this from fiction too but not nearly as much; in movies you hope the good guys win, but they always do, so you can't engage with it emotionally nearly so much. You get it from war and politics too, with genuine uncertainty, but it's too serious to be fun.
> in movies you hope the good guys win, but they always do
This might be true of modern American movies, but it's not true of modern movies generally and it also isn't even true of American movies generally.
I do think it's worth worrying about the kind of worldviews that we get from people whose experience of the world amounts to "in movies, bad things don't happen".
Yes. Or at least that describes my interest in sports. (There are many types of sports fans.) It's an emotional ride, my team against the other. And the ride is somehow better the less I can predict the outcome. Which is why I say that, "Happiness is a .500 sports team".
I'd like to push back against repetition not being enjoyable. It's possible to eat the same lunch every day and genuinely enjoy your sandwich. Or to go for the same walk every day on the same route, but you notice differences in the weather and what people you see.
People also vary in what differences they notice. An outsider might find it hard to distinguish between instrumental folk music tunes, while someone who has learned some of the tunes will have no trouble recognizing them. Noticing the differences isn't the same as enjoying them, but it helps.
It seems like there are a lot of activities that are both routine and varied, and people appreciate both at the same time. Going to a game (or a concert) is a routine where in many respects you may know what's going to happen, but the details are different, and I assume both the routine and the variations are appreciated by people who go to them.
It can be hard to predict at what point boredom will set in. You can do the same thing for years and one day decide that you're bored with it and it's time to do something different.
I guess I should refine my claim to something like "Enjoying repetition is weird and nerdy, but it's okay to be weird and nerdy sometimes." Repetition of most things is boring for most people, but everyone has different preferences and pays attention to subtle differences in things that make it less repetitive while other people either don't notice those differences or, more likely, don't care.
I certainly do quite a few weird nerdy things, and enjoy certain repetitive things. But I recognize that this is unusual and weird and most other people won't enjoy those same things.
I think the point was that repetition is in the eye of the beholder. Perceived repetition ("it's just orcs chasing British men for three whole books", "it's just piano scales for an hour and there aren't even drums", "it's just dudes moving a ball and stopping when the whistle blows") means the perceiver doesn't understand the thing well enough to distinguish what's important from not. I don't think this is weird at all, and in fact it's pretty close to universal.
Watching sports is generally more of a base level enjoyment, like having sex or eating ice cream. It doesn't matter that it's basically the same thing every time, it still generates the same brain response.
Intellectual stimulation is another fun brain state to chase, one that inherently requires novelty.
Sport is bounded by rules, but within those rules, each competition is wildly unpredictable and different from the others. If an observer says that watching (a) Keri Strug vaulting on an injured leg to win gold, (b) Soviet Olga Korbut cracking the Cold War ice and finding her way into American hearts with a smile during a floor routine, and (c) Simone Biles performing physical maneuvers so difficult that the International Gymnastics Federation has to literally expand the difficulty scales, is all the same experience, comparable to reading the same book over and over, because all 3 events took place in the context of gymnastics, I think it says more about the declarant’s shallow engagement with the subject matter than it does about any alleged uniformity in the sport.
>(unless they're especially entertaining people).
This is why sports have announcers.
I was thinking more about the RPG part of your comment, since that has the closest similarity to sports, they both have a fixed set of rules but plenty of space for improvisation within the bounds of those rules. I love TTRPGs, barely pay attention to sports at this point in my life, and I had the thought “A D&D character could have dozens of spells to pick from in a given moment, that gives it so much more variety.” Then I remembered learning soccer moves in high school and went to find a list of them. This non-exhaustive video has 100 https://youtu.be/mXjW78AgGu4
I imagine a sports nerd who could identify and understand players using these moves and why that move was a great choice for the particular situation would be part of how each week’s game could feel like a new and exciting experience, just like I feel the same about each week’s D&D session, even though every week I (from the perspective of an outsider) do some talking, do some fighting, and roll some dice for some skill checks, so it’s all just the same every time.
But there's still the distinction between participating and watching. If you're playing D&D you have agency. You think about the best choice for each situation and then you get to pick what you do and see what happens as a result. You get feedback and confirmation, rewards and punishment. You are controlling a part of the game with goals and abilities. I don't doubt that playing soccer is fun for the players. But as an outside observer? Maybe I can see getting some enjoyment from watching a game once or twice. I've seen a couple sports games, and I've listened to some D&D podcasts, and they were... okay. But I quickly got bored and don't do either anymore, because it's not the same as actually participating.
Sports are directly analogous to intense interest in a particular genre, particularly fantasy, swords and sorcery, etc.
"The Silmarillion is boring, Beowulf is boring, there have been one million historical battles and one million fictional battles, and nothing ever changes and there's always some forgettable warrior who ends up king, I do not *care* which warrior it is"
is the direct and proper analogue.
More importantly, these are not descriptions. They are preferences. To describe a sport as boring or exciting, to describe epic fantasy as boring or exciting, these are not actually descriptions, they are expressions of preference. "Swords resonate with me, balls do not".
Teams don't resonate with me, so I was not a sports fan. I didn't think balls did either, but then I found juggling. Balls are cool. Car racing resonated with me to a surprising degree, so that is becoming my thing. Swords and sorcery resonated with me, always, so epics are cool. Murder doesn't resonate with me *at all*, so mysteries are boring and repetitive and true crime is boring and repetitive. These are directly analogous expressions of preference.
> Reading, debates, and roleplaying games all involve words and narratives with tons of complexity that make them vastly different each time.
The same is true of sports, you just can't see the complexity if you're not into it.
> Watching someone else play a roleplaying game is usually not exciting (unless they're especially entertaining people).
Watching chess matches and poker tournaments is a big thing now.
I think the appeal for sports come from the fact that, every game is different in the sense that, the meta is different. If you get a bunch of pseudo random number based players play a game based on a set of rules, over and over again. It wont be interesting after the first try. But the fun comes from the fact that, the same thing that worked last time, might not work this time, either due to conditions or due to other plays trying to prevent that player from doing that particular thing.
It is like watching a cat and mouse game, each player tries to one up the other. And unless this meta-chasing is not circular, any sport will stay interesting. This is also why the same game is played completely differently now compared to say 10 years ago, the meta chasing has gone so far, that the game itself has evolved, eventhough the rules surrounding it hasnt changed much.
And don't get me started on sex. It's just a meat stick moving around in a meat hole. Same thing every time, same ending. No idea how anyone could find that interesting.
Personally, I find watching Lindsey Vonn do slalom as awe-inspiring as listening to Diana Damrau sing "Queen of the Night", and for much the same reason, the exquisite form and power demonstrated. Finding the art and skill of physical movement to be boring is as mystifying to me as finding Mozart boring.
> How could sports be interesting? It's just people trying to get the ball from one side of the court to the other, over and over again.
> How could reading be interesting? It's just people turning pages of a book, over and over again.
> How could debates be interesting? It's just people talking at each other without changing anything, over and over again.
I don't think these are alike in kind. Books and debates stay relevant over time. People generally do lose interest in hearing the same debate over and over again, and in reading the same book over and over again. But a debate from 2100 years ago can still be relevant to someone today (check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Salt_and_Iron !), and people do seek them out and try to learn from them. The same is true of books (and in fact all debates from 2100 years ago that we still know about are books).
A sports game from a month ago is usually of no interest to anyone. The exception is coaches/statisticians who are trying to learn about strategy.
Reading and debates are about knowledge; sports and roleplaying games aren't. So reading and debates are interesting to people who desire knowledge. Following a sport is interesting to people who want whatever it is they want.
Why is this week's game better viewing than last week's game, for you? Why does their value change if the games stay exactly the same, but happen in a different order?
For me sports is an emotional ride. I turn off the intellectual part of my brain, and just live in the moment. Of course you need some emotional investment in your team, and for me this happened in childhood, mostly due to me dad. If I think about sports in an intellectual way, I end up at... this is some weird shit, like gladiators at the colosseum. (Oh and playing sports is also fun, but is mostly orthogonal to watching sports.)
>>I don't think these are alike in kind. Books and debates stay relevant over time. People generally do lose interest in hearing the same debate over and over again, and in reading the same book over and over again. But a debate from 2100 years ago can still be relevant to someone today (check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Salt_and_Iron !), and people do seek them out and try to learn from them. The same is true of books (and in fact all debates from 2100 years ago that we still know about are books).
>>A sports game from a month ago is usually of no interest to anyone.
I don't think this comparison is apples to apples. If one takes the broad portfolio of all sports games ever played, then compares it to the small number of books that have stood the test of time, well it's only natural that looking at the two will leave the impression, "Wow! Books sure stay relevant longer than sports do!"
But that's because you've prefiltered out the massive, massive amount of chaff in the mix on the book side of the equation. How many books are published each year and promptly forgotten? Is the percent of books that become A Tale of Two Cities really all that different from the percent of sports competitions that end up being Jesse Owens at the 1939 Olympics?
But that has nothing to do with the comparison I'm drawing. A penny dreadful still holds the same value now that it did when it was published. A sports match doesn't. I'm not filtering out any chaff; I'm saying that the books hold their value, whatever that value may be, and the sports matches immediately decline to zero. The value people perceive in a match is taken from external sources.
Hmm yeah, there is a fond remembrance of past victories in sports. But for me it is the 'present moment'* of sports that makes it impactful. Sports is closer to food and sex than books. You can remember last nights dinner, but it's nothing like really enjoying what you are eating tonight.
*if you don't know the results you can watch in tape delay, but there is the ever present risk of spoilers....
>A sports game from a month ago is usually of no interest to anyone. The exception is coaches/statisticians who are trying to learn about strategy.
Not so fast. Sports enthusiasts may talk about events and matches that happened nearly half a century ago. It remains as emotionally relevant as any other socially important occasion.
Do new fans hear about those matches and go watch them?
Being remembered by people who found them relevant originally is not the same thing as maintaining relevance over time.
Well, I know that Lasse Virén tripped and fell during 10,000m distance run in München olympics in the 1970s. Or Diego Maradona's "Hand of God" goal sometimes in 1980s. Both happened before I was born, and I don't even follow either sport at all. I suspect that if you count, there are more people Finland (Virén) / worldwide (Maradona) who can name these events than people who can name any particular book from 1970s or 1980s.
That is a form of "relevant".
I hate to have to repeat myself so exactly, but... have you ever watched either of those events?
And I suppose I could equally well ask: have you not ever felt the thrill trying to get a hold of the ball in any competitive ball game? ;) I was never any good in anything in PE, yet I can recognize emotions involved.
To answer: Probably I have seen a newsclip? But I am putting those examples forth as an anecdotal evidence that I am not much a sports person (I don't watch Olympics or World Cup or play any sports) yet could name them.
On the other hand, I have not watched news footage of signing of Treaty of Lisbon, or more recently, Finland's representative signing the NATO membership papers, either; yet they are events of some importance and have some consequence.
I'd expect that a serious sports fan who pays more attention to any sports would know how various players' recent performance compares to previous games or season. (Are they gaining new skills? Or losing their athletic edge?) They might have an opinion about how their favorite sport has evolved over time, and how it compares to some past historic games.
A more generalizable form of argument is like this: not all things that are important or interesting or "relevant" are important or interesting or relevant in the same way as books or debates or knowledge.
Part of the allure of sports is in its one-time-only nature: there is always just one particular instance of a particular competition happening right now: it is not scripted nor "fixed" according to preferences of scriptwriter who wanted to create a make-believe story, but a genuine contest between athletes happening right now. Something real. Every decision and move a player makes counts. Very French existentialist. And after it has happened, it has similar kind of importance to participants (the audience included) as any other historic event of social importance. And because it is different, people rarely study past sports events like a bookish person reads a book.
One could argue that many people are interested in unimportant, "unworthy" things. But one could also argue that many people are paying attention to them is evidence that they are interesting.
I think that there is a market opportunity for this when done correctly. I would note the existence of documentaries from ESPN (and others), highlight/compilation clips on youtube, etc. Part of the problem is that enjoyment of sports is a real time experience (even when viewed on TV) similar to watching a show or seeing a band perform.
Every now and then I look for and re-watch the video of Franz Klammer's incfedible 1976 gold medal downhill run[1], or the American 1980 "Miracle on Ice" Olympic hockey victory over the USSR[2]. I saw both these events in real time as they happened, and they were phenomenal. They still are, and rewatching them brings back the astonishment and glee they originally summoned.
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[1] https://youtu.be/_0VrDnlPhTI
[2] https://youtu.be/qYscemhnf88
Scott was making a reductio ad absurdum argument. I can't be the only person here who recognized that.
Yes, but disdain for sportsball is common amongst intellectuals, nerds, etc. I understand the roots in western philosophy's focus on brain, etc. But given science/evolution, the animal/physical part of us is likely more important than the intellectual. And we have our big brain so that we can do sportsball like things: remember when each type of prey goes to which watering hole, "calculate" how to shoot arrow to catch them on run, etc. The bulk of our historical existence was much, much more like sportsball in all its facets (playing, observing, keeping stats) than it was like being an egghead intellectual. So the folk who can't embrace the physical, see the beauty in it, be roused by it, are the ones who have some explaining to do, not those in the . . . 95% of humanity who love it?
>>So the folk who can't embrace the physical, see the beauty in it, be roused by it, are the ones who have some explaining to do, not those in the . . . 95% of humanity who love it?
I think a lot of it is fewer parts "unable to see/appreciate" and more parts "pretending to be unable to see/appreciate for purposes of social signaling." If you tried to show it to a Martian, they'd find it really odd that there's this group of people for whom, if someone mentions gardening, and gardening is not of interest to them, they quietly let the topic pass, but if someone mentions football (US or otherwise), and football is not of interest to them, they suddenly need to make a big show about how they've never been into "sportsball" and never could be.
It's just the "I love all music, except for country and rap" energy, operating in another class setting. The question of whether the speaker has the capacity to appreciate the subject matter is less at issue than the question of whether they would ever permit themselves to.
You can see the beauty of something but not be all that interested in it. I'm like that with music. I can understand its attraction even though I don't experience it. There are a surprising number of people like me who don't "get" music on a visceral level. (Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project was one.) Some people are like that with respect to food, though only a handful of them actually stop eating.
I don't think the disdain is about the sports themselves. It's more about school sports culture which can be particularly noxious in the US. If you've had a bad experience with gym coaches and athletes in school, you may be less than enthralled with sports culture as an adult.
I wouldn't put the onus of appreciated the physical on those who don't. One of the big differences between humans and animals is our oversized brains and how much of our behavior is cultural rather than physical. For example, religion is extremely important to many people and societies, even today, are you going to put the onus on those who don't indulge in religion? Why should they be the ones having to explain themselves?
Because everyone from beginning of time has been religious? Doesn't mean it's right, but makes clear where burden lies. It's like claiming the beatles or shakespeare suck. You might be right, but you've obviously got the burden on that claim. Never understood why purportedly rational people weren't way more humble about whether the religious might be right, given the numbers, impact, etc., over time. So they in fact obviously should be the ones having to explain themselves!
Unfortunately, they sometimes try to. We get missionaries knocking on our door now and then. We try to be polite, but NO SALE.
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have).
It's tricky, because then you're kicking the can back to "ability" or "competence" (which are also ill-defined).
I think art should be graded on a scale, taking into account the limitations the artist faced. That's not the whole story (some art is just crap, no matter who makes it), but it can't be shut out of the discussion, either.
Look at the Beatles: the defining rock band. They weren't always paragons of quality. They wrote plenty of shallow yeah-yeah-yeah pop songs, and made sloppy mistakes - in "Hey Jude", at 2:57, you faintly hear Paul say "fuckin' hell!" as he fat-fingers a chord. That's on the master recording!
What made them great wasn't their quality, but that they achieved so much with so little. They were working-class twenty year olds in a world of crappy analog recording gear...and they reshaped pop music anyway. You can produce far more polished music with on a laptop today, but what could you do if you were in the Beatles' shoes, in 1960 Hamburg? To me, that's the issue
What makes Marvel films feel contemptible (to me and perhaps Kriss) is that they are created with every possible advantage on their side...yet they're so consistently bland and mediocre.
Imagine having access to Hollywood's best directors and writers and actors, and budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars...and you make Thor: Love and Thunder? Something's not right.
edit: or put another way, imagine you're a caveman, painting a horse on a cave wall at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc. Suddenly, there's a flash of light, and a 21st century human steps out of a time machine. He smirks at your cave painting. "Huh, you think you're hot shit? In the future, there's something called 'Midjourney'. It produces WAY better art than you ever could. You call that a horse? BAM! This is a horse! Ignore the fact that it has five legs! Bet you're feeling like a pretty crappy artist now, eh?"
I think a laserlike focus on "quality" that ignores context kinda misses the point. Art doesn't just manifest out of nowhere; it comes from the world, from a creative struggle, and this affects how we perceive it.
> Imagine having access to Hollywood's best directors and writers and actors, and budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars...and you make Thor: Love and Thunder? Something's not right.
If you're just the one director, I'm guessing this is actually pretty hard, since you have a massive unmanageable system and pressures and probably can't get away with doing much on your own.
This is definitely an area I'd like to see more explored: why big movies with $100 million budgets can come out so, so badly. How could that many people screw up and not one of them say "wow, this sucks, what if we did this instead?" Especially since YouTubers can come up with decent ways to fix a movie just days after it released.
A lot of it comes down to outside powers that can veto suggestions. $100 million being a lot of money, it often comes with many strings attached. Studios or parent companies can afford a mediocre movie that's pretty much guaranteed to be okay. They cannot afford a terrible movie. The pressure is to make sure the movies hit certain key points and not mess up. There's much less incentive to make something genuinely good.
Because people who have good taste aren't in charge. The people in charge aren't being punished enough for their mistakes, so the movie industry learns slowly, as a whole. It does learn, MCU's success is beyond unprecedented, and certain select people like Cameron can reliably put out hits.
"What made them great wasn't their quality, but that they achieved so much with so little. They were working-class twenty year olds in a world of crappy analog recording gear...and they reshaped pop music anyway. You can produce far more polished music with on a laptop today, but what could you do if you were in the Beatles' shoes, in 1960 Hamburg? To me, that's the issue"
This speaks well of the Beatles' personal virtue, but it doesn't suggest I should listen to them, except maybe to reward them for how virtuous they are.
I don't like many bands, but I do enjoy the Beatles' music. Still, I think I listen to them for reasons other than that they're virtuous, and I wouldn't listen to them if they were just good for their time but bad overall. Maybe I only think I like them because they're so popular that I can't help hearing them and forming good associations with them?
I think there's a component of this whole discussion that revolves around the amount of time we can or are willing to devote to something.
My sister is really interested in obscure music, and is apparently willing to spend many hours listening to stuff to find the gold. When she makes a suggestion I listen and she's right - I've never hated anything she's suggested to me and usually enjoy it. But I also enjoy mainstream music and songs from a wide range of years. I could type "top 100 songs from the 1960s" into Google then pick out which ones I wanted to listen to. That takes a lot less time and has far fewer failures than trying to sift through unknowns. The Beatles established themselves as a premiere band in the 1960s and I know I like a good number of their songs. They have enough songs that I could listen to them without getting tired of hearing one or a few songs on repeat. So if I want to listen to something from the 1960s and enjoy it, I can save myself a bunch of effort and just play the Beatles (or, more realistically, one of about a dozen well-established bands from that decade).
I think the MCU does something similar. (Or, for that matter, the hundreds of retreads, reboots, live-action remakes, 30-years-later-sequels). Rather than try to establish something new that people will like and convincing them to give it a try, it's easier - takes less time and more likely to succeed - to tap into something that is known and liked already.
From that perspective you can look at "nerds" as those taking a deep dive into particular content and "hipsters" being the group seeking something new. Both are putting in time that most people are not willing or able to put into the fandom. Much easier to watch the next MCU or Disney live action remake and not think about it too much. Considering how much money these movies make, the studios seem to be correct on it too. Those of us annoyed by these developments are rare only inasmuch as we care enough to put time into finding better alternatives than the shallow and repetitive options most accessible.
>What made then great wasn't their quality, but that they achieved so much with so little
I'm pretty sure for most of their career the Beatles had a whole lot of resources behind them. Sure they were restricted by technology of the time, but so was everyone else at the time, and the Beatles are still held above their contemporaries.
I wonder if perhaps the idea of 'quality' as a generalizable concept is wrong? I think any deep conversation about the quality of, say, a pop band, needs to get into specifics of music. You end up with some kind of ranking of pop bands, but with no way to generalize the ranking method to another medium like film
And yet they preferred mono.
I do too, as far as early 60's music is concerned anyway. Plenty of that stuff is terrible to listen to in stereo, especially on headphones. Best to stick to tried and true while your tech and skills aren't up to snuff.
If you watched the P Jackson document, was hilarious to see that the Beatles, as biggest/richest group in world, didn't even have roadies who tuned their instruments before they showed to play! Instead, the Beatles just tune by ear occasionally (makes me realize they likely get great chorus-like effect by all being slightly out of tune). And they're operating in a very jokey little studio! Seriously, it's eye opening compared to what a decent studio is today (that's still in business). All those little errors add depth/character that sterile modern recordings can't touch, even though there's an entire cottage industry of folk trying to recreate that magic via effects that deliberately degrade sound, etc.
>They were working-class twenty year olds in a world of crappy analog recording gear...and they reshaped pop music anyway.
I have to hard disagree here. The band that reshaped pop music were not working-class twenty year olds anymore. They were worldwide stars with unlimited access to sophisticated recording equipment at a time it was a particularly scarce resource. Hamburg-era Beatles sung and wrote conventional pop-rock, they were good, but one of many, well within contemporary musical currents. Then they're allowed into high-quality studios and soon start recording "Tomorrow Never Knows"'s and "A Day in the Life"'s. And that, that is what reshaped pop music.
One could even argue the technological progress is what reshaped it. The Beatles were just in the right place, at the right time, and took full opportunity. But if it wasn't for them, someone else would have led the way (even if it was for them, someone else could have, imagine a more healthy and assertive Brian Wilson). Yes, you can technically produce "more polished music on a laptop today", but emphasizing this fact obscures the relative insignificance of the process of musical production becoming cheaper and easier compared to advanced studio techniques becoming available at all, and musical production becoming a valid artistic tool in the first place.
The recording equipment the Beatles were given access to after becoming worldwide stars was the most sophisticated in the world AT THE TIME, but by modern standards it was still primitive, unreliable and laborious to use.
The Beatles did have one advantage - it was hard to sound derivative, since it had never been done before.
I don't know how much time you've spent in modern studios, but recreations of the gear used at Abbey Road in the late 60s, whether its a hardware preamp by Chandler or a digital emulation by Universal Audio, are absolute mainstays of modern recording. The Chandler TG2 is certainly the best preamp I've ever used and pretty much every engineer I know who does rock has a Fairchild 670 and EMT140 plugin in heavy rotation. While their tape decks and console might have been technically limited by modern standards, they were hardly primitive, not really any more laborious to use than a modern hybrid studio, and I'd wager no more unreliable than most protools rigs I've worked on. The sad fact is that almost all of the innovation in audio since the early 70s has been directed towards making things cheaper and easier to mass produce; the highest tier of audio gear hasn't changed much since the 70s.
I think the words "plugin" and "emulation" are doing a lot of work there, aren't they? Plugins don't require periodic servicings, unlike analogue gear. Of all the man-hours spent recording the Beatles' classic albums, how many were spent on busywork like winding and cutting 2-inch tape? There were also practical limitations on how many tracks could be recorded as part of a single session, forcing the Beatles to bounce multiple instruments down to single tracks.
Working with plugins has its own set of headaches, between ridiculous DRM schemes and compatibility issues. The kind of servicing that most well built analog gear needs can easily be handled by anyone who knows their way around a multimeter and a soldering iron, which should be anyone who's invested in high end analog recording gear.
Working with tape requires busywork, but so does a 120 track protools session, and personally I really do not enjoy the "draw automation tracks for every paramater of every plugin on every track" game that digital audio encourages you to play, nor do I particularly enjoy the sonic results.
As far as bouncing tracks goes, I don't think it's much of a creative limitation. I grew up in the digital era and when I switched over to 8 track tape, I found it incredibly liberating. You can't throw overdubs at the wall and see what sticks, you can't phone in your takes and Frankenstein it together after the fact, and the mix comes together in a matter of minutes rather than days or weeks. There is no buss compressor or line mixer on the planet that will make a bunch of disparate drum tracks gel as well as forcing em all into the same quarter inch of tape.
Fair points.
The constraints create magic! (Which we know from, e.g., poetry, where you write a sonnet rather than complaining you should have more lines, or no rhyme scheme, or whatever, working within the form is its own reward.)
The Beatles are heroes in part because they insisted on doing what had just become technologically feasible. Sure, somebody else would have done it later if they hadn't, but it might have been 18 or 24 months later. Sinatra did something similar in the 1950s by pushing the envelope of quality in popular music for the new long-playing album. Elvis, in contrast, mostly did not insist on bettering the state of the art, although his 1968 classics at least came close to catching up.
Ooh, I really appreciate you bringing up Presley here. Looking at someone who was never consciously pushing the envelope can be instructive in its own way. I was never more than passingly familiar with his music, but I'm now checking his output while paying attention to chronology, and it's clear that, between around 1965 and 1968, *something* had happened. I find it hard to pin down the exact ways and points when things change, but once you get to the likes of "A Little Less Conversation" or "In The Ghetto", his recordings sound recognizably different, recognizably (more) modern.
Mark Steyn's theory is that Elvis was too nice of a guy, a really polite kid, for his own development as an artist. He let himself get pushed around by Colonel Parker and other people, including his fans. He took some control over his career in the late 1960s and made the monumental singles Suspicious Minds and Burning Love, but mostly he didn't have the drive or the self-confidence.
Even Sinatra let himself get pushed around for a big part of his career, before taking over as the auteur of his own music career around 1953. (Unlike Elvis, the mature Sinatra didn't let his mostly lousy movies get in the way of his music. Although, one movie where Sinatra tried hard, The Manchurian Candidate, is remarkable, so maybe we lost some good movies from Sinatra caring about music more.)
The 1965 Generation had some good influence on each other as ambitious artists. Dylan's colossal self-confidence rubbed off on some of the others. Lennon's abrasiveness and snarkiness was a good influence on McCartney, kept him from being too nice like Elvis was. And McCartney's ambitiousness was good for Brian Wilson.
(I'm using "good" here in the sense of good for music fans, not necessarily good for, say, Brian Wilson's health and sanity.)
"edit: or put another way, imagine you're a caveman, painting a horse on a cave wall at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc. Suddenly, there's a flash of light, and a 21st century human steps out of a time machine. He smirks at your cave painting. "Huh, you think you're hot shit? In the future, there's something called 'Midjourney'. It produces WAY better art than you ever could. You call that a horse? BAM! This is a horse! Ignore the fact that it has five legs! Bet you're feeling like a pretty crappy artist now, eh?"
I call forth the soul of G.K. Chesterton, former student of the Slade School of Art, from Purgatory to set him right on this:
"This secret chamber of rock, when illuminated after its long night of unnumbered ages, revealed on its walls large and sprawling outlines diversified with coloured earths; and when they followed the lines of them they recognised, across that vast and void of ages, the movement and the gesture of a man's hand. They were drawings or paintings of animals; and they were drawn or painted not only by a man but by an artist. Under whatever archaic limitations, they showed that love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line which any man who has ever drawn or tried to draw will recognise; and about which no artist will allow himself to be contradicted by any scientist. They showed the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempt difficult things; as where the draughtsman had represented the action of the stag when he swings his head clean round and noses towards his tail, an action familiar enough in the horse. But there are many modern animal-painters who would set themselves something of a task in rendering it truly. In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure. In that sense it would seem that he was not only an artist but a naturalist; the sort of naturalist who is really natural.
...It is useless to begin by saying that everything was slow and smooth and a mere matter of development and degree. For in the plain matter like the pictures there is in fact not a trace of any such development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well. The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist. All we can say of this notion of reproducing things in shadow or representative shape is that it exists nowhere in nature except in man; and that we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone. ...But an excellent test case of this isolation and mystery is the matter of the impulse of art. This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature. ...But the clearest and most convenient example to start with is this popular one of what the cave-man really did in his cave. It means that somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror. It is like a mirror because it is truly a thing of reflection. It is like a mirror because in it alone all the other shapes can be seen like shining shadows in a vision. Above all, it is like a mirror because it is the only thing of its kind. Other things may resemble it or resemble each other in various ways; other things may excel it or excel each other in various ways; just as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God. These are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road."
This sounds super uplifting, but I'm compelled to point out that it's possible that all those paintings were in fact instructional manuals. Less "love of the long sweeping or the long wavering line", more "this is the spot on the deer where you can stab for maximum damage".
Possible to have both in the same drawing! Chesterton was looking at those with the eye of an artist, or at least someone who started out with artistic training, so he could speak for that element.
Fair point; the technical illustrator could also be an artist, and in fact the best ones usually are. Still, purpose does matter here. It may or may not be true that animals possess no innate facility for art; apes and octopi and even birds can produce decorative constructs, but one can always argue that these are mating displays or accidents or something. However, many animals (even housecats !) absolutely do instruct their young. Thus, if cave paintings were primarily instruction manuals, then Chesterton's thesis is built on a foundation of sand.
I don't think the badness of the MCU can be reduced to degree of difficulty. In the Youtube series Honest Trailers, when discussing the MCU, they often say something like "watch as one faceless CGI army faces off against another faceless CGI army".
Ease of production leads to laziness and blandness and stuff that isn't that interesting. But when you had to hand-craft every costume and each character was an actor, there's more effort and creativity put into it.
There are good things done with CGI but they can't be cranked out the way MCU stuff is.
Regarding the horse cave guy vs Midjourney, I'll just recall that I read somewhere that they designed those cave paintings to appear to move a bit when exposed to flickering light like you'd have with a torch. Not to say that there's nothing to the degree of difficulty argument in that case, but the cave drawings potentially do have something that Midjourney lacks.
Watching an analysis of the fights in The Last Avatar (the live action one), the analyst made a similar comment - the moves had no relation to time or space or the fight itself.
For example, blocking a fireball, which was in the air already, took five seconds and required six positions to do.
It's almost like the director and the fight choreographer weren't actually talking to each other and the antagonists weren't in the same room at the same time. So the choreographer was looking at the actor and saying "Well, this is a cool move we could film you doing today..." and later the poor editor had to cut the resulting takes into something more or less coherent.
I'd point out that it's entirely possible for MCU movies to be relatively unpopular. Marvel's been pretty lucky, but there was Eternals, and that one absolutely deserved being unpopular, and one reason was the CGI. They've also had bad luck with some TV series. DC has tried the same thing and have had a lot more poorly received superhero movies--but a few well-received ones too. When ease of production *actually* leads to less interesting things, people are... less interested in it.
CGIs transformation from something occasionally used to do something otherwise very difficult into the mainstay of movies was a very bad choice for the art of making movies. I feel like it really started with Star Wars TPM and the other prequels, but it's increasingly common for really badly done CGI to be all over the screen. It's distracting and off-putting. Then you realize that Jurassic Park had competent CGI in 1993 which works much better than stuff 30 years later because it was used sparingly and with great care, rather than as a crutch for every part of the movie.
The late 70s to early 80s SW movies have better special effects than the major movies since, despite having fewer options and worse options. The worst special effects in the original trilogy were the schlock they added for the special release - using too much CGI to try to do something they could have done much better with less.
I'm inclined to agree with some of the other posters that Kriss is sort of approaching the Geeks-MOPs-Sociopaths dynamic but he's confusingly renamed "geeks" as "hipsters" and "MOPs" as "nerds", which is weird because to me a "hipster" was someone who specifically builds their personality around liking obscure things.
(see e.g. the classic flex of: "You probably haven't heard of them" as a retort to the question of: "What are you listening to?")
So, something like Marvel is an example of a once nerdy/geeky thing that has now been overrun by MOPs and sociopaths, which makes it all the more confusing that Kriss uses it as quintessential
example of nerdy-ness.
What's a MOP?
Member of the Public. I also found it confusing at first, the term may be specific to hip Brits.
Thx
Retrospectively, I probably should have included a link to the original: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I’m totally onboard with the idea that some people are strongly motivated by social status, and others much more weakly so. But classing nerds as almost always closer to the non-statusy side doesn’t match my experiences.
I’ve seen plenty of nerds trying to one-up one another about who is most skilled at intricate rules interpretations, obscure lore, logical puzzles etc. Or even just who has the most rare and expensive cards/figurines/books/whatever. Status games that don’t translate well into mainstream status are still status games, no?
Yeah I stick by position that the main thing “nerd” was at least in the 80/90s was an alternative status hierarchy. For kids who interest wasn’t sports/partying.
Yeah - less "people who don't care about status" and more "people who have been kicked to the bottom of the status hierarchy, so they break off into their own clique, within which they can be high status and find shared agreement that 'normal' society's status system us unfair, bunk, illogical, and dumb."
I graduated in 1980 from one of the first public-school-system alternative high schools in the U.S., and from firsthand immersion I wholly endorse this description.
The claim is that nerds’ conception of status is largely orthogonal to the mainstream conception. They care (to different extents) what like-minded people think about them, but those like-minded people value things differently from the mainstream.
The quality of fiction is primarily in the style and I don’t really think anyone would seriously contest this. Take Shakespeare as an example. His plots are mostly lifted from other contemporary plays. What makes him exceptional is precisely his use of language. Or take another example: Ulysses. There is absolutely nothing exceptional or even interesting in a single bland day in the life of some random Irish dude at the turn of the century. The entire merit of that piece of fiction rests on the style of prose. When it comes down to it, there really aren’t that many different types of plots. Plots are the skeleton and the art is what you build on top of them.
Beg to differ a bit on Ulysses. Obviously it is not a plot-based novel, but it is certainly great for more reasons than just its prose style"s" (part of its stylistic charm is that nearly every chapter is written in a completely different style). The psychological exploration of character is, to my mind, unparalleled in modern fiction, and there is plenty of underlying political and allegorical meaning stuffed in there as well.
Yeah, I've read a bit of Marlowe, and I can tell the difference. "The Merchant of Venice" is a very different beast than "The Jew of Malta", and the latter is far more MCU-like in my opinion.
I wasn't attacking the MCU! I actually enjoyed it, at least up through the Infinity War saga, where I stopped watching.
But, well, I'll just quote Wikipedia's summary of "The Jew of Malta":
> Barabas begins the play in his counting-house. Stripped of all he has for protesting the Governor of Malta's seizure of the wealth of the country's whole Jewish population to pay off the warring Turks, he develops a murderous streak by, with the help of his slave Ithamore, tricking the Governor's son and his friend into fighting over the affections of his daughter, Abigall. When they both die in a duel, he becomes further incensed when Abigall, horrified at what her father has done, runs away to become a Christian nun. In retribution, Barabas then goes on to poison her along with the whole of the nunnery, strangles an old friar (Barnadine) who tries to make him repent for his sins and then frames another friar (Jacomo) for the first friar's murder. After Ithamore falls in love with a prostitute who conspires with her criminal friend to blackmail and expose him (after Ithamore drunkenly tells them everything his master has done), Barabas poisons all three of them. When he is caught, he drinks "of poppy and cold mandrake juice" so that he will be left for dead, and then plots with the enemy Turks to besiege the city.
> When at last Barabas is nominated governor by his new allies, he switches sides to the Christians once again. Having devised a trap for the Turks' galley slaves and soldiers in which they will all be demolished by gunpowder, he then sets a trap for the Turkish prince himself and his men, hoping to boil them alive in a hidden cauldron. Just at the key moment, however, the former governor double-crosses him and causes him to fall into his own trap. The play ends with the Christian governor holding the Turkish prince hostage until reparations are paid. Barabas curses them as he burns.
That's just kinda awesome, like the first few seasons of "Game of Thrones".
Whereas Shakespeare in "The Merchant of Venice" pulled off something that might have been unmatched until "Paradise Lost", taking the ostensible villain and exposing how that villainy derives from his humanity, not simply making the villain sympathetic but making us identify with him. It's a very different sort of awesome.
That's exactly why I said Joyce's exploration of character was unparalleled in *modern* fiction. Indeed Shakespeare probably wins the overall prize for this.
I think "primarily" is going too far. I can think of movies that I've seen that have amazing directing, beautiful sets, and talented actors, but fail to succeed because the plot is so dumb ("Krull," "Legend," and "Prometheus" all come to mind). On the opposite end I've seen movies with compelling enough plots and characters that they overcame low production values and pedestrian directing. The same is true for books, I've read some beautifully written stuff with no depth, but also some poorly written stuff with compelling ideas (I'm quite fond of old pulp magazines from the 30s).
Still, I quite agree that lots of style can elevate a work with a solid skeleton, and let you overlook flaws in something less solid.
This is a pretty divisive take, and I think tons of people (maybe the majority of fiction readers would contest this) - arguably this is the divide between the "literature" folks and the other types of readers who tend to be a lot more plot motivated.
Like, Brandon Sanderson is a *huge* name in books, built almost entirely on the "plot" side of things, with deliberately simple prose. (And not surprisingly there's a lot of disdain from the "literature" crowd)
It seems like caring about plot is "low status" in book circles, but I think it's still the majority view.
Hard agree that plot is king. When it comes to this stuff, I always think about Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera. From Jim Butcher’s wiki page: ‘The inspiration for the series came from a bet Butcher was challenged to by a member of the Del Rey Online Writer's Workshop. The challenger bet that Butcher could not write a good story based on a lame idea, and he countered that he could do it using two lame ideas of the challenger's choosing. The "lame" ideas given were "Lost Roman Legion", and "Pokémon".’
Even if you start with a bed of crap, you can still use it to write a best-seller if the plot is good.
I enjoy Sanderson's books - largely for their creative plots - but I think they would be better if he focused a bit more on elevating his prose. I know he has deliberately stated he tries to get the prose 'out of the way' of the story, and I can respect that. (He has written more NYT bestsellers than I have, plus he teaches a class and has his own convention based on his stories.)
However, one thing I enjoy in a well-written book is when the plot comes together in a single moment of poignancy, and the author drops a quotable truth bomb right there. Better if it's at multiple places.
In my view, this is what a lot of people who hew to the literary style are looking for in their books. They love when story and style come together just right. But they don't always come together, even in literary fiction. I've read a lot of literary books with garbage plots, dumb characters, and boring settings. They're not good books, and don't hold a candle up to what Sanderson can do. If he decided to do literary, Sanderson would probably churn out something memorable.
I think he has the talent for it, from the hints he has given in books where he plays around with elevated prose, but he just doesn't have the patience to take his books to the next level. I don't think he's interested in writing something like that at this point in his career. He seems more interested in telling as many stories as he can and spinning them out faster than even his biggest fans expect. Maybe some day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2bQhjiGvIw&pp=ygUTaW50ZW50aW9uYWxseSBibGFuaw%3D%3D
"except when you’re right; if you take a stand against Trump in rural Kentucky, or against wokeness in San Francisco, you can claim as much specialness as you want"
Au contraire: this guy is the worst. The politics-brain vindicated by genuine contrarianism manages in a painful proportion of cases to be the lowest-tier case possible, a terminal obsessive whose every waking moment is warped by the obsession that his neighbours are about to shoot him in the head. #2 tends to be a little worse -- the Kentuckian resistance lib generally does have some potential community elsewhere if the stars aligned to leave rural Kentucky, while the SF conservative would be called a "fuckin' commie" in all other parts of the world, and accordingly has a whacked idea of the Overton window -- but I've met many of both, and I'd rank the whole thing low indeed. (I see some tendencies of it in myself, and they aren't pretty either.)
That said, I think ranking okay-tier as 'okay-tier' and not 'oh my god kill me' is mostly a game for people who have not spent sufficient time using dating apps and seeing that this is 99.repeating% of the population, in all demographics, forever. (SF and NYC seem to have different dating app scenes to other large cities so may not count, but it's possible people only screenshot the profiles that aren't completely mind-numbing.)
> I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching!
See, I like sports precisely because every "episode" is different and unpredictable. Basically all fiction rehashes the same plot archetypes over and over again, and I'm not particularly interested in watching "the hero's journey" for the thousandth time.
The suspense from a movie can't come close to the totally unscripted, unpredictable rollercoaster of emotions from a high profile soccer game. Sports don't respect narrative rules, so when beautiful narratives emerge from the chaos it is all the sweeter.
Right, scripted fiction is best when the hero's triumphs feel "earned". It feels heroic when Sam declares "I can't carry it for you Mr Frodo, but I can carry you", precisely because we've spent a long time following Frodo and Sam's endless journey and seeing the increasing toll of the ring on Frodo, only for him to collapse as they finally near their destination. Sam has been convincingly sold to us as not superhuman - he's a humble hobbit gardener way way out of his depth. If a near godlike figure like Aragorn were to carry Frodo it wouldn't be impressive, of course he could carry a malnourished hobbit. If Sam were to defeat Sauron in single combat, it would feel absurd and unbelievable. But Sam carrying Frodo up the slopes of Mount Doom feels both believable and convincingly difficult. The heroism of the moment is earned.
What makes sports great to watch is that *every moment is earned*. It's always believable, because it's happening for real, live in front of you. It's always difficult, because there's a team of highly trained athletes doing everything they can to defeat the heroes.
It's not as flashy as a marvel movie where everyone is shooting bright coloured beams at each other and being punched through buildings. But there's fundamentally a lack of real tension in that kind of entertainment. Spiderman is always going to win in the end (even if he gets disintegrated and needs to get resurrected in the next movie). It's fundamentally the same thing as a fake wrestling match.
Whereas when you watch sport, the knife edge tension is real. There's no scriptwriter there to rescue the heroes when they're in a tough spot. They need to do it themselves. And that in turn makes the triumph and joy so much greater when they do.
(This is also why you *absolutely need* to follow and support a team and get emotionally invested in their successes and failures to really enjoy sport. If you're watching in a detached way not really caring if team A or team B win, yeah it's gonna be boring)
This is, without a doubt, the most compelling sports/LotR crossover analysis I have ever seen.
Speaking of Marvel and sports, have you seen "Welcome to Wrexham"? That felt like a good illustration of emotional investment in a sports team...
I haven’t, but I’m very aware of it.
I think the English football promotion/relegation system is a great example of rewarding supporters for investing emotionally in their club. No matter how small or humble a team is, even if it’s just a bunch of amateurs playing for fun, that club has the potential to climb all the way to the top, defeat titans like Man United, and to compete against the best teams in Europe in the Champions League.
That’s obviously not going to happen for most teams. But the fact that it’s possible makes your local club a more compelling thing to care about and get invested in than EG local Australian football clubs, where most of the supporters are direct family members of the players and they mostly serve as breeding grounds for higher leagues to recruit up and coming players from.
It’s basically the story of Ryan and Rob, two guys with a lot of money who decide they’d like to become soccer nerds and do so by buying a down on its luck team from a charming little down on its luck town and absolutely immersing themselves in it. It’s the most advanced cosplay of all time, because it’s both an adopted, somewhat artificial identity, and also one they have adopted wholeheartedly and genuinely.
You put your finger on why I'd rather watch unedited coverage of a biathlon or a debate in the Senate than play video games. Knowing that the whole thing has been scripted out ahead of time, that it's just a fixed maze with the lights off, and the only thing to do is figure out how to get through it makes it unbearably tedious. I've never been able to play a video game for more than about 20 minutes before I get bored and would rather do almost anything else -- something where the outcome is uncertain, unknown, depends on someone's thoughts and decisions, where brilliant saves and tragic error are both alive and possible. Of course, I recognize most people feel quite differently -- certainly my kids did -- so I try to understand why it can be absorbing, but I really don't think I do, yet.
There are lots of unscripted multiplayer games.
Yes, I think that's definitely part of it. Most of the long-time gamers I know seem to end up gravitating to those, and feel a sense of comradeship with their frequent in-game collaborators. This makes more sense to me, in that, even if you're still in an artificial maze designed by somebody else, you have various ways in which the group can divide up the job of solving the maze, and there are interpersonal dynamics that are real-world, and aren't that dissimilar to being on a sports (or military) team. It makes sense to me intellectually, but in the end it's still way less interesting to me than even playing a pick-up softball or baseball game, which is equally arbitrary as to goals.
I *would* just airily dismiss the puzzle as "this is just how people are" except that clearly it isn't, since so many people find MM video games much more interesting than a softball game after work. So there's....some other reason, and I wonder whether it's nature or nurture.
I was into one briefly, to keep in touch with a friend, and I think the big pull is the other people you play cooperatively with. Guilds, more or less. The people you chat with, plan with, and execute the plans with. It's like the opposite of the "Bowling Alone" thing; in this case you physically stay in your own home, but you're interacting with people online.
Yes, that makes sense, thanks.
Excellent analysis, spot-on.
Regarding your parenthetical though, the exception is if what you're watching is professionals playing a sport that you play yourself recreationally. As a longtime amateur ice hockey player I enjoy watching NHL games without needing to have a rooting interest; I know enough about the sport's intricacies to spot and enjoy the game-within-the-game storylines.
(Which is true even though as an aging amateur I stopped personally identifying with those guys long ago, having long since realized that what I do in skates bears only a superficial resemblance to what they can.)
I dunno, I watch a decent # of NBA games/F1 Races and they definitely have predictable "plot" points. One annoying example is that if there's less than a minute left in a close basketball game you know you're in for a bunch of time-outs being called. Or take this weekend's F1 race, it'll very likely be a Red Bull 1-2 finish with Verstappen winning. Every now and then you get a truly unpredictable game/season, but most games are fairly predictable.
These are two of what I would consider the most boring sports, for that reason 😄. But I assume fans are getting something out of them that I don't see.
I mostly watch soccer which doesn't feel predictable to me most of the time. Being low scoring is key for a watchable sport for me because it's usually possible for the underdog to take advantage of a slip up or have a moment of brilliance that changes the result.
I think I like the idea of Formula 1 a lot more than I like actual Formula 1 races. The idea of the fastest cars in the world, built with huge budgets, raced by the best drivers in the world, travelling the whole world to race in a variety of exotic locations, is really cool.
The only problem is that in reality one car is always 0.25% faster than any other car, which enables them to run away with the championship. Still, you can get occasional thrills from watching F1. Maybe something interesting will happen this weekend and someone else might win a race! You never know. This is why I can watch F1 without rooting for any particular team; I'm just rooting for _anything_ interesting to happen, please let someone who isn't Max Verstappen win the damn race!
"Sports don't respect narrative rules, so when beautiful narratives emerge from the chaos it is all the sweeter."
There's value in unpredictability, sure, but this just makes it sound like a hero's journey with a Skinner box attached. Will anything interesting happen this game? Dunno, better watch all of it just in case!
"Dunno, better watch all of it just in case!"
Well, I got bitten in the behind by that for ISTANBUL THE BEAUTIFUL DREAM THE MIRACLE 2005.
Half-time in the Champions League Final. Liverpool versus AC Milan. 3-0 down. "That's it",. I say to myself. "We're not coming back from this. The way we played in the first half? And it's Milan, if they just feel compassionate to us in the second half and don't bother scoring another one or two goals, it'll be amazing. I don't need to watch the second half of this game, I don't need to inflict that masochistic misery on myself".
Which means of course I missed the miracle come-back in the second half and just tuned back in in time to see the presentation, when I went "What????"
Like they say, "It ain't over till it's over" 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_towVD7-PQ
Milan are *still* salty about it all these years later, and I cannot blame them. They had it won. And then?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL2Bcp5tWrg
I remember Liverpool fans crying at half-time in the pub I was watching that game at. I didn't really have any skin in the game so I kept watching. Indeed one of the greatest comebacks of all time!
Knew a lady who left an NHL game five minutes early to beat the traffic, thus missing the straggling team scoring two goals to tie and then fifteen minutes of high-stakes brilliant overtime play.
It is, indeed, never over til it's over.
Ice hockey definitely has an unusual combination of "relatively low-scoring" and "the puck can travel the length of the ice and score within 5 seconds".
Greatest sport in the world!
I wouldn't really disagree with that description, except to say that it's a skinner box that you open over 90 minutes and every action of the game affects whether it will be good or bad. That's where the tension comes from.
It's not just about the end result either, individual runs at goal, shots attempted and saved, fouls, ref decisions all form sub-narratives. Then there's meta-narratives like "X scores their first goal for Y", "Z is improving every game", "W got away with a sneaky foul again".
You don't always get the payoff but the journey is usually entertaining, and when you do get the payoff it feels absolutely serendipitous. Improv comedy can feel the same way. Nothing scripted can though.
Plots have different levels of detail of abstraction, as do sports. Saying that all stories are the same because they all follow the hero's journey is like saying all basketball games are the same because they all follow the rules of basketball. In both fiction and basketball what is interesting are the smaller scale details, not the overarching rules. How will the hero complete their journey? How will they get the ball to go into the basket? What strategies will be used?
If this interests you, then you'll like test cricket (the five-day game). It's *all* strategy and psychology.
In response to the four tiers at the end of the post.
People are preoccupied - dare I say, obsessed - with identity these days, but they almost invariably define a person's identity in terms of copulas. "I AM a woman", "I AM trans", "I AM bisexual", "I AM black", "I AM bipolar" etc.
To quote The Last Psychiatrist (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/01/can_narcissism_be_cured.html):
"Describe yourself: your traits, qualities, both good and bad.
Do not use the word ‘am.’
Practice this."
I think an identity built on copulas is the most shallow and unstable kind of identity going. Identity isn't something you ARE, it's something you DO. "We are who we choose to be" - Green Goblin, Spider-Man (2002).
Looking at the tiers, I note that copula-based identity foundations (race, sex, sexuality, tribal affiliation) are concentrated in the lower tiers, and action-based identity foundations (complex intellectual endeavours which require a serious investment of discipline and mental energy, underwater gardening) are concentrated in the upper tiers.
A harebrained theory: copula-based identity foundations are the most unstable and shallow. Identity foundations based on something you DO (creating things from the ether; mastering a craft, skill or discipline; raising a child; charitable activities) are very stable and deep. In the middle you have identity foundations which are kind of LIKE doing things (passive consumption of media; intense identification with a sports team), but not really meaningful enough in their own right. It may be sort of a second-hand thing, where you're subconsciously hoping that intense engagement with the people who DO things (or the things they have done) will reflect on you and help to compensate for the fact that you yourself don't really DO anything noteworthy. (See SMBC on the difference between scientists and fans of science: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-30)
To have an identity to call your own, you need to actually do things. Intense but purely consumptive engagement with a thing you enjoy will only help to fill the void up to a point. If you really want to, you can tell me your race, gender, sexuality, tribal affiliation and the list of mental illnesses you've been diagnosed with, but you haven't really told me anything about yourself - you haven't told me anything that you DO.
I think that's wrong. Those attributes I would typically describe with a copula include the most stable and deepest parts of my identity: my species, my race, my sex & my basic personality traits. I might also use a copula to describe some less stable attributes, such as hunger, thirst, tiredness & location. In Spanish, one would use different copulae for those two use cases (ser vs estar). In general, grammatical structure is not a good guide to semantics.
Do you really think your species, race and sex provide me much insight into who YOU are, as a person? Or the fact that you are currently hungry, thirsty or sleepy?
To clarify, my point is that whether I describe it as "I am a human" (i.e. with a copula) or as "I belong to the human species" (i.e. without a copula) does not change the amount of insight.
Yes, you can come up with contrived circumlocutions which ostensibly undermine my point, but this is idle linguistic pedantry. Back in the real world, no one says "I belong to the male sex/gender and exclusively find other members of that sex/gender romantically and/or sexually desirable": they say "I am gay". Although they COULD, in principle, use other verbs, in practice people only ever use the copula when describing their own sexual orientation. Likewise race, gender identity, Zodiac sign etc.
And counter to your point, the use of the copula can itself be rather telling. You might think the phrases "I perform and/or compose and/or record and release musical compositions" and "I am a musician" to be equivalent, right? Wrong. I know at least two people personally who describe themselves as musicians despite not having performed or recorded music in years. Likewise people who say "I am a writer" despite never having written anything.
So you believe there is an importance distinction between "I like hiking" and "I am a hiker"?
If people who never hiked habitually described themselves as hikers, there would be an important distinction to be drawn between the statements "I am a hiker" and "I routinely go hiking at the weekend". I'm not aware of this being a common thing, for the simple reason that being a "hiker" doesn't raise one's status the way that being a "musician" or a "writer" would (or is intended to). Hence, I interpret the statements "I am a hiker" and "I routinely go hiking at the weekend" as interchangeable, in a way that I definitely DON'T with the statements "I am a musician" and "I perform and/or compose and/or record and release musical compositions".
(For what it's worth, it's an old joke about Tinder, and dating apps generally, that lots of people claim to enjoy hiking but never actually partake in it.)
This BEING/LIKING/DOING scheme is very nice and rings true.
It strikes me that there is a symbiosis between the doers and the likers. I depend on people who like (as part of their identity) what I do (as part of my identity) -- and vice versa. E.g., I go to the bar and “like” (in a sort of geeky way) what the bartender (great mixologist) does; they, in turn, as it happens, have a partial “like” for the kind of science I do.
A sort of gentle game recognize game thing, perhaps.
That's true, in many fields doers are dependent on likers. The ideal would be that one can wear many hats, being a doer in some contexts and a liker in others. But you can't do without being a doer at all.
To some degree, isn't this a matter of perspective? For example, sometimes being a homosexual Earthling is irrelevant, but sometimes it's very relevant to understanding who a person is and where they're coming from.
I think that the things *shouldn't* be important, in the sense that in a better world they would have less effect on us and would say less about us. And that's the world I try to create. But I still come across as a mammalian chauvinist to one of my more insect-oriented friends.
>sometimes it's very relevant to understanding who a person is and where they're coming from.
For example?
Sexual orientation:
Being a “gay man” doesn’t just “male sexually attracted to males”. It includes a collage of life experiences such as childhood or adolescence feeling alienated from your peers:
>> I knew I was gay from a very young age, probably 7 or 8, or even earlier, though I didn’t know the word gay. At that time, the word poofta (or poofter) was a commonly used Australian term for a gay male. I understood that in some ways this term meant me. I was also very aware that, for many people, being gay was akin to being a prostitute or being immoral. It was also very clear to me that being gay only meant sex; it had nothing to do with love, as I had no gay role models and I had never met a gay person.
At age 11, I left home to attend an all-boys boarding school. This saved me but also drove me deeper into the darkness of the closet. It saved me because it opened a whole world that I did not know about, exposing me to students from all over the South Pacific, along with cultures and ideas that were not available during my life on a sheep station. It also opened a door to a darker side; I was so terrified of being outed that I sometimes acted as the loudest bully toward others suspected of being gay. Every day I wore a mask to hide who I really was. This inner battle became a daily struggle: Deep down, I knew that everything about the way in which I presented my identity was a lie. When I had crushes on other boys, I had to keep them hidden, unfulfilled, when all around me, peers were getting so excited about romance and love. All I could do is dream that one day I would have friends who would be happy when I had my first boyfriend.
https://amshq.org/About-Montessori/Montessori-Articles/All-Articles/Growing-Up-Gay
teenage years fearing rejection from your family and peers, including potential homelessness or physical violence:
>> In August of last year, Daniel Pierce was kicked out of his home and disowned by his family for being gay. He recorded the confrontation on camera and the footage was later uploaded to YouTube. Daniel received help from Lost N Found Youth, an Atlanta organization that helps homeless LGBT youth get off the streets, along with other services.
https://www.glaad.org/blog/daniel-pierce-gay-georgia-teen-kicked-out-home-reflects-his-situation-one-year-later
>> Oct. 28, 2011— -- An Ohio high school student waited in a classroom to attack a 15-year-old gay classmate, beating him repeatedly in a vicious assault captured by a bystander on a cellphone.
"I covered myself and shielded my body, and he kept hitting," the gay student, who did not want to be identified, told ABC's affiliate WSYX in Ohio. "Nobody did anything."
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/ohio-bully-beating-gay-student-caught-cell-phone/story?id=14834057
It may have included years of emotional repression, shame or religious guilt, depression and/or suicidality
>> In November, the Mormon Church decreed that people in same-sex marriages are “apostates,” who can be excommunicated, and their children may not be baptized or blessed until they’re of “legal age,” don’t live with a parent in a same-sex relationship, and have committed to the teachings of the church and disavowed “the practice of same-gender cohabitation and marriage.” …
Since that announcement, 32 LGBT Mormons between the ages of 14 and 20 have committed suicide, according to a report from Mama Dragons, a support group for Mormon parents of LGBT kids. According to co-founder Wendy Williams Montgomery’s husband, Thomas, the families of these victims — 27 male, three female, and two transgender — reported the suicides to the couple personally, and the news was also shared with another Mormon LGBT support group, Affirmation.
It may have included an increased risk of exposure to deadly diseases, and/or different behavioral and cultural expectations about healthcare and interactions with the healthcare system
>> To be gay is to get used to blood tests. If you are positive, you do them to monitor your HIV status. If you are negative and on PrEP, a daily medication that helps prevent HIV, you do them to ensure it’s working. If you are negative and not on PrEP, you do them to maintain your sanity. Every gay person has their own rhythm to testing, defined by their relationship to HIV, their sexual practices and their neuroses. No matter your status, waiting for test results is never easy. You count the minutes until you hear via text, in person, over the phone, in an app: your body is OK for now.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/04/hiv-teach-us-to-survive-coronavirus
For many men sexually attracted to men “I am a gay man” represents a wholistic representation of these shared lived experiences. And how these lived experienced have been and continue to be distinct from the cultural, religious, economic, educational, healthcare etc majority.
Further, it is distinct from other minority experiences such as “I am a lesbian woman” and “I am a gay black man” and “I am a straight Deaf man” - this is the fundamental concept of intersectional identity formation.
Why would all this be considered a “unstable and shallow” ??
If you think I can just infer all of the above from someone telling me that they're gay, I think that's absurd. Surely you don't seriously think "your parents throwing you out of your house because of your sexuality" is an experience common to ALL (or even a majority) of gay men?
If you tell me specific experiences that you've had, you've given me some insight into you as a person. If you tell me "I'm gay" and hope I'll take that as shorthand for everything you just said, I think that's silly and a poor way to express yourself.
There are experiences that are common to many members of a particular identity group, but simply ASSUMING that a given member of that group MUST have had those experiences on the basis of their membership in said group seems functionally indistinguishable from stereotyping, which I thought was bad.
And yeah, being bullied sucks and can be deeply traumatizing, but if someone in their mid-thirties (or older) still has a chip on their shoulder about getting bullied as an adolescent and thinks of that experience as a core part of their identity - I think that reflects poorly on them, and I would think they have a pronounced victimhood complex.
>>If you think I can just infer all of the above from someone telling me that they're gay, I think that's absurd.
I didn't make that claim. I merely provided what I consider to be a number of compelling personal, relational, and/or cultural experiences which are common among a group of people who all self-identify in the same way. Those people believe, to some extent, that these are shared experiences amongst their group. These experiences, or the history of these experiences, or the threat of these experiences, may shape how they interpret their own lives, and the ways in which they relate to other individuals, groups, and society as a whole. That shaping of interpretation and shaping of expectations, to me, is largely what a Capital I Identity *is*
>>If you tell me specific experiences that you've had, you've given me some insight into you as a person. If you tell me "I'm gay" and hope I'll take that as shorthand for everything you just said, I think that's silly and a poor way to express yourself.
I think that you may be undervaluing social context / discourse pragmatics.
Would I know all the exact particulars of their life story? No. But for me, if I was told that, it would help me to understand "who a person is and where they're coming from", as Moon Moth also explained. If you prefer the framing common in the Astral Codex community, we could say that a collection of priors about "Average Human Default Life" exist in your mind, and a man saying "I'm gay" significantly changes some of those priors about the particular man - for example, the likelihood he has a wife would be moved to near Zero, while the likelihood that he lives with HIV may be increased from about 2% to about ~15-20%, among many other life experiences.
Further, we can consider from pragmatics that the content of a message is also informed by the context and the method of transmission.
Consider encountering a new man randomly at a party and asking them "Do you have a girlfriend" and that man responding "No" or that man responding "No, I'm gay". The man is actively choosing to reveal something about himself with the second answer. It may be benign, or it may not be. Is the man at a work function or a personal function? Is the man at a party of people he knows well, or is he a newcomer? Is this a general gathering or a specific event for LGBTQ+ people? The context would interact with the content.
Consider another encounter between two 18 year old freshman who have randomly been assigned as roommates. Roommate A asks the other, "Do you have a girlfriend?" And the Roommate B responds "No, I'm gay". Roommate A could potentially respond with "Ok cool." Or he could respond with "Ok man, I'm cool, but don't tell my parents, they're very religious". Or Roommate A could potentially respond with "Oh that's cool, how long have you been out?"
The second and third responses only meaningfully connect to "I'm gay" if we acknowledge that saying "I'm gay" imparts more information about that person's relation to society than just "I'm only sexually attracted to other men". Roommate A knows his parents are very religious - perhaps he knows they have expressed explicit homophobic views. Or Roommate A knows that our society assumes all humans are heterosexual, unless and until a particular human explicitly denies it.
>>And yeah, being bullied sucks and can be deeply traumatizing, but if someone in their mid-thirties (or older) still has a chip on their shoulder about getting bullied as an adolescent and thinks of that experience as a core part of their identity - I think that reflects poorly on them, and I would think they have a pronounced victimhood complex.
I would refer you to significant psycho-social, cognitive/psychological and neuroscience research that indicates experiences during development, and particularly during teenage years, do have a tendency to impart lifelong mood and behavioral patterns and that acknowledging these influences as formative and recognizing their outcomes is not "victimhood".
And I am not just considering extremely abusive and traumatizing situations - ALL experiences -positive, negative, boring, surprising, - interact with biological factors to lead to adult personalities and cultural/social patterns.
Thanks for answering here. I'd been putting off responding because it'd take a lot of time to write a serious response, and then I found that you'd done it better than I could.
I can see we're not going to agree on this point. All I can say is that I think a person's sexual orientation is one of the least interesting things about them as a person, and in my personal experience (anecdotes are not data and all that), people who define themselves principally in reference to their sexual orientation tend to be dull or insufferable.
I also think that vastly updating your estimate that a person has HIV because they told you you're gay, while statistically accurate, would in other contexts be considered homophobic stereotyping, and you don't seem to be acknowledging that.
>And I am not just considering extremely abusive and traumatizing situations - ALL experiences -positive, negative, boring, surprising, - interact with biological factors to lead to adult personalities and cultural/social patterns.
Yes, but this is true of everyone, not just gay men. If you talk about specific experiences YOU have experienced, you've told me more about YOURSELF. I'm not simply going to assume that every gay man I meet has been the victim of homophobic bullying, and gay men don't have a monopoly on bullying or abuse.
I live by my wits and as such I have survived and sometimes thrived all these winters, and now my kittens are found all over the county.
I would entirely agree with that. The first thing I ask of any new acquaintance is usually "What do you do?" because that interests me the most. And if I think about what defines me, it always comes down to what I do, what I like doing and don't like doing, why I do this instead of that, et cetera. Things that were born to me -- my sex, age, nationality, hair color, height, weight, that I like girls -- I mostly couldn't care less about this, either in me or in other people.
But this is not the Zeitgeist, I think, and that mystifies me a little why that should be so. I would hate to be defined by random external characteristics, things that are passively true or false, rather than by my actions.
Also, in a void (or desert island, whatever) all the checkmarks become meaningless. Many of them are pretty meaningless for most even on an everyday basis (young men are desperate to be a couple inches taller, later in life, zero relevance for almost all), but without a specific society around you, doesn't matter if you're X, Y, Z. Which basically means the checkmark are a way to let society define you, which seems like a losing proposition.
These are some great points, and I think they provide another framework to help understand nerds. I think that nerds differ from the rest of the population is that they blur the LIKE and DO lines. They engage with things that most people just LIKE in a way that is more like DOing.
Nerds often engage with media that other people passively consume in a very active, DOing type way. They spend huge amounts of time thinking about little details of the plot and world and commiserating with other people about it. They contribute to online forum discussions. They edit fan wikis. They go to conventions and attend panels on media. They write fanfiction. It isn't quite like your canonical examples of DOing something, but it isn't passive consumption either. They are engaging with media in a way that is more constructive, thoughtful, and social than is normal.
This could explain why nerds seem extremely attached to things they LIKE in ways that seem strange and unreasonable to other people. They are able to form stronger and more fulfilling identities around things they LIKE than other people, because they are able to engage with them in ways that are more like DOing.
My wife and I have debated the importance of “what you do” for a person understanding you, and for her, “what you do” often means almost nothing. Scott’s top tier would probably be lower tier for her in importance. Why? Because it says nothing about what kind of a person they are and how they relate to the people around them. There are some “what you do” cases that at least get some small adjustments, like being a healthcare worker or a teacher, but someone doing advanced abstract math gives us no information, or possibly a negative prior, because this person may live in an ivory tower and look down on others. Until she finds out if this person is the type to show concern for a friend, or not be stingy with tipping their waitress, or any other interaction that indicates “is this person a kind and moral person,” then the rest of those things are just window dressing for the actually important aspects of a person’s identity.
We’ve managed to meet more in the middle, I definitely often felt misunderstood because people didn’t understand or care much about what I do, and she definitely helped me realize that a lot of people just aren’t wired that way. I feel like a lot of this focus on the tiers kind of ignores the elephant in the room, that if you’re an asshole, none of these “things to build your identity around” really matter all that much, because you’ll be alone and friendless.
But isn't "being an asshole" really just a shorthand for "doing a lot of asshole things?" I mean, you can have asshole thoughts inside your head and not act on them, indeed you can feel like being an asshole but actually be a considerate and reasonable person, via your conscience and will. Certainly happens to me. And does it matter if you're an asshole on the inside, so long as you're not one on the outside?
I feel like there needs to be some kind of Harry Flashman quip here.
"Showing concern for a friend", "not being stingy when tipping" are examples of things that you DO, not things that you ARE. As I said above, we are who we choose to be. The fact that someone is gay, or depressed, or a Libra, tells me virtually nothing about them. The fact that they make the decision to tip a waitress speaks volumes.
>if you’re an asshole, none of these “things to build your identity around” really matter all that much, because you’ll be alone and friendless.
In my framework, "being an asshole" also means "making the conscious decision to do asshole things", which is also something you DO rather than something you ARE. I wish I could say I believed that assholes always end up alone and friendless, but frankly, I don't believe that: I think that being "likeable" and being "good" are orthogonal to one another. But that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
I think the comments to my post helped me to think about how to clarify this. I think if you really want to get down to the nitty gritty, you can argue that there’s very few things that you actually are, almost everything is something that you do. That said, I think there’s high-level what you do (e.g. your occupation, your hobbies), and low-level what you do (e.g. how you relate to your coworkers, whether you’re a good or sore loser when playing board games with friends). I think my wife would say she doesn’t think the high-level what you do is very useful, except in the case that it gives you some reliable signal about the low-level what you do. Thanks for the comments back, this will definitely inform the inevitable next round of debate my wife and I have about this!
If you're an asshole, that *is* your identity. Or at least a major load-bearing pillar of it. But you probably won't admit that part, at least not explicitly, which means there isn't a simple question you can ask other people to get them to admit that they are assholes.
A large part of quality is virtuosity and the qualities we imagine the artist must had. People who like sports usually value the moments of incredible performance. A Marvell movie is such a corporate product that the personalities behind it are lost, whereas in an art movie the personality of the director is more visible.
A large part of nerdery is being into fictional worlds. Fans are often more into characters.
I don't think it's that a Marvel movie is a generic corporate product, it's that it is trying to tell a serialized story. That means that directors sometimes need to compromise their vision in order to make the product fit into the larger narrative. They are less like traditional movie directors and more like the directors of TV show episodes. Directors have less power in the MCU compared to writers, again more like TV.
A lot of movie directors don't like this, because they are used to directors being in charge and writers being disposable hired guns. But, in my view, they need to get over it, because the serialized and connected nature of the MCU is one reason it is popular. If you want to get to direct something incredibly popular you can't immediately start complaining that your directorial style clashes with one of the main things that makes it popular.
The MCU films are formulaic in a way spears from their serialised nature. The most recent Ant-Man film had very little connection to films outside the Ant-Man trilogy, but it still felt very much like a Marvel film.
> Top-tier: Intellectual subfields, especially obscure ones or ones involving pure abstract math. If you can say “I’m really into trans-finite 8-dimensional Hoffdorf groups” and justify this with a discussion of how innately beautiful they are, you’ve got it made.
This is some blatant Sniffnoy propaganda.
I have a (slightly crackpot-ish) theory about what nerds are.
Scott links nerdiness to class here, in that upper class people and nerds both cultivate refined interests that are inaccessible to the general population.
SSC has a post about "the science of nerds" linking nerdiness to Jewishness, in that there's overlap in traits between the stereotypical Jew and the stereotypical nerd.
Of course there's also a connection between Jews and economic class, they're on average unusually well off, if you believe Cochran, because Jews have undergone selection to fit a finance/office work/white collar economic niche.
The basic elements of human psychology are adapted to a hunter-gatherer existence, but success in the modern world often depends on having psychological traits that weren't selected for in the HG world. Self discipline, and the ability to focus on what would seem like incredibly boring stimuli to a hg, spreadsheets, writing code etc.
It's interesting that Scott's list of respectable interests boils down to will power and I guess less instinctually compelling things, like tribalism. Being the kind of person who's interested in pure maths probably isn't adaptive in the HG world, but someone like that could be very successful in the more bureaucratic niches that civilisation creates, like finance.
I think nerds are people with psychological traits that are useful in a bureaucratic/office-work niche, as opposed to the majority of the population who have traits selected for hunter-gather or farming life.
Sports are the archetypical non-nerd interest, and they're basically tribal contest of physical might, which feels very hunter-gathered/primitive farmer-ish to me.
Obviously a lot of nerds end up working various kinds of desk jobs, like software, engineering, physics etc., and often are financially successful.
The class signalling around more cultured and less cultured interests is a way to advertise that you have the psychological traits that predict success in civilisation.
I mentioned in the other thread that you could fairly accurately predict the characteristics of the archetypical "traditional" 20th-century nerd by looking at the intersection of "intellectual" and "masculine-coded."
I think you're getting at something similar here, but you're missing the gendered element, which is very important. Traditional femininity - the characteristics that make people good at managing a household, supervising children, doing repetitive chores every day, and concentrating on textile work like embroidery or weaving - is very well-suited to the modern office, and yet these have always been the antithesis of nerdiness. It's specifically masculine-coded traits like numeracy and curiosity that got the original "nerd" label.
But this, and your observation as well, still only applies to the 20th-century nerd. Most people here seem to be using an entirely different operational definition, which I can only describe as "trying very very hard not to say the 'a' word."
The problem with slang terms like "nerds" and "hipsters" is that they change meaning every generation. That's what slang does, because slang is language that is in fashion. When my dad called someone a "nerd" he meant that that guy was an asshole. I haven't heard anyone else nerd to mean that, but apparently it meant that once. I think I've heard "nerd" deployed to mean a dozen different things over the years. All we can be sure of is that whatever it means today, it will mean something else in 15 years.
Similarly, when William S. Burroughs uses the term "hipster" he means a drug user or someone who looks like one.
I think you underestimate the complexity of hunter-gatherer existence. Plant nerds could be extremely useful if you want to know where to find a particularly rare fruit tree and when it's ripe. Animal nerds could predict the migration patterns of common prey animals or identify behavioral quirks that could be used to lead prey into a trap. Rock nerds could identify the highest quality material to craft arrowheads out of. And so on.
Perhaps most important, sky/star nerds, who could predict the weather, navigate across oceans, etc. (while engaging in very non-nerdish related physical pursuits).
One useful concept to solve the "quality" problem is "upmarket" and "downmarket."
Things that are upmarket are aimed at a smaller market that has high discernment. Things that are downmarket are aimed at a larger market with low discernment.
With something like speakers, downmarket speakers are functional, but may not give the clarity of upmarket speakers. Meanwhile, people who purchase downmarket speakers may believe that people who purchase upmarket speakers are falling for marketing rather than actually enjoying more quality.
The same applies to cultural products.
The MCU is aimed downmarket. To speak to as many people as possible. This does not mean its plot is bad—lots of things are easily accessible but flop big-time—But that it requires little effort or skill to appreciate.
Meanwhile, a movie like Portrait De La Jeune Fille En Feu has no soundtrack, no action scenes, and is in French: it requires a significant amount of skill to understand and enjoy.
Does this mean it's better?
Not necessarily. Sometimes, things move upmarket just by adding meaningless complexity (difficult diction, or nonsense in the case of Ern Malley) or by removing emotional cues (not using music in a movie, like the example above). Sometimes, things move upmarket because they are adding meaningful complexity, like deep themes.
So, let's go back to your feeling about quality: that things too upmarket for you are meaningless complexity, but things that are downmarket of your taste are shallow. This can be a meaningful statement, where you like things that add meaningful complexity, while something like Finnegan's Wake is meaningless complexity.
It's also true that adding complexity can require more close attention and skill, and that can actually make someone enjoy something more. Removing music from a movie or adding bits of nonsense to a poem means you have to pay closer attention, which means that you will get more out of it I unironically like Ern Malley's poetry, a position that is actually quite common. Revealing it was written as a hoax does not change the fact that it has a more emotional effect on me than any of the other poems the creators wrote. I get more out of it.
But I still refuse to pick up Finnegan's Wake, because it goes too far: the complexity is designed to take a lifetime to read, and while James Joyce was really, really smart, he was not smart enough to spend a lifetime on.
So, in summary:
1) Upmarket and downmarket are better terms because they allow that what is upmarket is not always better (but always has higher barriers to entry)
2) What is upmarket does require more attention and understanding, which can legitimately increase enjoyment and engagement
3. Some of this complexity can be meaningful (e.x. deeper themes) and some can be meaningless (e.x. removing music). Meaningless, however, is not always bad because #2
4. There is a point where something becomes too complex for reasonable enjoyment (e.x. Finnegan's Wake). But it is difficult to know whether this complexity is for meaningful reasons or meaningless.
Nerds, generally, take something that is in a medium that's traditionally seen as downmarket (e.x. animation) and find upmarket examples of it. This is why you have Sci-Fi nerds but literature geeks.
(The ideal piece of art, in my mind, is something that can be enjoyed both downmarket and upmarket. That is, it is immediately enjoyable, but also rewards increased attention with deeper meanings. Like Jurassic Park, which uses very subtle symbolism to create narrative meaning and character resonance while also being a dinosaur action flick)
>With something like speakers, downmarket speakers are functional, but may not give the clarity of upmarket speakers. Meanwhile, people who purchase downmarket speakers may believe that people who purchase upmarket speakers are falling for marketing rather than actually enjoying more quality.
Speakers might not be the best example, but some people - even self-identified sommeliers - literally cannot tell the difference between e.g. cheap wine and expensive wine, or French wine and Californian wine, despite professing a preference for expensive wine over cheap wine.
Buying upmarket speakers also serves a secondary function from the perspective of conspicuous consumption, obviously. If you don't have a good ear, conspicuous consumption may in fact be the primary (even sole) purpose of buying Bang & Olufsen rather than Phillips.
Regarding Coagulopath's comment: "In general, I am creeped out by effusive public adoration for things that are near-universally loved. Like The Beatles. Or bacon. Or dogs. Or science.
The similarly creepy but inverse phenomenon is the effusive public hatred of things that are nearly universally hated, such as gender violence, racism etc. (in other words, virtue signalling)
Half-joking/half-serious:
Yeah. You know who else made a big show of publicly hating things they thought were bad? Nazis.
> sci-fi and RPGs are very popular, and the typical sci-fi fan is closer to a socially-adept albeit “quirky” young woman
That would be fantasy, not sci-fi. Across both books and videogames, fantasy is gender-neutral, while SF is still predominantly consumed by men.
Source: http://quanticfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/
https://wlv.openrepository.com/handle/2436/620363
Socially-adept quirky young woman? Even in my own fandom, I can't get no respect 😁
Woman? Yes.
Quirky? If that's the polite version of "odd", okay.
As for the rest of it - no.
Fantasy and SF demonstrate that the whole thing is fractal.
Star Wars isn't even SF or fantasy; Star Trek and The Expanse series are low class, Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer are a tier above, perhaps; enthusiasm for The Dispossessed or Dhalgren definitely; mastery of Philip K. Dick's canon and, say, early Pynchon is impressive. And then there's being able to be insightful about the commonalities and differences in Harlan Ellison, N. K. Jemisin, and Stanislaw Lem.
Much of the cannon is basically sci-fi/speculative/fantasy fiction. Frankenstein, Dracula, Wells, 1984, BNW, Clockwork, Slaughterhouse 5, 451, etc. E.g., if you go down guardians top 100, roughly 1/3 to 1/2 are speculative, depending how you define term. E.g., why isn't Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, Master and Margarita fantasy? Same with Odyssey, Beowulf, etc. Realistic fiction is the odd one out, probably because it's inherently boring (we all know unhappy people in unhappy relationships, who wants to read about that as a leisure time activity?). And in terms of what sells, also dominated by speculative: King, Rowling, etc., basically destroying the competition. Funny thing a few years back when everyone was writing apocalypse stories.
The main difference is that you should really only read Lem out of that set.
> https://wlv.openrepository.com/handle/2436/620363
Something that struck me while looking over this paper:
> Although girls preferred relationships and fairytales/folktales more than boys did (t(4768) = 2.75 and 3.08, ps < .001), both genders shared almost similar taste in other types of fiction, except for mysteries (t(4768) = 4.09, p < .001). This points to greater convergence in boys’ and girls’ reading preferences by genre.
It takes a special kind of dedication to look at data that says "big differences in genre fiction preference by gender in 3 out of 8 categories" and conclude "the genders are very similar, except for the relationships / fairy tales / mysteries categories". Are they just hoping no one realizes there are only 8 rows in their table?
I think you might be making a category error in regards to the 'quality' thing. MCU absolutely *has* quality. I wouldn't watch it, but defining it as the low end of the quality scale is causing a lot of confusion for you. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnosaur_(film) is closer to the bottom end of the movie quality scale by far than the MCU stuff (potentially touching the "so bad it's good" effect for some people). I've not seen any of the MCU movies and don't really plan to (superhero is not really my genre), but I imagine they have a lot of production value. The plot is probably glib, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily more glib than, say, Jurassic Park, which a lot of people loved and doesn't seem to have much of a backlash (beside the whole "those aren't Velociraptors" style complaints).
Similarly, I *think* you might be making a category error about sci-fi or RPGs being "very popular". You can't really walk up to a random person in the street and have a high chance of them being into either of these things. Sci-fi, as far as I'm aware, is less popular than fantasy, and fantasy is less popular than dramas and thrillers. I would describe it as very niche! There are things that are *even more* niche (e.g. horror I believe is one of those genres, and definitely surrealist fiction), but I'd not put "very" infront of "popular". Yes, there are a lot of people who have seen Star Wars, and for a large amount of them, that'll be all the sci-fi they want. (And arguably it's space fantasy and not sci-fi, but I'll leave the sci-fi definition uncontested here so I don't make my life too easy.)
>I *think* you might be making a category error about sci-fi or RPGs being "very popular". You can't really walk up to a random person in the street and have a high chance of them being into either of these things. Sci-fi, as far as I'm aware, is less popular than fantasy, and fantasy is less popular than dramas and thrillers.
I agree that RPGs are a much more niche interest than Scott is presenting them as, but hard disagree on the rest. With regards to sci-fi, Avatar is the highest-grossing film ever made, the MCU (which sort of straddles the line between sci-fi and fantasy) is a massive multimedia juggernaut, Star Wars has been one of the biggest media franchises in the world for fifty years, likewise Star Trek, Jurassic World is the 8th-highest grossing film and so on and so on. With regards to fantasy: Lord of the Rings is the third bestselling book ever (and the film adaptations are among the highest-grossing films ever AND swept the Oscars), Harry Potter has been a huge media franchise for the last twenty-five years, Game of Thrones and ASoIaF are huge etc. While some science fiction or fantasy works are obscure (as in every genre), the genres as a whole are not niche or obscure by any stretch of the imagination. I think the last time this was true was like fifty years ago.
I'm going to disagree with this. That a number of big-budget science fiction films were popular doesn't necessarily translate into science fiction being popular; these films could be popular despite being science fiction.
To go with a sports example: American football is a popular sport (in America). The Super Bowl gets something like 100 million viewers. The average NFL football game viewership seems to be between 15 and 18 million people. Broadcast big name college football games get enough viewers to make the game worth broadcasting. For most sports, however, that the very top end championship gets a lot of viewers says nothing about the number of viewers that the regular events will draw. Let's switch sports to women's gymnastics. The Olympic women's gymnastics championship got around 40 million viewers. What number of viewers would a weekly women's gymnastics sports program draw? I know which way I would bet.
This is important if you're a film-maker going on to make a movie. If you think you have the next Avatar science fiction blockbuster that isn't a big name IP, and your name isn't James Cameron (or another household name like Lucas or Spielberg), you're likely to be very disappointed at the box-office results. Viewers like big budget action movies; that those movies happen to be some flavor of science fiction is incidental to their popularity except in that special effects are a good use of budget in getting people into theaters. (I think viewers are more interested in science fiction than they used to be, but all else being equal, science fiction will turn away more viewers than it will attract).
Another quibble: the MCU isn't really a MULTIMEDIA juggernaut; it might have qualified when the TV shows were getting decent viewers, but even that seems to have dropped off. That MCU viewers were attracted to big budget movies and not superheroes (science fiction + fantasy) is demonstrated by the continuing failure of Marvel comics.
I don't think the MCU is completely without quality or artistic merit. The early movies in the series (which worked from a proven base of time-tested comics) took decent directing, talented actors matched to time-tested characters, and time-tested stories mated with cutting edge special effects and produced a number of great movies. There's demonstrable artistic merit in the successful transition from one media to another alone. But as the well of good and translatable comics have run dry and the corporate pressure has increased, the quality has dropped significantly.
Do you think most of the people who went to see Avatar went to see it specifically because they knew James Cameron directed it? I don't think so. Consider the fact that it did amazing numbers in China, and several of Cameron's previous films (e.g. Terminator 2) were never released there theatrically. You can say "people only went to see it because of the name recognition of the director", but even Spielberg has had flops (many, in fact). You can say "people only went to see it because they like big budget movies", but a) history is littered with examples of big budget films that flopped - a big budget is no guarantor of commercial success and b) there are plenty of more modestly-budgeted science fiction films which had impressive commercial returns, many of which are still widely beloved entries in the pop cultural canon to this day - Robocop ($13 million), The Terminator ($6 million), ET ($10 million), Star Wars ($11 million), Rollerball ($6 million), Alien ($11 million), Back to the Future ($19 million) (these figures are not inflation-adjusted). Sure you'll tell me that "people only liked these movies in spite of their being sci-fi, not because they're sci-fi - they only went to see them because they like big budgets/explosions/director with name recognition/actor with name recognition", but like - when you have numerous examples of successful science fiction films which were modestly budgeted, were not wall-to-wall action (several of the above were even pretty restrained when it came to special effects), were directed by virtual unknowns and starred virtual unknowns, what exactly would it take to prove that actually there IS a huge mainstream market for science fiction films? (Excluding a bunch of special pleading; "Back to the Future is more of a teen comedy anyway".) Not to mention the converse - it isn't hard to find examples of big budget movies starring and/or directed by household names, which bombed anyway (Tomorrowland, Cutthroat Island), some of which were even franchise entries/remakes/adaptations with name recognition (The Lone Ranger, Pan, The 13th Warrior, Mulan [2020]).
>the MCU isn't really a MULTIMEDIA juggernaut; it might have qualified when the TV shows were getting decent viewers, but even that seems to have dropped off
Sorry, no. WandaVision was "the most viewed title of January 2021 across all major U.S. streaming and advertising video on demand services" - and this is a TV show which is a pastiche of 50s sitcoms, not big-budget explosions and special effects. "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the most-viewed series of April 2021". "Moon Knight had the most in-demand United States series premiere in the first quarter of 2022. It had 33.4 times the average demand of all other series in the U.S. during its first 30 days." There are 7 new MCU TV shows due to be released in 2023 and 2024. MCU's TV shows are still in rude health.
In addition to that there were a bunch of MCU tie-in video games, hence the "multimedia" part.
Where are you getting your streaming numbers? I can find Nielsen's numbers, and they do include Disney+, but WandaVision is #14 for 2021, and no MCU show makes it in 2022.
As far as video games goes, none of the MCU tie-ins have been particularly successful, unless you count the PlayStation Spider-Man games, and counting those as MCU is a bit of a stretch due to the whole 'what do you mean we licensed our most popular characters to Sony?' debacle.
To get to my main point, if I want to persuade someone I don't know to go see a movie, the phrase "science fiction" doesn't enter my vocabulary. "It stars [X]" or "it's by the director of [Y] and [Z]" or (in the case of China) "it's a big American movie that made it past the censors" are the phrases I consider using. If it's got nothing else, I show the trailer and hope whoever put it together did a good enough job of doing whiz-bang special effects without spoiling the film.
I think this is a change from the 70s and 80s because there wasn't any competition. The original Star Wars stood out because there were only a few big screen special effects blockbusters each year. 1983, the year Return of the Jedi came out, the other films in the top four are Tootsie, Flashdance, and Trading Places. 2019, the year before COVID, the top 8 are three Marvel movies, two Disney animated sequels, two Disney live action remakes of animated films, and one Star Wars film.
>Where are you getting your streaming numbers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WandaVision#Audience_viewership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falcon_and_the_Winter_Soldier#Audience_viewership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Knight_(TV_series)#Audience_viewership
>WandaVision is #14 for 2021
"This MCU TV show was the 14th most popular TV show of the year before last" does not scream "MCU's TV shows are failing" to me.
>none of the MCU tie-ins have been particularly successful
Agreed.
>To get to my main point, if I want to persuade someone I don't know to go see a movie, the phrase "science fiction" doesn't enter my vocabulary.
Fair enough, but I don't think the way you try to get your friends to see movies is necessarily indicative of any broader cultural trend. Nor do I think that it in any way contradicts the objective fact that there have been dozens of sci-fi films in the last fifty years (including sci-fi films made on modest budgets, restrained in their use of special effects, without marketable stars and directed by relative unknowns) which were enormously critically and/or commercially successful. And maybe you don't use the specific phrase "science fiction", but I'm sure if you show your friends the trailer they can make a reasonable inference as to which genre it falls under.
>2019, the year before COVID, the top 8 are three Marvel movies, two Disney animated sequels, two Disney live action remakes of animated films, and one Star Wars film.
So you're saying in 2019, of the top 8 highest-grossing films, only one WASN'T either science fiction, fantasy, or that intermediate space between sci-fi and fantasy that superhero films occupy - and this is meant to UNDERMINE my argument that science fiction and fantasy are extremely popular, mainstream, commercially viable genres?
I enjoy science fiction. I would like to continue to enjoy science fiction across multiple media. I'm not a picky consumer, at least with regards to the definition of science fiction; I don't consider Star Wars to be some separate 'science fantasy' category. The problem is that all my mental heuristics point to 'less enjoyable science fiction in the forseeable future'.
In the style of ACX, I'll make a number of predictions. For the sake of clarity, I rate each of these at at least 75%.
1. The quality of MCU movies, as measured by domestic box office gross or by audience score, will continue to trend downward. That doesn't mean that some movies might be better than others, but the overall trend is downward. The low hanging fruit has been harvested.
2. The next Star Wars movie may make the Top 10 for the year, but it will not have the domestic box office (adjusted for inflation) of Top Gun: Maverick or Avatar 2.
3. Over 75% of the movies on the top 10 lists during the next five years will be Disney (including Disney owned IP produced by others such as Sony), non-Disney animated, DC, or Avatar. There will be no new science fiction movies from a new IP or existing untapped IP that make any presence in the top 10 movies list during that period.
The problem is that movies are only part of the pipeline, and they're mostly the outlying end. There's almost no sources of new viable IP, at least nothing that studios are going to take a risk on throwing down for a blockbuster. The last Black Swan multimedia IP was Harry Potter. It took four years for that to generate a movie, which lead to the brief and now pretty much finished YA IP boom. Science Fiction is still doing ok over in Video Game land, though any attempts to move from there to the wider media system have not had good results (see Halo). It's holding on in TV land, through middling quality Star Trek series (including the Orville), Star Wars series, and the Expanse.
The only 'gray swans' (not entirely unforseeable) I see are:
For the MCU, Deadpool 3. Ryan Reynolds is a creator willing to take risks to make a product for fans, and he's produced results despite opposition from the corporate side. If anything bucks the MCU trend, it's most likely to be him.
For movies: now that Sonic and Mario have shown that animated video game movies can work if they cater to the fans, Nintendo has a stack of potential IP floating around, and (for all the issues with their business model) defending the integrity of their IP is one thing they're known for. I just wager that any future Nintendo projects will be animated and intended primarily for kids.
Fantasy is its own separate problem. Telling me "there are a lot of great fantasy movies coming out soon... go watch [the next MCU film] or Frozen III!" doesn't work. There's talk of another ASoIaF TV series, but the botched ending to the last series kinda dampened any enthusiasm for that. The Witcher had another Creator with a passionate need to see the series done justice, and they effectively fired him for it. LotR has been discussed here to death. If there was an existing viable multimedia fantasy IP that hadn't been touched, I would figure someone would have grabbed it back when fantasy TV series were trendy.
A comic book costs five dollars for MAYBE fifteen minutes of entertainment. The story will either be completely confined to that one issue, or will be stretched out over months.
For example, I can get a trade paperback of Watchment for $35. If printed as individual issues it'd easily run me $40-60, over the space of a year.
Nothing is needed to explain the unpopularity of comic books beyond that.
Under 'comics', I'd include any similar visual storytelling, such as graphic novels.
Graphic novels for kids are doing great. Imported graphics novels are doing great. Domestic graphic novels from domestic publishers that once had massive audiences (and can tie them in to blockbuster movies)? Not doing great.
For what it's worth I rather liked "House of the Dragon", once I figured out that it was a cross between "The Crown" and various Shakespeare histories. We know where it goes - doom, civil war, no more dragons - and the process of getting there is helped by some good performances by the actors. Plus hot dragon-on-dragon action, as it were.
> Nothing is needed to explain the unpopularity of comic books beyond that
Disagree, the unpopularity of comic books has little to do with economics. Most people (like me) who'd never consider buying a comic book have no idea what they cost or how long they are.
The unpopularity of comic books is almost entirely about the social stigma associated with them. Comic books are perhaps _the_ most uncool thing that there is, and owning even one is a threat to your social status.
Or comic books are really, really boring to many? You've got a couple panels a page, plus some text. You can "read" them in a couple minutes. Basically, a weird way to tell a story.
The Marvel stuff from 2008's "Iron Man" onward for 5 or 10 years was strikingly good for comic book movies in terms of quantity with respectable quality. They put out a lot of pretty decent comic book movies in a short time. Comic book movies weren't good at all until the 1978 "Superman," and that was highly erratic. For decades afterwards, comic book movies remained hit or miss. Marvel eventually briefly got down a formula where they could consistently make decent comic book movies. D.C., in contrast, never figured out a formula.
I haven't paid much attention lately, but I wouldn't be surprised if they'd gotten lousier lately. In any case, you'll get bored with a formula after awhile.
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)."
That is not a "plot", that is a premise.
Each "episode" (game/match) of whatever sport has its own plot, with dramatic twists galore.
I'm not even a sports fan, but Scott is being unfair.
(“Access” should be “axis” – silly voice recognition software!)
I can't blame voice recognition - I do that to myself somehow, my brain seems to classify words along how they sound, and even though I know intellectually which one is which, I'll put down the wrong one if I'm in a hurry.
Funny how Americans pronounce those two words the same. In my native Canadian, there would be a clear difference in the sound of the second vowel.
This is an internal difference. In my native American English, there is a clear difference in the second vowel. "Access" uses the DRESS vowel; "axis" has a reduced vowel.
(Other English speakers may distinguish between a reduced KIT and a schwa. Not me.)
I'm really glad to hear someone else say this, because I've noticed myself making pronunciation-based typos (some which even seem to involve the replacement of vowels based on my regional accent), and now I have more than one data point to start speculating about what this means about how the mind handles verbal vs. written language. What I should speculate I don't know, but it certainly seems to imply something interesting is going on.
(Example from this very post! I originally wrote certainly as "certainle," which I think was because it ends in the sound that's used for the name of the letter "e")
“Top-tier: Intellectual subfields, especially obscure ones or ones involving pure abstract math. If you can say “I’m really into trans-finite 8-dimensional Hoffdorf groups” and justify this with a discussion of how innately beautiful they are, you’ve got it made.”
As an academic, I know people like this (not all academics are, some fields have this more than others, etc) and I can tell you that this kind of identity construct does *not* age well. At 20, it’s great (there’s a lovely sense of calm that radiates from them); at 30, it’s fine (but starts to seem a little childish); at 40, it seems sad and it is almost always confined to the ex-child prodigy third-tier Hoffdorf theorists.
Notably, and maybe this is my message to ACX readers, the best people at Hoffdorf groups *don’t* do this. The best Hoffdorf people do, actually, have personalities that are load-bearing. This is true even in pure mathematics.
In some fields that require intense and sometimes unpleasant work, being Hoffdorf guy/girl in your 20s can help. Here I’m thinking more of certain parts of the humanities that require reading lots of badly-written secondary sources and getting up on the higher gossip.
But the people who don’t move beyond that lose out in a number of ways:
1. They can’t connect to others, even others in their field. They miss out on the wider experiences, including the intellectual experiences that would make them better at Hoffdorf groups. There’s something deeply incurious about them. Imagine a Shakespeare scholar who would rather know 0.02% more about Two Gentlemen of Verona than read, say, John Donne, or who only cares about John Donne because he illuminates some minor aspect of Shakespearean prosody.
2. Mystical take: intellectual achievement comes in part from a connection to a wide unconscious aspect of one’s experience. But identity construction, by contrast, is a conscious act. Being Haffdorf guy is antithetical to learning more about Haffdorf spaces because Haffdorf spaces are in some way bigger than what you can encompass. Haffdorf spaces go low when you want to go high, as it were.
Reading FdB’s load bearing essay, I feel like he gets it right. In high school I knew people who were really in to math, and others who were really in to being gay. Twenty years later, I’m struck by how, for both groups, it was a useful phase to have gone through. Some of the math types became math profs, some of the gay guys became artists (the gay thing was actually a sensitivity/aesthete thing, turns out some weren’t gay, and there were some gay jocks). Others became b-school profs, or lawyers, or died young of cancer.
But that early identification matured and developed, becoming something that was a small part of their present, that they could draw on, but not define themselves by. It’s useful to remember that phase, because if you’re good you’ll encounter plenty of 20 year olds who are really in it, but even most of them realize that you, yourself, should have probably become a person.
I have to second this. I have met people at the bar who want to talk about Category Theory, and I have to refrain myself from saying "why". But, if you look at the person who wrote the book on Category Theory, you will find she spent a year playing professional Aussie-rules football.
Thirded. Book recommendation along these lines: Range by David Epstein.
She did??? Damn, and I just wasted my time asking her about her vision for teaching math through proof assistants.
I still don't understand what you mean by "personalities that are load-bearing". It sounds like you're saying "not based on anything, just their magical essence of selfhood shining through in an unconditioned way".
How did you get that from my post?
Like, which remarks in particular led you to believe I was asserting a “magical essence of selfhood” (some unchanging unitary thing?) that “shines through” (through what?) in an “unconditioned way” (unconditioned by what?)
I truly don’t think any of that and in my remarks I was giving examples of experiences that led me to believe a personality is quite the opposite: an evolving, complex process, with a logic that excludes simple, stable solutions.
I guess I don't understand what it means to have a "load bearing personality" separate from one's personality having specific features like "liking transfinite math", but I feel like if I pointed out someone whose personality had those kinds of specific features, you would say they were using it as an alternative to a load-bearing personality.
I didn't mean to make fun of you, just to try to express the level of my confusion.
It seems like you’re having difficulty engaging with the stories in my original post. Here is something a bit more Spinozan that might help you see what a self might be other than a magical essence unconditioned shining etc.
1. A self is a complex, evolving object.
2. It takes on and assembles itself out of features (like being really in to Haffdorf spaces). These features play a role in its further evolution. Many of the most important properties are emergent, however: not reducible to having this or that subfeature. (Think about the property of water being wet — what specific feature of the molecule does that?)
3. The self is only partially knowable to the self. This is partly a result of #2. Partly a diagonalization thing/cybernetic theorem/X can’t contain a complete model of itself as a subpart. Lots of interesting epistemic stuff here, but I hope this is reasonably intuitive.
4. Because of #3, attempts to define the self through a conscious identification will be at best “usefully wrong”. At worst they are dangerous self-amputations that reduce the intrinsic complexity of the self. In general this is why you should be very wary of thinking you’ve made sense of yourself or someone else by pointing out their properties. (Note that simply having recognizable properties is fine — my original post happily drew attention to some.)
5. Most interesting things in the world (Haffdorf spaces, human relationships, etc) are comprehensible only to complex selves, so there are good reasons to pay attention to the limits of knowability implied by #4.
Maybe a non-load bearing personality trait would be, “I like The Merchant of Venice” and a load-bearing personality trait would be, “I think literature expresses human emotions and helps us be fully human”. The load-bearing one says something about you and how you value things, where the non-load bearing one feels more arbitrary.
People “without load bearing personalities” really do have personalities, but that personally might be “I enjoy working with Hoffdorf spaces, and nothing else has been quite as fun so I’m still interested in them”. That personality rests on how fun something is, so it’ll change if something more fun comes along. The “human emotions” thing is grounded in being fully human, so it won’t change next time something fun comes along. That person would (hypothetically) only switch to something else equally good at expressing human emotions.
^This is a really good comment. Don't be the Haffdorf spaces guy your whole life. It's not a good way to life.
Meanwhile I'm trying to figure out if this was just meant to be a plausible-sounding made-up example (probably!) or a sideways wink at Hausdorff spaces...
I think so… although Hausdorff is such a generic property it’s hard to get excited by it…
True enough, although I was excited when I came across my first *non*-hausdorff space 'in the wild' (Zariski, of course)
The description of sports as a thousand episodes of a series with the same plot is highly illustrative. I appreciate sports (even moreso chess, go and modern board games) as a realm in which true drama emerges in a relatively natural proportion, as opposed to letting screenwriters artfully pull my marionette strings. The older I get, the more I tire of long serial fiction.
Agree. To take the argument to its extreme:
How can someone possibly like literature, when everything that happens is entirely predetermined by some dude or gal that arbitrarily chose the sequence of events and what everyone would do, say, and even think? In sports, the protagonists are making decisions for themselves while exhibiting high levels of skill, and they're even real people! And the more you're into the sport, the more you understand the challenges they face and the choices they make.
Excellent.
> How can someone possibly like literature, when everything that happens is entirely predetermined by some dude or gal that arbitrarily chose the sequence of events and what everyone would do, say, and even think?
I think this is what Eliezer Yudkowsky was trying to say with his rant against arguing from fictional evidence.
And it is a real problem. Something that bothered me in reading The Wheel of Time was the discussion of military tactics. I can't tell whether what the books say is legitimate or total gibberish. And I could never escape the sneaking suspicion that the author might not know either. (I genuinely have no opinion; it's just a question that bothered me that I couldn't resolve.) This has pushed me a little moreover the years towards reading nonfiction.
But I think the rant against arguing from fictional evidence was a mistake, and I also think that the fact that fictional scenarios are contrived by the author doesn't make them useless for learning about analogous scenarios. The author can tell you that something happened and what everyone thought about it. But the author can't make you believe that everyone's reported thoughts are plausible real-world reactions to the same set of events.
In Morgan Llywelyn's historical novel Finn Mac Cool, there is a scene with the following setup:
Finn has grown up in slavery. He belongs to a caste of enslaved military lowlifes. He has become their leader through a combination of the force of his personality and the strength of his arms, and he is working on reforming their (terrible) behavior and reputation.
Cruina is the respectable daughter of a blacksmith. She is not noble, but she is several social classes above Finn.
Finn falls in love with Cruina from afar and attempts a personal study of the laws that would be relevant to marrying her. He also attempts to develop a relationship with her, but things don't go very well.
As a last resort, he comes to her home and delivers a marriage proposal. In this scene, several things are clear:
1. Finn wants to marry Cruina.
2. Cruina wants to marry Finn.
3. Cruina's mother approves of the marriage.
4. Despite the fact that all of them want the same thing, and Finn has openly stated his goal, none of them know how to work with the others to actually arrive at the goal. They do not share a set of social mores and don't know how to react to each other. Finn is awkward with women. Cruina says something snotty to Finn, he balls his fists in distress, and the mother takes this as a sign of anger, panics, and runs out of the room. Cruina turns Finn down and he slinks away never to "bother" her again. Meanwhile, as Finn's star rises higher and higher elsewhere, Cruina turns down several other marriage proposals in the hopes that Finn will come back and try again, publicly letting everyone know that she considers herself engaged to Finn Mac Cool.
So here we have a scene set in a historical-fiction version of a mythological world, with one mythical figure and some characters invented for the novel. None of this features in the real-world mythology on which the novel is based. All of the situations and dialogue and behaviors are the author's invention, though the structure of medieval Irish society is painstakingly researched.
The question is: is this a particularly well-cast example of a kind of thing that happens _all the time_, something people can recognize as plausible human behavior, sympathize with, and perhaps derive useful lessons from, even though none of the events described ever technically happened?
Or is it just so many words that sounded good, a trap to mislead hapless readers into thinking the world works in ways very different than it actually does?
Novels and other fictional evidence definitely exist in both of those categories. But making an argument based on fictional evidence is just saying that you think your fictional evidence belongs to the first of them. It's not a sign that you've lost track of the difference between fiction and reality.
There was a whole lot to read, and not much time to read it. But here is my skimming input.
Nerds meaning has changed over the past few decades. At one time it used to be pretty much synonymous with geek, but over the last few decades it’s become more synonymous with being passionately obsessed over some hobby or subject. And disagreeing with the author... it doesn’t have to be bad.
Now days you can be a car Nerd... though to truly be a nerd you should be very specific... such as being passionate about 1970s mustangs. It also helps if you are passionate about something rather obscure. For instance I am a scooter nerd (Vespas and Lambretta’s) but more specifically I know way to much about German built Vespas from 1955 to 1962.
Obviously there are also nerds into bad stuff, such as Marvel Comics or microbrews (it it was good it would be a major brew), but it’s not a prerequisite.
Also, on behalf of us blue collar workers from flyover country, thank you for shaming Hipsters out of existence... we can finally have out clothing and our beards to ourselves unironically.
Don McMillan on nerds, geeks, Dorks, etc.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kwz-Md6OoyA
"I’m the son of X, husband of Y, friend of Z"
I agree that this is the traditional answer, and will note that in traditional communities, it works really well. Drop me into the section of the Plain world I grew up in (which is probably 20,000 people spread over a couple hundred communities), and I will almost certainly find someone to whom I have a "know the same person" connection.
This also works to some extent in smaller professions: I'm an actuary, and if I meet another actuary in my general area of practice, the odds we have worked with some of the same people are incredibly high.
But what about language, food and place, etc, Culture.
I don't discount child of, spouse of, friend of. But there seems to be a conflation of identity with individuality.
The classic introductory question in Atlantic Canada is, notoriously, "who's your father?" It works.
Connections to other people are extremely, extremely common. Finding them is what can sometimes be the tricky bit.
It seems like an important data point that after reading this (very interesting) post, all I can think about is the commenter who claimed that the MCU was one of humanity’s greatest artistic achievements…I feel a tremendous need to explain to them how wrong they are.
So: what explains that impulse?
When I feel such an impulse, I tend to interpret it as me seeing an opportunity to demonstrate my superiority.
That’s likely correct, and a good opportunity for self-correction!
That's fascinating. When I saw that, I felt a tremendous need to ask for elaboration. Usually I try to steelman takes I don't understand, but I don't even know what angle to take for that one, it extends beyond the bounds of my imagination. Worst case scenario, they're wrong in a boring way. But maybe you get to experience a novel insight or perspective! Do you not enjoy those? I really enjoy those. It's why I read this blog after all.
Let me try to steelman this take. I'll preface it by noting that my initial take on the MCU was extreme boredom and being somewhat upset that Hollywood kept churning these movies out when they had the chance to make something truly memorable. While I still think there's an argument that Hollywood is less interested in making great movies than in getting a reliable ROI, my take on MCU has shifted.
First, let's get it out of the way that the first MCU film was actually really good cinema. Iron Man was a good movie. Before it came along, the anti-hero was not mainstream (Despicable Me and Megamind were still two years away). In a deeper sense, the idea that the audience could LIKE a protagonist who is an anti-hero - could even cheer for them and want to dress up as them for Halloween - was a foreign concept. Beyond that, if you study storytelling a bit, you can start to accept that Iron Man does a really good job of getting a lot of major storytelling elements right in a satisfying way.
Okay, what about the rest of the MCU? I don't think they're coasting on a quarter century of nostalgia from one good movie. Admittedly, not all the movies are great, but some are still fun to watch. Iron Man making up a new element is clearly dumb, and sometimes the power levels are opaque. But the idea that you could weave elements of one film into another film, while not exactly new, was a bold move. They even added those scenes after the credits to telegraph to the audience that, yes, they were doing this on purpose and would continue to do so in a planned way. Hollywood is fickle and superhero reboots change as often as the casting director changes his underwear, but Marvel decided early on they would be consistent. It was a huge gamble - tying the fortunes of movies in development on other movies that hadn't been released yet - and it made the whole thing pay off. The first Avengers movie was a culmination of this weaving together in a completely new way. Before Avengers, nobody had done anything like this before. Sure, it made a mountain of cash for the creators, but they did something new and bold, took huge storytelling risks, and it paid handsomely.
This is better understood by going back and rewatching the MCU movies in order. My kids are old enough that I figured I had to introduce them to some of this stuff. Not only did they love the movies (they're kids, of course they would - also we mostly skipped the dumb ones that didn't matter), they loved the way the movies came together in culminating arcs across multiple movies. And I admit those arcs are satisfying in a way I didn't quite catch the first time through when I didn't reliably go see every MCU blockbuster the year it came out. (Sometimes I caught them out of order on the tiny screen on the plane, if at all.)
Okay, but other than Iron Man and the 'works as a whole' thing, what about the movies themselves? No series is perfect. Some of the Thor movies were pretty dumb. Some movies tried too hard, because they had a lot to live up to. Many of the movies were just replays of a chase the McGuffin trope, and so were mildly entertaining but otherwise forgettable. But some were truly good.
I struggled to like Infinity War and Endgame the first time through. I still think Thanos is dumb, because as a biologist I think it's stupid to curtail species growth by halving the population - at best that sets everything back one generation. And although Infinity War didn't introduce the idea of a movie that ends in a cliffhanger (because the heroes lose), the MCU had spent the past two decades establishing a nice clean romp where nobody dies and everyone comes back fine in the sequel. Sure, War Machine fell from the sky, but he still didn't die. Yet Infinity War turned all that around and got rid of lots of characters. This set up Endgame, where they killed off other characters who'd been huge money makers for the franchise.
Endgame was written as a 'heist' movie in reverse. Instead of them trying to get the McGuffins OUT of a place, they're trying to get them INTO the 'present day'. It's a time heist, yes, but it only works when all the McGuffins get to the special glove thingy - ergo the 'reverse heist' idea. If you're into storytelling tropes, this is an interesting concept that was at least well executed. It includes the time elements (with lots of handwaving) so of course it has inconsistencies, but so do all time travel stories.
I won't defend anything past Endgame, because I don't think I'm competent to do so, but having given the MCU movies a second chance recently I've revisited my initial snobbery of them and judged it to be at least somewhat misplaced.
I think it's fair to point out flaws in art "they could have done that better", but mainstream art seems to have less of a margin of error before it's judged drivel. If some arthouse film goes too slow so they can pad the runtime, or has bad graphics, or you can tell the props are cheap Chinese knockoffs, they get a pass because "they weren't multimillion-dollar Hollywood films". Except that if they WERE those Hollywood films, attention to all those details wouldn't garner praise despite the fact that those things are tough to do well.
MCU wasn't perfect, sure, but it was a mostly consistent quality endeavor. That's hard to pull off. DC saw all that cash after Avengers and got a lot of investors to throw money their way to try and replicate it. They couldn't. Because, yes, MCU is an unrivaled accomplishment. Compare it to the Shazzam! series as the closest also-ran for reference. This isn't like boy bands in the 90's. It's not as easy as it looks. That it looks easy is evidence it's done well.
"Iron Man" was also engineer porn, which is why I love it.
Edit: among the many reasons why
Compare/contrast with The Martian? I feel like they hit different aspects of the engineer brain. One is watching progress on impossible tech come to life. The other is working through subtle complications to realistic problems on another planet.
Here’s my attempt to steal man this as an MCU fan.
To me, to understand what makes the MCU great, you should start with “The Avengers” movie.
It manages to be (a) non boring (b) fun (c) engaging, and (d) cool.
These are all distinct things:
By (a) non boring I mean that while watching it you spend very little time being bored. This is true for a few reasons. The biggest advantage MCU films have here is that since they are interconnected with each other, you don’t need to spend a lot of time watching to get to know the characters and start caring about them. You already know them right away so you’re not board. The worst MCU film, “Eternals” tried to introduce too many characters at once and thus was very boring. The other thing that makes MCU films “not boring” is the quips and comedy. People don’t like this sometimes because it makes it feel like the films aren’t taking themselves seriously if it happens too much. But they do give you something to pay attention to, to make you not board. Especially during otherwise boring fight scenes. Obviously a better way to make fight scenes interesting is to just have better fight choreography, less CGI, more like a Jackie Chan film. So that’s a sacrifice the MCU makes in favor of producing more films.
(b) fun
What makes MCU films in general and The Avengers in particular, fun, is the characters and their interactions. This is also helped by interconnecting the movies. Going into The Avengers we already know who Captain America, Iron man, Thor, Natasha, Bruce and Loki are.
The dialogue and arguments between Cap and Iornman is great because we know enough about their personalities from other films to understand why they are saying what they are saying. Natasha tricking Loki is great because we are already familiar with Natasha tricking people (ala tricking Tony in Iron man 2 and in the opening scene of the avengers). For people who like interesting characters interacting, MCU films manage to fit more of that in than most other films because of their interconnectedness
(c) Engaging.
What makes MCU films engaging is that they usually manage to be about more than just “the fight”. And often have many threads of plot to follow.
The avengers is about SHIELD’s secret plans to turn the tesseract into a weapon as well as the distinction between conquering and ruling
Civil War is about the conflict between responsibility to do what you believe VS the imperative to submit to society's rules
Again, this multiple layering of plots is more possible in an interconnected universe since movies can touch on plots without resolving them entirely.
(d) Cool
There's just something really awesome and cool about watching captain america or Natasha single handedly take a bunch of adversaries at once or Thor taking down an army by summoning lightning, or iron man standing up to congress and just not caring what they say like a character from Atlas Shrugged.
The thing is, when you try to pull off so much at once sometimes it doesn’t work. Which is why MCU movies sometimes are great and sometimes suck. But even when they suck, they usually are still enjoyable and when they are great they are extremely enjoyable. Even if they will never be as well crafted and artistically meaningful as something like The Dark Night which doesn’t have the same constraints.
I agree with all of this, but trying to explain the greatness of the MCU on the basis of The Avengers, with reference to the four preceding character movies, is playing on easy mode. "One of Humanity's greatest artistic achievements" is a bit over the top, but there's ten hours of filmmaking there that's hard to beat as a whole.
Then there's everything that has been done in the MCU since, which seems to have been mostly about forgetting what made it great in the first place. More characters, meaning less focus on each and interactions reduced to witty banter. What was once fun and engaging has become boring through repetition, and there is increasingly more focus on the fights than on the reasons for the fights.
"Cool" is ineffable, but I think we're now in a place because things are cool because they're part of the MCU, which means they can't bear the strain of being the reason the MCU is cool.
I think in general the run from Avenger (original) to Endgame was pretty consistently good. Since Endgame there have been 3 major issues in my opinion:
1. The loss of the original cast and a struggle to find new lead characters (I think this is what you are talking about with too many characters and not enough focus)
2. Too wide a scope of topics (combining "grounded" characters like Falcon/Winter Soldier and God like characters) making it hard to know what to care about. At this point it's not really even clear what makes something an MCU movie/show.
3. Most importantly, poor quality of writing/scripts/plots as they try not to just rehash the original run and deal with https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SequelEscalation
As a piece of evidence that there is something kinda interesting/identifiable going on with being a nerd consider the phenomenon of the nerd 'accent.'. Like the gay accent it's far from universal amoung nerds but it's common enough you know it when you hear it.
And, unlike most popular explanations for the gay accent, you can't explain this as an affectation or learned via imitation. When I went to Caltech as a freshman there were tons of people who came in with that 'accent' despite (or more likely because) having been pretty socially isolated and, at that time, lacking any media figures to pattern their speech on.
My hypothesis is that it's largely a result of a certain kind of emotional detachment (eg because your shy/fear being hurt) where you use mastery of facts as a way to converse without having to risk too much emotionally. You then get a kind of lecturing quality but with a sort of hesitance and lack of full throated emotion that ends up kinda nasal. That plus, perhaps, less attention to the social details like the sound of your voice or looks that might prompt another person to alter speech patterns. But that's just a guess.
But my point is that I think there is a psychological natural kind there that isn't just about showing depth of interest.
Wasn't it kind of invented by Jerry Lewis in "The Nutty Professor"?
Never seen the movie and I knew plenty of people with it who have never even heard of it nor with a group for social contangion to happen with. I suspect you are thinking of something far more extreme than what I have in mind.
The nasality and hesitancy/stuttering is there, and it seems clear that this was the accent the Simpson's copied for Professor Frink (albeit in an even more exaggerated form)
Or they are both just exaggerating a behavior the writers saw out in the world. If not it wouldn't be as funny or entertaining.
I think it may be about a lack of self-confidence. Something to do with breathing shallowly, being hunched over, stretching your lips out as if searching for approval, leads to a certain type of high-pitched nasally voice.
What's the opposite of this? Relax your shoulders, breathe from your diaphragm, and speak with calm authority and you get that one calm deep voice all over the world that utters the words "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking..."
Which, according to The Right Stuff, is every pilot in the world doing an imitation of Chuck Yeager, whether they know it or not.
When I first read that (early 1980s) I laughed out loud, because it was 100% true that most airline pilots affected that West Virginia drawl, and it was immediately clear why. But my experience is that this faded long ago, and I can't remember the last time I heard that "pilot voice" from a commercial pilot.
I have been trying really hard not to bring this up; I want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that they really are just trying to talk about a personality type. But in this case, what you're pointing to and attempting to psychoanalyze as an identifying feature of "nerds" is actually a well-known and empirically-validated feature of autism spectrum disorders:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-02487-6
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312270/
which is often described using the same terms you use:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750946715000744
https://www.verywellhealth.com/autistic-speech-and-prosody-259883
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/autism-speech
and is detectable by objective metrics in children as young as 4:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00237/full
and by AI/ML in young children across languages as different as English and Cantonese:
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2022/06/ai-detects-autism-speech-patterns-across-different-languages/
This isn't a social phenomenon. It's just how we talk.
Well I didn't know that. As someone who has always had that quality to my speech (and not particularly liked it) that's an interesting thing to learn.
Though I don't think there is anything contradictory in saying that it's a feature of people with a certain kind of nueroatypicality and that it goes along with a personality type. After all there are lots of shared personality features of people with ASDs.
Anyway, my point was that the very fact this is part of the nerd stereotype shows that it was always picking out something deeper than just proving membership in a social group via depth of knowledge.
Fair enough. My point is just that it's really annoying when people speculate baselessly about environmental/social/psychological causes. (This kind of speculation has caused a lot of harm to both autistic and LGBT kids.)
And yes, the whole discussion is getting at something deeper. The modern "nerd" stereotype *is*, fundamentally, the outwardly-visible characteristics of adults and teens with ASD: social awkwardness, atypical prosody, intense special interests, poor physical coordination, even subtle things like an association with allergies, asthma, eczema, and digestive issues. I don't think anyone's studied this, but I would bet actual money that if you asked people to pick out "nerds" in neutral AI-generated photos, they would identify the distinctive facial features of ASD.
Also, I'd like to push back on this idea that looking for social reasons people like things somehow isn't taking the idea of liking them seriously.
It's no different than trying to understand the sociology of religion. You don't need to doubt the sincerity or depth of people's religious convictions to notice that the best predictor of what religious beliefs you hold isn't their abstract philosophical plausibility, evidence or usefulness. It's often social factors like what church you grow up in or what beliefs your peer group has that determine what you believe.
The same thing is going on with being into various fandoms. It's not an accident that the people who tend to be into popular stuff tend to be into the same stuff as their peers. Many (most?) people enjoy content more when they can talk about it with peers. OTOH some people seem to be just the opposite and like content less if others in their social circle like it.
There isn't any reason to doubt people like the stuff they like but it's clear that what people like is influenced by social factors and it's interesting to understand how.
I think most things people think of as 'quality' in the status sense meet, or appear to meet, the following criteria:
1) Specialised production (expertise is needed to produce the good; most people couldn't do it and you can't just throw money at it)
2) Specialised consumption (Expertise is needed to consume and enjoy consuming the good to its maximum potential.)
3) A group of high status people already like it (otherwise the thing is weird rather than high quality). I see this as random nucleation rather than something that says much about the thing itself (beyond it being likeable in principle)
Obviously this has a lot to do with affordability, because in a capitalist economy that kind of thing is usually expensive – but cost alone isn't sufficient to count as specialised production/consumption: it's not quality because it's expensive (dear me no), it's quality because it's _aged in hand carved barrels in a single remote village in the Highlands by Jack, our master distiller).
Most attacks and defenses on quality tend to revolve around whether (1) and (2) are truly met. "Sure Marvel is _visually impressive_, but that's just because big studios threw money at it, and I'd rather watch something a bit more refined than 90 minutes or explosions anyway".
Similarly people that are sports _snobs_ are pretty dismissive of rich billionaires buying up players to form teams, and care much more about the performance of specific players, coaching and strategy, etc – things that are perceived as requiring talent to execute and to appreciate.
I did not see this anywhere so thought to share- my parents, who both were teenagers in the 1950's, told me that nerd was actually Drunk spelled backwards, as in a teen boy who doesn't drink and therefore is not in the in-crowd (Ritchie or Potsie on Happy Days, I guess). Square would be another one, but not as mainstream now. Unfortunately my father passed but I think he was the one who told me that. I was never called a nerd to my face as a kid in the 1970's although all the stuff applied to me (except not drinking...). I think when Bill Gates got rich, the tables turned.
FWIW, this is mentioned as an RPI oral tradition in Wikipedia's discussion of the word nerd's origin. The same source credits Dr. Seuss for the word's first appearance in print, but that's apparently because if you make up enough funny-sounding letter combinations, you'll get lucky sometimes.
I like to pretend that it derives from the name of Fëanor's wife, and describes exactly what he found attractive in her. :-)
"A lot of people’s default personality, if they just do exactly what comes naturally and don’t put any effort into self-presentation or cultivation, is to browse Reddit and play video games. Most people realize this on some level and try to cultivate some personality beyond this, but I think that makes it extra unfair to say “Just use your natural true self!” The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
This struck me as odd. Does this seem true to anyone? I know maybe one or two people who fit this description; everyone else I know likes specific things with a weird, obsessive level of interest, and I'm pretty convinced they would continue to do so if the thing was unpopular. But I could also self select for people like that, so I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts.
100% true for me. Im passionate about things but I consciously have to decide to do something productive multiple times a day or I will do nothing except work, sleep, play video games, and masturbate. Its a serious effort for me to remain engaged in anything, no matter how interesting it is.
Definitely strikes me as strange, maybe coming from a place of curious detachment. I get restless when things get easy and comfortable, and feel increasing pressure to Do Something New. Learn some biochemistry or Magyar, try to ski some moguls or juggle 3 oranges, whatever other people can do that I can't, or go someplace new and talk to people I've never met before. Holing up with just me and the computer screen, trundling down the same ruts, feels like some kind of living mummification, even thinking about it gives me the willies.
I think this might describe me - if I put no effort into doing anything else, I would probably browse Reddit and play video games constantly.
And yet you clearly spend enormous amounts of time on this blog, and its predecessor, and have chosen to be way more engaged with a much wider public than most people. My impression is that the fact that it pays is not at all why you do it, too.
A few of your posts do read like they are coming from some feeling of obligation, I promised to do this and so now I must. But most of the time they read like you really want to get something or other said. I can't tell how much it matters to you that other people fully grok what you're saying, and it doesn't seem to matter all that much if they agree or find it pleasing. It seems more like it just matters to you that some particular concept, thought, observation, or idea gets set down in a clear and rational and complete way.
It reminds me of Tom Robbins's definition of being an artist in "Skinny Legs And All" where the nascent artist says something like "art happens when you have something inside you that you really want to get outside you, so you can look at it." That is, my impression is that you write for similar reasons as an artist paints, or musician composes, to have the work of art actually exist rather than remain a vague potential inside your mind.
Interesting responses. I relate most to Carl--if I stop doing things I'm passionate about, it feels like a sort of pressure is building up inside me until it just overrides everything else--sort of like if you are fasting, eventually eating will become your top priority.
I talked to a few friends, and people generally fell into one of two categories: "Prefer to sit around play video games and just be happy", and "my brain is trapped by a specific special interest that oftentimes no one cares about and I can just mine for infinite joy". It's an interesting division. Two of my friends are writers. If you threw them onto desert islands, I'm convinced one would stop writing. The other I'm pretty sure would be carving novels into the bark of trees, because they just feel like they have to do that. Maybe at some point a reward (social status, candy, satisfaction) was given for successfully completing one of these tasks, and that reward has sort of backpropogated into not only the task, but even just thinking about doing the task or things adjacent to it. Or maybe people's brains just end up in specific shapes where certain sorts of tasks are just inordinately appealing, and for some people those are video game and for some people that's installing doom on AO3.
Anyway I think I socially select for people who tend towards "I will carve this novel into a tree just to get it out of my head", so I found Scott's statements surprising.
> "A lot of people’s default personality, if they just do exactly what comes naturally and don’t put any effort into self-presentation or cultivation, is to browse Reddit and play video games.
To me, this is what depression is like.
Sounds about right. As I understand it, If you're depressed, you have no energy or will to do any of the things that would usually be an expression of your personality. But non-depressed people will usually find something to engage with more deeply, even if that's just one youtube channel or one subreddit, and explore that interest from there.
But putting no effort into cultivation also implies making no attempt to think about what you like and why, so from a position of ignorance, the activity you'll most likely spend your free time on is the first thing that captures your attention, which today is one of like five online content feeds. Thus, the 'default personality'.
This seems like an unusually dreary existence, to be sure, and I assume that most people don't actually have such a complete lack of self-awareness when it comes to what they value in their lives. But judging by how many social media influencers and game studios can keep themselves afloat by publishing nothing but utter dreck, I can't help but think that the 'default personality' people are a substantial part of the population.
In "What universal human experiences are you missing?" (I think) Scott mentioned someone who, up until recently, did not have any idea what sort of foods he liked and just ate whatever. If someone can be ignorant of their preferences on something as basic and universal as food, I have absolutely no doubt that people can be equally ignorant of what they enjoy and value in other aspects of life.
There's still something there regardless: people will gravitate to the kind of online content they like just out of a Pavlovian response, without ever needing to realize what it is they actually like. But to the outside world, someone whose obsessive level of interest centers on one youtube channel is indistinguishable from someone who just watches whatever the youtube algorithm throws at them.
I think "browse Reddit and play video games" sounds boring the way it's written, but isn't necessarily. What are you browsing on Reddit? I've read so many fascinating things on Reddit, and I haven't even read it that much. What videogames are you playing? What incredible triumphs have you had? What are some of the coolest examples of emergent gameplay that you've seen?
Someone who is at all observant and thoughtful could make browsing Reddit and playing videogames all day sound entrancing. My friends and I have spent hours on end entertaining each other with stories about our experiences playing videogames, or about fascinating things that we've read on the Internet.
This post and the previous one reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about regarding the word “basic”.
These days, I don’t hear it used much — I think I’m actually more likely to hear someone criticizing the concept than actually using it. “The term ‘basic’ is misogynistic! It’s just a way of shaming women for liking feminine things!”
And in the context of “basic b$&*%” or “basic white b%*$&@“ (not sure what the Substack moderation filter is like): yeah, maybe. But I’ve long thought that it should be expanded. That men liking football or Breaking Bad is just as basic as women liking pumpkin spice lattes.
When someone just likes all the TV, movies, music, hobbies, etc. that are most popular in their subculture, which is more likely: that they have tried lots of things and just so happened to only like the ones that are the most socially acceptable to the people around them, or that they just didn’t bother to try anything else and/or dismissed the more unusual stuff out of hand? “Low openness to experience” is one way of putting it, but colloquially, why not say “basic”?
For what it's worth, "basic bro" was also a term in common parlance around the same time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pvdDsMOZ0k&ab_channel=CollegeTimes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7nQrtMQEw&ab_channel=CollegeHumor
What a sad state of affairs when every comment section is assumed to have an automated moderation filter.
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
I'm a little confused by this "hoax" - the example poem on Wikipedia seems perfectly competent. Like, I don't get very excited about most poems, but there's nothing making me say "ugh, this guy just doesn't understand poetry" or "this poem sounds profound but it's not saying anything." It's free verse, but it's clearly divided up with intention. It has weird imagery, but coherent ones. If you asked me what the poem was about, I would have an answer and a justification. "Great poetry" is subjective, but at the very least, it's not a *bad* poem.
Sure, the authors of the hoax *say* that they just slapped these poems together with no thought or effort, but effort does not correlate with success! I'm a software developer and I often feel that most my code could be slapped together by a monkey with access to Stack Overflow, but apparently that not-very-difficulty-feeling work is worth six figures to the right people.
The wiki article goes on to note that some people liked the poem even knowing that Ern Malley didn't exist!
Yeah, I'm a Malley fan!
Another hoaxer who actually produced a lot of good poetry: Thomas Chatterton. He even had a fan base of "real" poets (who knew the deception—by this point, Chatterton had long since been found out and committed suicide), despite everything he wrote being complete fraud. Wordsworth and Shelley (in verse) mourned his death. Keats dedicated Endymion to Chatterton.
My favorite was the Dutch dude who faked Vermeers during WWII, got them verified by academic experts and sold his fake but verified Old Masters to Nazi bigwigs for some fat stacks.
After the war, the artiste was arrested and threatened with the death penalty for selling the Dutch cultural heritage to the occupiers, and it took some work for him to convince the court that the paintings were fake, because he made them himself. This was also highly embarrassing to the supposed experts who had vouched for the Lost Vermeers.
So, if the paintings were a testament to the human spirit before, was that only when they were Bonafide Vermeers and not the work of some ripoff artist who liked to live the high life? Why aren't they hanging in museums now?
This feels like that thing where some people who want to write “the smart character” into a fantasy story will depict the character giving modern opinions about the old state of the world. Being smart enough to arrive at those opinions independently would mean the character was smart. If an author writing in historical times had written a character with those viewpoints, that character probably would be really intelligent. But if someone writes a character with those opinions today, it doesn’t mean that author is necessarily good at predicting what a smart person would say - the author might just be putting what they learned from their parents into he character’s mouth.
So the character might not actually be all that smart in other ways, even though the story contains sections which would mean the character was smart, if the story had been written a long time ago.
It’s hard to say whether a character is actually smart, and is making a decision because the author is smarter than you, or is actually not all that smart, and is making a mistake you would avoid. Humility means it’s really hard to answer that question for someone roughly the same level as yourself. So instead, you have to look for evidence, and that can be faked.
A personal gripe of mine is when authors, screenwriters, etc. insert speeches in the mouths of historical characters that could have come straight from a 21st century progressive.
Why? For the reasons I described, or because of something else?
In general.
To be fair, I don't think the authors' goal was to claim "this is obviously an unlikable poem." It was to point out that you can slap any old shit together and people in the modern art community will praise it as brilliant if you prime them right.
A noticeable amount of good creative work is produced when the creator is confident it wont be taken seriously. In other words they have no fear that their status as a serious creative person will be tied to the obviously "joke" works. The metal music soundtrack to the cartoon Metalocalypse comes to mind. The show's creator is a music school grad with a "serious" portfolio; a cartoon metal band is obviously a non serious thing. Its probably the best music he's ever made.
This is referenced in the wiki article for Malley as well: "that in letting down their guard, opening themselves to free association and chance, McAuley and Stewart had reached inspiration by the side-door of parody". In my opinion its the removal of the Self from the creative process, which tends to only hinder and bind.
"I think the traditional answer is that you should build your identity around social relationships (I’m the son of X, husband of Y, friend of Z), career, and maybe a few hobbies."
No, the traditional answer (i.e for most of human history) was that identity was built from family, place (neighborhood/region), language, food, religion, music, custom. Identity was first socially mediated.
Individuality is a separate particular function of identity: a matrix of what/who do I like, one's virtue (a good child, sibling, friend, neighbor, spouse, parent), one's skills (techne), occupation, and one's calling (I am reminded of Arendt treatment of arbeit and beruf).
The universal questions: Who am I and to whom do I belong?
Alienation is not knowing how to the answer these persistent 2 related questions.
Fetishized life collapses identity into individuality and the preference of the individual connected with commodities (to be bought and horded) and increasingly as Debord noted with the commodification of our time in furtherance of fetishized consumption and consumerism.
The fetishized individual then seeks to answer the "to whom do I belong" question by seeking similarly fetishized individuals. Granfallooning. (See also slapstick: Lonesome no more)
The old way of socially created identity first and individuality second was not without its problems. Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan. The levi and the priest with clear social identities walk on by because their "identity" is too narrow to see the neighbor.
But the new way of individuality first can never really work, because it is temporary solution in which the social aspect is just an add on. It is not an organic process that recognizes the essential and proper social first development of identity.
The traditional way is not very helpful to unbridled capitalism and consumerism. Novelty seeking (new products to buy consume and horde) is essential to the individuality first fetishized person aided by affluence -(maybe we should investigate the unintended consequences of child allowances which facilitate the process of fetishized consumerism over social integration).
Third generation what? Maybe start with food and language and place and the religious traditions of your grandparents. (Or your spouse's familial traditions.)
Do you have enough roots to answer the questions: who am I and to whom do I belong.
Being cosmopolitan doesn't mean rootless. It means you are comfortable being a multi-cultural pluralist. Having wings is not the opposite of having roots it's the complement. Identity is not static but it's not just a creation of self directed hobbies or obessions.
The immigrant experience is also one of leaving stuff behind. Being able to sluff off accretive nonsense is also an kind of root/identity.
”But the new way of individuality first can never really work, because it is temporary solution in which the social aspect is just an add on. It is not an organic process that recognizes the essential and proper social first development of identity.”
Is there an argument here? '... the essential and proper social first development of identity' sounds to me like a long way round to saying 'how I think people should be'. I don't see why this or that form of relationship between the community and the individual that worked for one group of people in one place for one period of time should have any bearing except as a generalized data point. Human society has been in flux since day one and I doubt there is any natural way of doing things, or that if there were it would be best simply for being natural.
I think we are social creatures, even while autonomy is necessary feature.
There is an ongoing post-industrial problem of alienation. It's not just a problem of being alienated from our labor. (Marx in his muddle and economic reductionist way got this wrong.) We are suffering an alienation from ourselves and our social nature.
Hobbies, buying and collecting stuff (consumerism), fetishes of time and interests - are not real nor satisfying "identities" because they are not organically created from family, place, food, culture. They are manufactured granfalloons when we really need some kind of karrasses. A person can't socialize or domesticate one's self.
Some granfalloons are benign so long as we understand that they are granfalloons (being a Cubs fan, cheering for Notre Dame, being a Hoosier or from Baltimore or whereever, being a jazz musician, etc) but some granfalloons are not (e.g. joining gangs, putting on a MAGA hat, etc. to try to cure loneliness and alienation).
To say there is "no natural way" of doing things is ridiculous. We are basically genetically the same for at least 100,000 years - social beings with semiotic capacities and a childhood that requires nurturing. There is no need for language, math, logic, music, art (symbolic activities) without a tether to some social construct, even while we are also autonomous creatures.
You are not sua sponte, even if you are uniquely you.
Vonnegut probably had a good insight: you're identity must also allow for someone to tell you "to go take a flying f at the mooooon."
Real, as opposed to self-directed and manuafactured, identity is a cure for loneliness and narcissism.
Fair enough - 'no natural way' is certainly an exaggeration; we can not suddenly elect a preference for oxygen-free environments, and I grant there there are also (weaker) social requirements without which we can not do (at present, and subject to changes which are probably as unimaginable in advance as our ways of living now would be to our distant ancestors). But it is an exaggeration in response to what I also see as an exaggerated and unfounded distinction between authentic (natural) and manufactured ways of socially being. I don't think it adds value to any one form of identity construction to call it organic, any more than it makes this or that food or hand lotion healthy and natural to slap an organic label on it...
I'm using "manufactured" in juxtaposition with the "new things" created by industrialization and consumerism and the commodification of life.
I'm using organic in a way to invoke the biology and essence (which in addition to the noetic (biology) includes the poetic and pneumatic nature) of our being.
Sure - I think I got the associations you're making. I just doubt they point to anything - I am skeptical of essentialist arguments in general, which seem to me born of the same marketing impulse to slap a 100% natural & organic label on something as though that in itself were enough to distinguish hemlock from parsley.
There were philosophers before the steam engine. They weren't slouches.
I subscribe to pluralistic epistemology.
We aren't dogs nor angels nor meat machines.
>There is an ongoing post-industrial problem of alienation. It's not just a problem of being alienated from our labor. (Marx in his muddle and economic reductionist way got this wrong.) We are suffering an alienation from ourselves and our social nature.
Look. I realize what you're doing. You want to employ a useful concept, you realize the concept's origins are haram in the predominant ideology of this space, so you preemptively diss said origins to signal your allegiance to said ideology and prevent summary dismissal of your arguments on that basis alone.
But you're talking about a guy who laid foundations for modern SOCIOlogy and rallied against economic reductionism all his life, as did other SOCIALists before and after him. I'll mostly skip the part about how easy it is to check what the concept's scope was, because then it'd sound like I'm nitpicking, and that's not the point, the point is, this is epistemically harmful.
And look, I understand the point of doing as Romans do while in Rome, I try to use the local conceptual apparatus as much as possible. But when something is only expressible in the language of its ideological adversaries, I'd prefer there to be norms that let me use the latter and not be bashful about it. If somebody's repulsed - their problem, I can only worry about them up to a point, and that point lies somewhere before pretending things are the exact opposite of what they actually are. Because that, again, would be epistemically harmful, to an extreme degree.
I may not understand what you are saying:
Who are you saying rallied against economic reductionism and laid foundation for modern sociology? If you are saying Marx, (which is the only named person in the quotation): you don't know what you are talking about.
Yes, Marx.
And, honestly, I wrote the preceding reply because I tried to avoid being the person who just goes "you don't know what you are talking about", but, well.
Again, this is easy to check, if your goal is being correct rather than status-signaling. That "we are suffering an alienation from ourselves and our social nature" is fundamental to Marx's point. And consider his perhaps most to-the-point description of alienation, "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" - the whole thing is essentially one long rant against classical economists seeing men only as economic inputs, followed by a similarly long call to restore their (men's) humanity by making them social beings doing social activity. It couldn't be any more clear cut on that front.
I mean, it's possible to disagree with any of the man's reasoning slash arguments slash conclusions and, you know, not fundamentally misrepresent what they are.
Marx thought alienation was the separation of the worker from his product.
But alienation is more than this. His meaning of "social nature" excluded culture. Consider his derision of so-called lumpen.
He was against the reduction of man to an "economic input". But his key point was the objection to being reduced to an "input". He was an economic determinist!
His materialism and scientism prevented him from seeing that our "social" experience is not just material, it is also poetic and pneumatic. Marx was an ideologue not a philosopher nor social scientist. See Voegelin.
Marx as foundation of modern sociology? What? (Are people still making this claim?) How does he consider how family, language, food, custom, place and religion are important necessary aspects of social life.
Gramsci was the first to try to reform the blatant deficiencies of Marx's economic determinism.
What Marx also had wrong was that the fundamental unit of economics is not the individual, it is the family. See for example, Msgr. Ryan's work.
I think Your experiment in part 1 is actually useful for explaining why a lot of Marvel Fans think that the MCU has gotten a lot worse. I would argue that the first Ant man movie would pass the first experiment. At its core, it's a story about a poor but intelligent man who stole from the rich to feed his family, and ended up imprisoned. His wife moved on and married one of the sheriff's that arrested him. A wise Sage enlists him to steal a magical artifact that the sage created, but is now possessed by an evil wizard who was once his partner. The Hero uses the Sages magic and defeats the evil wizard, bringing him to justice, and rekindling his relationship with his estranged daughter.
The most recent Ant-Man is in category 4. Trying to translate it into a medieval story would result in gibberish, and not have anything relatable to the human condition. I think that's one of the main reasons many fans feel that the MCU has gotten worse
One thing I didn't see mentioned. While "the death of hipsters" might have come to pass, but I think that "death of nerds", or, rather, "death of recommendation algorithms" sounds contrary to everything I see. Algorithms that recommend the same thing to everyone are BAD algorithms. They're bad AI. And what we have right now is the growth in AI. Therefore, I believe that instead of removing algorithms from the loop, we will get better and more personalized algorithms.
I, for one, feel very much in need of one, because I often want to request for example "a song with vocals close to that other song", but it's impossible right now. Algorithms still mostly work in a "if you like blues-rock I'll give you more of blues-rock" - which is still a huge improvement from previous "if you like that one song by a 70's rock band I'll give you other songs by 70's rock bands that sound nothing like it and are actually in a completely different style of rock". If you compare 00's Last.fm recommendations with Spotify's algorithm, it's noticeable.
And modern algorithms can even recommend more obscure bands and tracks - I was pleasantly surprised recently hearing a nice track from a German singer-songwriter that I had never heard about before (admittedly, he's well-known - in Germany, but not in the rest of the world, and I don't live in Germany and only listen to a few German bands that have nothing in common with his music).
Modern algorithms, though, still mostly rely on people, and give you songs that other people who have similar tastes to you listen to - they make no judgement themselves. But with advances in AI, I wonder if it will be soon(-ish) possible for an algorithm to "listen" to the song, and get a feeling for its components, and recommend things to me that sounds like things I love, picking up every little detail from my previous listens (or give me something unexpected, if I ask it to). If so, there will be no death of algorithms, and no death of nerds.
+1 to the hope for better algorithms.
Also, would you care to share the German singer-songwriter you found? I've been trying to get Spotify to recommend more German music to me but all it gives me is Rammstein (and their only song I love is "Rauchen Toetet." Admittedly, I do listen to a lot of death metal.)
Reinhard Mey - "Annabelle, ach Annabelle": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_fv0L5REjc
This song is somewhat different from his other output, but I loved its music-hall melody, and, well, it's funny.
Some more German music I love. It's decidedly not metal, I'm more of rock'n'roll/country/jazz/blues fan, but just in case :) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyqzJTNcygE - Comedian Harmonists, a vocal band from 30's, somewhat in style of The Mills Brothers, but with piano instead of guitar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfgA_tbq0fE - Boppin' B, my favourite German rockabilly band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig3zDDSEYmA - Rudolf Rock und die Shrocker, absolutely kitchy rock'n'roll band, but they take it up to 11, so it comes out really cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krr2nWif65Q - Hubert Kah, another super-kitchy video. I actually like cover of this song by Boppin' B more, but the original is worth watching at least for laughs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJeC1Akb5ao - everybody knows Dschinghis Khan for their "Moskau" clip, but they also had a lot of other fun songs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYuQWO3NsFI - BossHoss is probably the best know of the bunch, but still worth the mention.
I found asking Bard/Chat GPT for bands like a band you like works pretty well and is a much better experience than using Pandora 10 years ago (the last time I used Pandora). Especially because you can be specific on the attributes you like.
Hm, it would be interesting to try, but I have no access to either. Maybe someday. Then again, I feel like it still would work on a superficial level - a LLM cannot understand music, it only understand textual description of music from reviews and other sources. Ideally, I'd like to have a model pre-trained on all available music in the world and then fine-tuned to my own tastes, a model that *gets* me, if you like :)
Ah, Star Wars CCG... I got a starter box for Christmas one year, but until I met a friend who actually knew how to play it, it was pretty background to my Star Wars fanaticism.
Once I started playing, though, it became what I spent all of my money on for several years and consumed a great deal of my free time.
I like to think of fiction as being a song, and the audience is the instrument. And not every song sounds good played on every instrument.
Fiction evokes emotions and experiences we've had in our lives. As we encounter different situations through life, different things resonate with us. Stuff that I would have found boring as a younger man makes me cry now. Stuff that I thought was fun and exciting as a kid makes me roll my eyes now. The products haven't changed, I have.
So it shouldn't be weird that some popular stuff leaves you cold. It's not bad, it's just hitting a note that you don't have at the moment. And that's ok.
It would be interesting to do this analysis for politically active people. There are "hipsters" who plumb the ideological depths searching for a new spin on old ideas, and there are "nerds" who consume and replicate the ideas the hipsters deliver.
These are episode of the week procedurals and they’re very popular!
“Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching!”
I think that the mass-marketing of things like the MCU or Star Trek has hollowed them out as nerd items. Part of what made them nerd-fodder is that they dealt with deep subjects, frequently in a low-quality medium due to limited finances.
The work to popularize them involved upping the "production quality" substantially. But it also involved cutting out the deep subjects. The Star Trek television shows frequently dealt with complex subjects about dignity, discrimination, identity and growth. Most of the movies are generic action stuff.
I feel like the philosophical complexity of Star Trek is often very overstated. At best, it will gesture vaguely in the direction of a big philosophical problem but without saying anything interesting about it.
I knew he was a hoax before I read him, but I have to say, I think Ern Malley is pretty good, and occasionally excellent. Take this piece, for example: https://allpoetry.com/Drer:-Innsbruck-1495
This is wonderful, and surely less obscrue than other poems, even other poems that I like (such as Wallace Stevens’s “Blanche Mc Carthy” (http://web.mit.edu/cordelia/www/Poems/blanche_mccarthy.html).
Which proves nothing, and asserts nothing other than the Ern Malley hoaxers were unsuccessful at writing bad poetry.
I'm not a big sports fan, but for the record every sporting event is just people trying to get a ball in a hole in the way that every historic battle is just dudes trying to walk past each other.
Regarding the Ant-Man as a Mabinogion myth hypothetical, a retelling of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope as a medieval Irish epic does exist: https://headofdonnbo.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/the-tatooine-cycle/
There's also Tattúínárdǿla Saga: The Saga of the People of the Tattúín River Valley: https://tattuinardoelasaga.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/tattuinardoela-saga-complete.pdf
I think it's fair to look at a lot of sports fandom as, not *forming* identity, but as *expressing* identity, and since the reason why this is so is fairly clear with sports, I think it helps understand a lot of other types of fandom.
I actually get the intrinsic appeal of sports. Each game of basketball has the same "plot," but that's only in the sense that each heroic novel has the same plot, or each romantic comedy does— it's the details that matter. Since the details matter, each game has the potential to have a lot of drama, even besides the wonder of watching skilled people do hard things. That said, even fanatics generally admit there are *bad games*, so there are aesthetic criteria being applied even to sports!
But, the intrinsic appeal doesn't explain most sports fandom, the shared experience does. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. Nearly everyone was a University of Kentucky (UK) basketball fan. If UK had an NCAA tournament game during school hours, we stopped school to watch it. Kids and adults both cared about who the players were, how the team was doing, etc. It wasn't just a default topic for conversation, either— caring about the thing alongside other people gives a real sense of commonality. This sense of commonality is why, despite not having lived anywhere near Cincinnati in over a decade, I remain a Cincinnati Bengals fan. It's something I share with friends and family. We can get excited about the same things, get frustrated by the same things, etc. If I couldn't share the experience, I probably wouldn't care. Now that I live in a big metro, I can go to a bar where fans of the Cincinnati Bengals congregate and get an instant sense of community for seventeen or more games a year.
My drive to be a fan of any particular team is pretty low, even if I can enjoy any "good" game of football. Without these social experiences, I wouldn't care about football that much— I'd probably just watch the playoffs, and watch some college games with my dad when I visit back home. I like that I have this connection— not just to family & friends, but also to a region I come from while being a typically transient (for an American of my class).
A lot of MCU fandom probably works like this on a different level. I've had strangers ask me about the latest MCU movie, or want to talk about MCU news (assuming I'd like these things because everyone does), and each time I feel a little bad that I find these movies to be pretty bad and not worth my time. I like having conversations with strangers! I like sharing things with people! And I don't even score highly on agreeableness!
The bigger issues about "identity" is that it's not really a thing. Choosing anything to "base an identity" on is a sure way to wind up miserable, alone, and a prime target for propaganda.
Take the rationalist community for instance. They "community" is based on high ideals of studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues. But the "identity" marker is "being part of the community." Trust me as a dude who spent most of his 20s trying to do this: Absent the community, studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues is just as annoying as being a marvel fan, and just as useless as browsing reddit and playing video games.
Modern culture hates all communities everywhere. It thinks they're lame and annoying and sometimes genuinely dangerous. I don't think this is a conspiracy but I do think various powers that influence culture have strong incentive to keep things this way. If folks must join a community it should be as large as possible with as little member-to-member contact as possible.
This means that people tend to tokenize their identities and their communities: Just wearing Star Wars t-shirts and getting excited about Star Wars online sublimates that need for real community while also ensuring your identity is still mostly about products. Such a person would be happier and healthier if they went to Star Wars conventions and met with other Star Wars people in person and had Star Wars viewing parties, and such. But the more they did that, the less it would be about Star Wars, and the more it would become about the other people in that dude's network.
For a *fantastic* illustration of this, see the Doctor Who Episode "Love and Monsters." A group is formed by people obsessed with searching for the Doctor but ultimately end up basically doing normie things like falling in love and showing off their creative projects. The creative projects are still vaguely Doctor-obsessed but the point is no longer the fetish, it's the other folks involved.
Yeah, I feel that "constructing an identity" is a relic from high school where people (stereotypically) formed cliques based on what they did, and for some reason this issue is extended into adulthood for more and more people.
I have difficulty understanding what is at stake in these discussions about what the exact meaning of "nerd" is (or is there anything at stake?)
I think what's at stake is people's self-worth. The implication that folks are somehow "lesser" for liking Marvel vs. liking medieval poetry is deeply hurtful if most of who you are is "someone who likes Marvel."
To be clear though, that's not what I'm saying - Liking Marvel and liking medieval poetry are both first steps on a path to being the best version of yourself (if we assume Scott's right, and everyone natural inclination is to be deeply boring, think of "finding an interest" as step one). The question is what you do with that enjoyment. Does it lead you somewhere interesting. Does it lead you to a life you'd be proud of? Or do you signal that you're "the medieval poetry" guy as a substitution for actually deriving any value from medieval poetry, connecting with others through the medium of medieval poetry, and using your knowledge of medieval poetry to bring something unique and interesting to your community.
I might think it's more likely that you can do those things with medieval poetry as a starting point than with Marvel movies as a starting point, but that's me being a snob.
As for the semantic argument about "geek" vs. "nerd" I think it's a rhetorical dodge. Being a geek who was super into Star Wars went from being this quirky thing smart guys did to being criticized for all the mindless consumption and toxicity. So this is a rebranding. But I'm not entirely opposed anyway - the rebrand is that "nerds," unlike "geeks" are also into difficult academic topics, and if the goal is to brand "learning stuff" as aspirational then good.
I think you make a lot of good points. Although I am personally less convinced that liking medieval poetry generally has (in any direct way) the kind of utility that you describe. It depends on context of course. (And I am a snob too, in the sense that I appreciate it more than liking superhero movies.)
(I think liking medieval poetry is more likely to awaken what is called "the life of the mind", but what the function or status of that is another thing.)
Someone who feels that "someone who likes Marvel" is most of what he is, that is poignant.
I feel, also from personal experience, that people tend to "identify" with qualities in a way that limits them. So someone might identify with being an introvert (or a nerd) in a way that limits their idea of what they can do.
Some of the discussion of status here confuses me (that people choose what they do based on status). There are some things that give people status, like being a lawyer. But does a high brow lawyer who understands fine wine have "higher status" in society compared to an equally competent lawyer who likes going on fishing trips and eating hot dogs? Outside of some very specific context?
I feel like the only people who try to construct an identity around something are people who are uncomfortable with the default identity that society would otherwise give them.
So for instance, being "that guy who is really into ska" is preferable to being "the fat guy with the lazy eye" or "the guy who pooped his pants that one time in eighth grade and never managed to live it down".
I see what you're getting at, but building an identity for yourself and building a community to be a part of are very different things, and what works for one is no guarantee of working for the other.
You've probably already read Scott's earlier post about how communities are form: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
Yeah, I'm trying to equivocate less in my comments, first to keep them from getting super long and second because I'm told they're deeply unpersuasive and annoying otherwise. A more honest comment would be something like "Community, role within a community, and personal expression are all important components of who you are, and I feel like as a culture we focus on personal expression and neglect the other two."
I agree. I think this is kind of what people are talking about when they complain that modern society is "atomised".
> Modern culture hates all communities everywhere. It thinks they're lame and annoying and sometimes genuinely dangerous.
I would like to hear more about this, because it seems like it could tie into "seeing like a state" - the powers that be struggle with huge numbers of atomized, distinct communities and would prefer a giant, even mass of similarity, perhaps.
I apparently need to read this, that's exactly what I mean.
I don't think it's quite "TPTB want everyone to be a mindless zombie that thinks exactly the same way." I don't even think this would be preferable for those in charge for a bunch of reasons I can go into if you want. But I do think those who seek power on a massive scale prefer to be able to treat large groups of people as units. If they need to respond to the preferences of 300 million people they...I mean, they can't. But they can respond to a few dozen interest groups, and assuming those interest groups are in the power-having game they have incentive to push their *own* members to simplify their preferences.
And this can work itself all the way down to the individual level - you *could* insist that to be complete you need varied interests, a community willing to explore those interests with you, a niche inside that community that makes you distinct from the other members, and a careful balance of both novelty and comfort. But you're demanding a lot, both from yourself and those around you. It's much easier to just buy Star Wars figurines or post online abous socialism a lot and be a bit sad all the time.
That's a good way of looking at it - it's much harder to support a complex system, so they tend toward simplicity over time. Good stuff here, thanks!
This probably sounds like a nitpick, but it's really conceptually important, I feel: "even mass of similarity" is what atomization looks like. That's not to mean "this chemistry metaphor fails if taken literally", it's to mean "this chemistry metaphor is extremely accurate and perfectly demonstrates the implications of social atomization as bemoaned by its critics". Distinct communities EOR atomized, the two are contradictory.
I find the points about MCU being the point where people figured out how to market comic book superhero stories to a mass market interesting. I agree, but also, isn't this what Shakespeare mostly did? His plays were media for the common people of his day and time, many of them retelling old stories. He filled them with fight scenes to keep things exciting. His actors raced through lines to keep the total time way down compared to modern productions of the same plays. (All of this might be wrong, but it's what I was taught in high school).
None of that is a dig against Shakespeare, but it is a dig against glorifying Shakespeare while vilifying the MCU (Note: not personally a fan of either, except I like things written in more archaic language sometimes). I can imagine a world where 300 years from now, literature professors are expounding upon how the MCU combines the styles of mythmaking and epic poetry (large casts of mighty beings beyond our ken, each with many stories about them that the audience already knows), civic religion (Superman is an immigrant, Captain America is a patriot,, etc.), sci-fi/fantasy, and maybe a few others. Maybe Ant-Man is typically experienced as a non-optional day-long interactive holodeck-equivalent story for educating fifth graders on the fundamental nature of quantum physics and its relation to the human-scale world, and maybe historians think the original publication was inspired by the discovery of the laser or fear of falling behind the Russians in technology advancement or something.
In the 19th century, as printing became cheaper and literacy more common (and so there was a true "mass audience" in a sense there wasn't before), they had these cheap publications called penny dreadfuls, stories that were often about crime and vampires and the like. Someone back then could have made the same argument you made and said "ah, aren't these doing just what Shakespeare did? etc. In the future people will think these penny dreadfuls have great literary quality." But no one nowadays thinks that the penny dreadfuls have great literary quality, and while they are no doubt studied by some scholars, it isn't for that reason (just because academicians study something doesn't mean they think it is good).
I'm not making any claim about MCU, by the way (I know nothing about it).
That's true, but many of the 19th century novels that are studied as literature today were also published initially as serials, including works by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Madame Bovary, The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov were also all published as serials, though I'm not sure if some of them might have been serialized after initial publication?
And even if much of the MCU got glossed over in my hypothetical future, or some 2040s-era retelling (or another big, complicated blockbuster saga) got remembered instead, well, the modern world has forgotten most of the Epic Cycle, and our oldest versions of the Iliad and Odyssey are from a millennium or more after it was written, and we often gloss over obvious fan service sections like the Iliad's Catalogue of Ships, and we forgive quirks of the oral poetry format like calling characters by epithets that don't match their current actions just because it fits the meter and is easy to remember.
So you're right, maybe the future will forget the MCU entirely or never think of it as great art. But pointing to the format and mass market popularity as a reason for that being likely just doesn't make sense to me. If this conversation had been about Star Trek instead of the MCU, I would think it was totally fair to say that maybe 90% of TOS, TNG, Voyager, and DS9, and much more of everything else, would never be remembered, but the remainder could be seen as important and impactful literature, and as a reflection of society grappling with current and expected future issues in meaningful and novel ways. When we someday start having (hopefully legal and metaphorical) battles over the rights of AI, I could easily see TNG's "Measure of a Man" and Voyager's "Latent Image" episodes having pride of place beside Asimov's "I, Robot" in discussions of past thought about the topic.
My comment about that might need a little more historical context to distinguish it from Shakespeare:
Superheroes started as a mass-market entertainment medium in 1930s comics. They appealed to a wide range of people. Most early superhero stories were continuity-lite stories where the conflict was resolved at the end of the comic. As time passed, publishers noticed that they could increase the appeal to dedicated fans by having more serialization, crossovers, recurring characters, and more continuity references.
As time passed, superhero comics started to lose popularity, partly due to competition from television, and partly because of weird content restrictions created by a moral panic in the 1950s. Publishers noticed that they were losing casual readers, but keeping long-term fans who were dedicated to continuous, serialized stories. Soon this type of story became the default story-telling option in superhero comics. It has become common for superhero comics to feature epic stories with huge crossover casts that reference plot elements from decade-old stories. These stories have less mainstream appeal, but have great appeal to people with nerdy personalities that love to keep track of decades of storytelling.
Superhero live-action movie adaptations have been around since there have been superhero comics, and there have been successful adaptations like the 70s Superman and 80s Batman movies. However, these in many ways followed the continuity-lite, nonserialized nature of earlier superhero comics. They didn't try to tell long storylines that took place over multiple movies and included crossovers. Producers were afraid it would alienate audiences who hadn't seen everything.
What the MCU did was find a way to tell serialized stories with a lot of crossovers and continuity in a way that appealed to mainstream audiences. There were superhero movies before the MCU, but there wasn't something like "Infinity War" that tied together plot and character threads from multiple movies. That kind of storytelling was de rigeur for comics, it's an adaptation of "Infinity Gauntlet," a story from 1991. But something like that had never been tried in film before, especially not big budget live action film.
So it isn't just that they were able to make things exciting, it's that they were able to adapt a form of storytelling that was previously only found in a niche medium for dedicated fans, into a crowd-pleasing box office smash.
What's interesting is that the whole MCU thing peaked with Infinity War and has been on a downhill slide ever since, in both popularity and quality. It turns out that the mainstream audience had an appetite for this kind of thing exactly once (or maybe once in a generation), and aren't really on board for doing the whole thing all over again. If you were excited by Thanos, just wait to see how bored you'll be by Kang!
The other thing that happened with comic books after they lost popularity is that they became obsessed with their own continuity, which led inevitably into complicated multiverses. This is the path that comic book movies are going down now, and it's too damn nerdy for mainstream audiences.
I don't know for sure that it's the complicated multiverse that's doing the harm. Of the recent Marvel movies, the two most successful have been "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness" and "Spider-man No Way Home." Both of those movies leaned heavily into the multiverse concept, but outperformed more contained works like "Eternals," "Thor Love and Thunder," and "Shang Chi." I think the main reason Phase IV is underperforming is because of weak scripts compared to previous phases.
In general I don't think continuity is as big a deal to audiences as most people think. One of the most popular animated series in the world is "Dragon Ball Z," which is a direct sequel to a 150+ episode show called "Dragon Ball." "Z" was released in the USA prior to "Dragon Ball" and became a smash hit, even though "Dragon Ball" was not released in the USA until years later. And it's not like it's a continuity-lite show, it references events and characters from "Dragon Ball" a LOT. In spite of this, audiences ate it up. They were able to follow along, even if they didn't quite know who everyone was and what all their deals were.
To be fair, continuity or not, DBZ is also a show where you can see every dozenth episode and still be in the middle of the same fight, or at least figure out the gist of what you missed. Also you open and end with "previously" reviews and "next time" look-ahead segments to make it easier to keep up.
According to the late Samuel Crowell in "William Fortyhands", the real Shakespeare was an extremely successful producer who took fancy-pants plays which appeal to your English teacher, written by poor scriveners for cheap, then ripped out the boring bits and added stuff like music/dancing/animals that Samuel Pepys wrote about in his diaries. Thus, his actual work that made him rich is now referred to as the "bad quartos" while the output of relative nobodies is lauded and attributed to him.
Hasnt' that been disproved by computer analysis of the texts?
Has it? That would seem to be asking a lot out of computers.
The concept of authenticity explains a few of the puzzles here, I think. The original Mona Lisa is higher-status than a copy of it, even if they're undistinguishable to the untrained eye, because the former is authentic. Likewise, the Mabinogion-Ant-Man crossover wouldn't be as authentic as the original Mabinogion, and therefore less interesting. (So it's true that "the “quality” of the Mabinogion comes from something outside the text, like the fact that it’s old".)
Sports are enjoyable because they're not fiction: it's true that no one would watch a sitcom that would be formatted as a sports season, but the difference is that the sitcom wouldn't be authentic. Repetitive though they are, sports come with real stakes and real people playing a real game somewhere in the world.
In general, intellectual or scientific topics are somewhat authentic, because they are closely linked to reality; whereas video games or movie franchises aren't. An interest in an unusual topic is often authentic because no you have to investigate it yourself rather than follow someone else's lead, whereas a "common' topic like culture war politics or the MCU contains a lot of inauthentic ready-made stuff.
As for collecting, it's higher status to collect butterflies (which really exist independently of human actions) than to complete the Pokédex. Stamps are somewhat authentic because they're made for a real purpose, not just for collecting; but baseball cards or NFT profile pictures are intended for collecting and are therefore lower-status, to a first approximation.
Why do we care about authenticity? That is a good question in itself. Maybe it's some sort of culturally evolved defence against people tricking us.
OK two quick points.
First, I think a fair bit of disagreement on these threads really comes down to whether the MCU is Good or Bad. From the movies I've watched I'm on team "MCU is Bad" but I can't say I've watched them enough to say that definitively about the whole series. But it does seem like an important distinction, if we're going to group Star Wars and the MCU as analogous in this discussion, that the original Star Wars trilogy is pretty universally seen as Good and the MCU is seen by many as Bad.
Second, different reactions people have to levels of engagement in popular things. I.e. how can people claim to be socially oppressed for liking [major media franchise]? I was thinking about this in regards to Zelda. With an upcoming game coming out, three types of Zelda fans I've seen recently:
* casual fans who say "oh I played the original so much! I just saw they're making a new one, I'm gonna waste so much time my spouse is gonna hate me lol"
* people on the internet with really strong opinions on the "Zelda timeline" and encyclopedic knowledge about what all the enemies are called and shit and have played every Zelda game even though you have to own like 10 different Nintendo consoles to do this
* hot chick on Instagram I saw recently with a bunch of tattoos, one of which was a Zelda tattoo
So why is it that average people (group 1) and people with some claim to higher popularity (group 3) both are Zelda fans, but the big time Zelda fans (group 2) are lower popularity?
My hypothesis is that by getting really into it, you are on some level admitting to a ... flatness of personal experience. Where your life is uninteresting enough that the thing that everyone else enjoys in passing and then moves on from, becomes a personality trait for you.
It would be different if getting that into it produced a qualitatively different experience, but for something like consumption of a media franchise people assume that it's not that deep ... you're watching the same movies as them.
As for group 3 ... sex appeal aside, it matters that this girl had a lot of tattoos. Scans differently from someone who only had one tattoo and it was Zelda related. If it's one of many it has a similar effect to a comedian mentioning a life experience many people have but don't normally talk about (don't you hate when you hate to fart but you're on a date and hold it in for hours?), and they get cool points for saying it aloud.
Name your kid after Daenerys? Everyone will make fun of you (or the kid).
Name your kid after Zelda? You can get away with it... if you're Robin Williams.
Zelda is just a better name. Actually Daenerys isn't inherently a bad name phonetically - it's pretty similar to the old female name Damaris - but it suffers from phantasie vowelles, and now people have seen the TV show finale, so...
Zelda was a name long before Nintendo came along. The second most famous Zelda is Zelda Fitzgerald.
[snark]I think other factors to consider is are willpower and depth. Group 2 are obviously the only group that has enough willpower to focus on objectively interesting things like Zelda monsters instead of getting distracted by dumb things. People in groups 1 and 3 just don't have the willpower. Also, groups 1 and 3 do not have the rich depth of personality needed to appreciate the subtle differences between different Zelda games on different systems. [/end snark]
You are reminding me of the fallacy where ordinary people assume that intellectuals must have extremely boring personalities because they are into boring things like math and science, instead of interesting things like gossip, fashion, sportsball, and getting plastered. The idea that other people could find different things interesting doesn't occur to them so they assume the uninterestingness must be a quality of the people. Similarly, you can't imagine liking Zelda that much, so you assume it must be that people's lives must be so boring that there is nothing else but Zelda.
People find different things fascinating. I believe the main reason group 2 is low popularity is that being popular takes effort, and they are so fascinated by things like Zelda that they expend effort on that instead. Popularity just isn't worth as much to them as it is to others. I can personally attest that I have had ample opportunities to engage with more normal activities in my life, but had to stop because they were excruciatingly boring when compared to nerdy activities.
Your hypothesis also doesn't make predictions as well as mine does. According to your hypothesis there should be no celebrity nerds since celebrities tend to lead exciting lives. My hypothesis predicts that celebrity nerds should be somewhat rare since nerds don't work as hard at popularity, but that some nerds might get lucky and become popular anyway. As it happens, there are some celebrities with nerdy interests/.
This is definitely the better hypothesis but I would point out that for the most part absolute popularity doesn't really matter after high school and what we are really discussing is whether people have enjoyable personalities and are able to find and make friends. There are lots of people in group 2 who are locally popular however as you point out being popular provides opportunities (requires time/effort) to do things that lower them from group 2 towards group 1.
I think as nerd culture goes mainstream some people with exceptional personalities (celeberties) will like nerd culture. Liking MCU, Magic The Gathering, or Video Games no longer marks you as a nerd.
I'm a big film-analysis nerd who loves shit like Citizen Kane and obscure foreign arthouse films. I read and write super pretentious film criticism. I have all the bona-fides of a snob.
I love the MCU, because it's really god damn good. I've seen every single film in theaters. I've had long debates about how Shang Chi uses the Kishotenketsu 4-act structure and simultaneously fits into a standard western 3-act structure, and whether this means it constitutes a new act-structure or proves that acts are subjective.
A common failure of analysis that supports claims like "the MCU is bad" is to collapse "good-bad" to a single axis, when it obviously is made up of many orthogonal axes. We usually trust the listener to know which axis we mean.
"So bad it's good" is a great example. Some movies are so bad you'd rather gouge out your eyes than watch them. But "so bad it's good" movies are generally well-written and have a lot of soul, but the production value is cheap and they don't take themselves seriously or have complicated themes. Even something like "production value" isn't linear, since something like Lawrence of Arabia simultaneously reads as "holy shit the care that went into getting these colors to look right, it cost untold millions" and "wow they really sucked at makeup back in the 60s, this would be unfathomably bad in a modern movie but it's quaint."
“Emotionally, everyone who likes things more prestigious than what I like is a snob who’s faking it, and everyone who likes things less prestigious than what I like is a boor who doesn’t understand true art.”
See also, Kingsley Amis’s “berks and wankers.”
In a similar vein, cult Aussie band TISM divides the categories into "yobbos and wankers".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiHdpAVIHgo&ab_channel=CarbieWarbie
"I’m not up to date on what goes on in academic literature departments, but Freddie de Boer says they’re increasingly offering “Spiderman Studies” classes in attempts to stay culturally relevant; probably Spiderman professors engage with Spiderman on the same deep level that Shakespeare professors engage with Shakespeare."
Probably for the best. I always thought it was pretty bizarre how we treat analysis of old high status art few people engage with as a normal and reasonable humanities major (fine art, English lit) while analysis of our actual culture is kind of niche.
New life goal: move from Okay-tier to Upper-tier
> People “are constantly meeting strangers and having to communicate their identity to them quickly.”
This is a very strange and foreign concept to me. Why exactly do I have to do this? What is the negative consequence to me if strangers I meet don’t get an instant tutorial on who I am as a person?
I live a life where the way people get to know me is to, ya know, actually get to know me, over time.
Well, in situations where people feel they have to establish contact with people quickly. If you are satisfied with your social life, then there aren't any negative consequences. But a dating site (or social media) might be an example of a place where this becomes a perceived need.
The confusion over definitions sounds like a rewatch of this series of classics of cinema is in order:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Nerds
"The film's plot chronicles a group of nerds at the fictional Adams College trying to stop the ongoing harassment by the jock fraternity, the Alpha Betas, in addition to the latter's sister sorority, Pi Delta Pi."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDJmRYBTd4w&list=PLnueMi3HAhzKKsVfiX2BtO0E54DatxZJx&index=2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6-PR0cFFKY
This has been a remarkable exchange, and the Krissian 'low quality' bit did less to highlight for me why I have always disliked nerds than the responses to his thesis did.
A ctrl-f on both this and the comments to the original response turn up zero hits for "Berkson", and I believe this is the crucial point. Scott's matrix of quality vs status is a useful step and jogged my memory: 'nerds' are victims of Berkson's paradox because they are people who assume that being attractive, fit, athletic, and socially capable actually and literally are negatively correlated with intelligence. This is not the case, but it is a common illusion which has been reinforced by Hollywood (E.g. Revenge of the Nerds). Note that Hollywood writers/etc were themselves the first victims of this (with resultant expressions going as far back as that awful movie about people with dwarfism before the code imposed more mainstream values on the place). Anyhow, 'nerds' are people who are not particularly (or at least, usefully) intelligent but assume they must be due to their not having other, more socially-rewarded traits. One of the traits they don't have is being able to select things that are high quality/status (that's a 'prestige hierarchy' move) -- note that the people who fell for Ern Malley were the kind of dreadful nerds who run a magazine about garbage non-art.
Producing lower-quality/status things is easier, and at some point saturated the market. This caused people who are not actual nerds in the sense I have outlined above to become interested in them, leading to a confusion where some of the actually usefully intelligent and successful people who comment on this substack falsely think of themselves as nerds and defend the category.
There's nothing 'wrong' with being socially undesirable and also a midwit. It's not anyone's fault. It's not even his fault if he thinks he's smarter than he is because he wears glasses and can't throw a ball. It's not a moral failing. But defending this category as "good" is absurd and morally incoherent.
I don't think the nerd's assumption is wrong, it's just a little more complicated than they often think. There is definitely a weak negative correlation between intellectual achievement and social capability/popularity. This is simply because engaging in social signaling and status games, especially in the more toxic communities, can take a lot of time, effort, and brainpower. As a result, popular people are often less intellectually accomplished than nerds.
The same is true of athletics and attractiveness. There is some inherent attractiveness and athletic ability, but a lot of it also comes down to practice, either in athletics, or in paying attention to fashion and makeup. Some people can do those things and also be intellectual, but some can't, so there is a weak negative correlation between those and intellectual achievement.
I don't think that nerds want to be able to select high-quality/status things, but make mistakes and can't. It isn't actually that hard to select high-quality/status things, you just need to pay a little attention to things like critic scores and sales numbers. Nerds just don't want to select for those things, they want to select things that they like, things that are interesting. You are making the same mistake I was talking about in my comments on the previous post, where you literally can't imagine liking something for reasons that are independent of status.
That's why I can't help but like nerds. They are trying to live good lives instead of chasing popularity. They recognize on some level that popularity is a game where the only way to win is to not play. And they are often quite intelligent in whatever subject fascinates them, because they put so much effort and thought into it. I think a lot of people who read this substack definitely are nerds, because they do put lots of thought and effort into intellectual topics without regard to popularity.
I don't know if a lot of nerds are "midwits," when it comes to things outside their area of expertise, but that seems fine. Most smart people are outside of the areas they choose to focus their efforts in. The concept reminds me strongly of the "Valley of Bad Rationality" concept Scott introduced on Less Wrong a while ago and, like that concept, it is only true for a few limited issues. Most of the time smarter people do better at things than less smart people, even though there might be even smarter people elsewhere.
I've never understood why people who are bad at sports imagine that being good at sports takes all of a person's time. Going to the Olympics certainly takes a lot of time, but natural athleticism isn't exactly much of a time sink.
As for the main point, actual status correlates with quality. We're not talking about doing high quality things for the sake of chasing status. We're talking about using prestige as a filter. And this has nothing to do with sales rank. I absolutely do not care how many Star Wars minifigs Lego sells, collecting them is still useless and absolutely no good for a person doing it. On the other side, although I personally don't have the attention span for golf, at least it gets people outside and walking around and talking to other human beings who are capable of doing things like going outside and walking around.
It doesn't need to take all of a person's time to not be worth it. It just needs to be less worthwhile than other activities. I know that I could probably become good at soccer or basketball with a few hours of practice a week. I wouldn't have to give up all my nerdy interests, just dial them back a bit. That is irrelevant to me because soccer and basketball are boring as all hell. Spending any time on them at all is not worthwhile. What really made me become more athletic is audiobooks, now I can go on walks or to the gym without feeling like I am not accomplishing anything.
Collecting Star Wars minifigs and Legos, by contrast, is quite useful. A lot of the newer figurines are of immensely high quality, by many metrics of quality. They are beautifully made with incredible detail. They look awesome. They don't need to do anything else, looking awesome is its own reward. But collectors often do meet and form communities. Assembling complex Legos takes patience and effort, and it creates a feeling of accomplishment that is rewarding in itself.
The problem with the idea that prestige is being used as a filter is that many high-quality things do not need to be filtered. In a market economy, greater demand for stuff will increase the supply, given time. If there is more demand for gyms, they'll build more. If there's more demand for amateur sports clubs, people will found more. For things like movies, the writing of cultural critics are available free online. If nerds wanted to do these things they could. They choose not to, not because they are ignorant of the benefits, but because they care more about their own interests than they care about those benefits.
I think it makes more sense to postulate that nerds like things because they are cool and fascinating, and are more indifferent to status than the typical person. For this reason they often have trouble obtaining status because they are unwilling to make compromises with their interests in order to do so. Other people like things because they are cool and fascinating, but are more likely to hide/suppress their interests for conformity and status signaling. They are also less likely to become fascinated in depth with things, which leads to them having shallow interests that they fail to master.
Also, why do you keep listing going outside as a reason things like golf is high quality. There are bugs outside! You can get sunburned. Outside is gross :)
Okay, you got me. That's more subtle trolling than I'm used to encountering. Bravo.
I wasn't really trolling. I really believe everything I wrote in my reply. I was just exaggerating it in the final paragraph to be funny. Outside is nice in the spring and fall when it isn't too hot, cold, snowy, or buggy, but I prefer the gym and mall walking at other times. I was just trying to humorously illustrate that a lot of things that you are treating as measures of quality might actually be unpleasant for some people.
I guess if I do find myself surrounded by a lot of people criticizing nerds and nerd culture I do find myself starting to turn into an unabashed defender of it, but that isn't a conscious thing.
"But the southwest square could be “writes a wacky Shakespeare fanfiction, Romeo & Juliet II, in blank verse and period-appropriate language”
We already have this! From Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" to the various movies about Shakespeare, and even a sitcom from 2016-2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTYGmza0Skc&t=30s
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)"
But that's pretty much what sitcoms *are*! You have a cast of familiar characters who each episode get into wacky hi-jinks and end the episode pretty much as they began, and over the arc of the season even if we learn more about them, they don't really change that much or are affected by what happens. Think of "Friends", it ran for ten seasons and eventually ended up with Ross and Rachel together, as had been heavily hinted at since the first season. Everything changed, yet nothing did.
"Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant (ironically, Sam Kriss is probably the single person alive most qualified to do this)."
We need to stop fooling around, stop looking at funny pictures of cats on the internet or whatever, and put our collective funds together to commission Sam Kriss to produce this Magnum Opus on behalf of humanity.
"Effective Altruism" and stuff.
"The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful."
Am I the only cat who remembers "She" by J.T. LeRoy? I remember European hipsters getting taken in by this, hook line and sinker.
I grew up in a barn, so I read about three pages of "She" before I called bullshit. I managed to finish the book, but only after I decided that I would view it as a sort of a crude form of magical realism and not anything like an actual autobiography. Still, my hipster friends gave me grief, said I was "victim blaming" and even when it came out that J.T. LeRoy didn't actually exist and "She" was a hoax they weren't inclined to forgive.
It ain't just literature, yo. Shortly after the election of Trump, the German magazine "Der Spiegel" published a piece on Fergus Falls, Minnesota, describing the sort of town where people vote for the Orange Buffoon. Needless to say, it came out that, like "She", the piece was entirely fabricated, but because (also like "She") it was fabricated in a way that fully confirmed the prejudices of the readership, it ran and was celebrated for a while.
See also Stephen Glass.
Re: Ant-Man and the Mabinogion, I was led to understand the problem is that the latest Ant-Man movie is an unholy mess due to several reasons, so that may be an unfair comparison.
As for adaptations of old myths, let me quote from Tumblr:
https://www.tumblr.com/sunshinemoonrx/700721026916548608/old-welsh-lit-dave-punched-steve-this-incurred-a?source=share
"Old Welsh lit: Dave punched Steve. This incurred a fine of twelve cattle and a nine-inch rod of silver and is known as one of the Three Mildly Annoying Blows of the Isle of Britain
Old Irish lit: Dave punched Steve so that the top of his skull came out of his chin, and gore flooded the house, and he drove his fists down the street performing his battle-feats so that the corpses were so numerous there was no room for them to fall down. It was like “the fox among the hens” and “the oncoming tide” and “that time Emily had eight drinks when we all know she should stop at six”
Old English lit: Dave, the hard man, the fierce man, the fist-man, gave Steve such a blow the like has not been seen since the feud between the Hylfings and the Wends. Thus it is rightly said that violence only begets more violence, unless of course it is particularly sicknasty. Amen. "
I think the problem is that the Marvel movies are based on comic books; and comic books are essentially the foundational myths of our modern culture. As such, the stories that have stood the test of time are relatively short and to the point; their power derives from packing a lot of emotional engagement into a very efficient package.
But if you're Disney, your goal is not to provide a gut-punch of emotional engagement in a focused strike akin to a laser beam to the soul; rather, it's to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. So, what do you do ? That's right, you incessantly dilute the material with quippy jokes and visual gags and pop culture references and CGI effects. Thus you end up with homeopathic mythology, which works about as well as the regular kind of homeopathy.
> comic books are essentially the foundational myths of our modern culture.
Thank you, yes! I was having a conversation about exactly this on the original thread.
> the Three Mildly Annoying Blows of the Isle of Britain
Ah, good, someone else recognizes the listiness of early British history/mythology. I was wondering about this in the open thread, speculating that it might have been some ancient Indo-European thing if it wound up shared between Celts and Indians.
It is a little unfair maybe to the Brits, who really only have the Matter of Britain and half of that is Norman-French, but this is precisely why Tolkien started writing his mythologies:
"But the mythology (and associated languages) first began to take shape during the 1914-18 war. The Fall of Gondolin (and the birth of Eärendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The kernel of the mythology, the matter of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren, arose from a small woodland glade filled with 'hemlocks' (or other white umbellifers) near Roos on the Holderness peninsula – to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber Garrison in 1918."
"Thank you very much for your kind and encouraging letter. Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still the undarkened heart and mind.
It has been a considerable labour, beginning really as soon as I was able to begin anything, but effectively beginning when I was an undergraduate and began to explore my own linguistic aesthetic in language-composition. It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. (For example, that the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize, though of course it depends on both. And vice versa. Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends.) So though being a philologist by nature and trade (yet one always primarily interested in the aesthetic rather than the functional aspects of language) I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing 'legends' of the same 'taste'. The early work was mostly done in camps and hospitals between 1915 and 1918 – when time allowed. But I think a lot of this kind of work goes on at other (to say lower, deeper, or higher introduces a false gradation) levels, when one is saying how-do-you-do, or even 'sleeping'. I have long ceased to invent (though even patronizing or sneering critics on the side praise my 'invention'): I wait till I seem to know what really happened. Or till it writes itself. Thus, though I knew for years that Frodo would run into a tree-adventure somewhere far down the Great River, I have no recollection of inventing Ents. I came at last to the point, and wrote the 'Treebeard' chapter without any recollection of any previous thought: just as it now is. And then I saw that, of course, it had not happened to Frodo at all."
"Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.
For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. (I am speaking, of course, of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, which you read.)
Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd."
"while possessing the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic, it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry."
I hate Peter Jackson.
"the Brits, who really only have the Matter of Britain and half of that is Norman-French"
Is it? I thought that half was merely "French", rather than Norman. Neither Chretien de Troyes nor Robert de Boron were Norman (as far as I can tell).
The other half is Welsh, so Tolkien has a point - the matter of Britain is hardly English.
Regarding sports, I will try to explain two reasons to actually watch sports from my own experience (in response to "It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.")
One is that they provide a sense of connection or continuity. While a college student I attended (American aka gridiron) football games with friends, mostly as a social activity. Shortly after I completed my undergraduate studies I moved across the country for grad school. Living far from my old college community, I enjoyed going to a sports bar where the alumni association would gather to watch our alma mater's football games. It was a way to connect with others with whom I had things in common and to feel connected with a community I had been part of during my formative years (and happily, this occurred during a period of significant improvement by the football team, so each season offered the prospect of new heights). Work eventually brought me back to the state in which I had attended college, and since then my interest in watching football has declined somewhat -- I still do, but not as regularly, probably in part because I don't need it for that connection anymore.
The other reason I sometimes watch sporting events is indeed to appreciate the pure athleticism involved. I don't normally watch the local NBA team, but when they make the playoffs I may watch a game or two, since the playoffs pit the best teams against each other, and in an era of load management you are more likely to see the best players on the court during a playoff game than during a regular season game. Similarly, while I certainly don't even attempt to watch most of the Olympics, there are a few sports that I enjoy watching (at least once they have winnowed the field down to the final round or two). These mostly skew towards sports where even a non-expert in the sport can't help but be wowed by the displays of athleticism: gymnastics, various swimming events, freestyle skiing, et cetera, and because it is only once every four years it doesn't feel like a repetitive exercise in watching the same thing over and over.
There are of course other reasons many people watch sports, not all of which I understand. I just wanted to illustrate two that I have experienced to hopefully bring some clarity to the mystery of why some people actually watch sports.
There's also betting involved at times. Or so I've heard.
This has me wondering: what are the topics that the social outcasts flock to today? Do they have their own things or are all the kids interested in the same stuff now? I really have no idea or any idea how to find out.
Depends why you’re an outcast. If it’s due to some component of your identity, identity communities are a common outlet. Gaming is a *huge* one, of course. Obscure music and fandoms are still a thing as well
> This has me wondering: what are the topics that the social outcasts flock to today?
As far as I can figure out, obscure genders.
I'm polycircuitous, you've probably never heard of it.
Human biodiversity.
>The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person.
This is probably spoken like a narcissist, or maybe just a naturally interesting person with a lot of interests and personal quirks.
But there is absolutely nothing "boring" about my true self and I don't think I have ever thought so. To the extent I posture or pose, or hide, or construct a false front on top of my true self, it is almost always to hide facets I find undesirable, or to impress someone, or whatever.
It is pretty much never because I think they would find me uninteresting, I am super interesting, too interesting in ways.
Grosse Pointe Blank reference, or just your name? Never see that movie get enough love.
Don't rush to judgment until all the facts are in!
You can never go home again, Oatman.
All right, see you at the I've-peaked-and-I'm-kidding-myself party.
Agreed, for me there’s also an element of being a bit tired of explaining my various esoteric interests to people.
I will say, if I ever found anyone currently living who liked Jonson more than Shakespeare, I would be *very* interested to hear them out! (Same deal for Marlowe, although that would be a little more understandable.) Jonson and Marlowe fans are not exactly the outgroup relative to Shakespeare fans! And almost all dislike I hear of Shakespeare is based on difficulty in understanding the language, so it would be very interesting to hear a criticism from someone who wasn't put off by that at all -- Jonson's most famous plays are full of contemporary cultural references that make them IMO even harder for a modern audience than most Shakespeare.
I am a Shakespeare is super overrated person. I tend to most like literature for plot not style, and so all the style stuff doesn't hit me as hard as it does others. And i find the plots pretty "meh", just your typical soap opera drama you can find anywhere.
Of course he gets huge points for being "first", but I don't think that if you just had random Shakespeare level pieces released today anyone would notice. They would not be held up as all time classics. Their value is in their cultural history and place, not their abstract quality.
I also think there is a big issue of "gods goodness" about them. Where people have been taught "this is the good" for literally generations, so they believe it is good. But when you try and get them out of that box to be like "what is good about it that isn't just "this is like Shakespeare", they often have a hard time coming up with examples.
IDK I read most of the plays when I was a kid, and again in my 20s, and just found it kind of underwhelming compared to the continual treatment of it as ambrosia.
But do you think Marlowe or Jonson is better? That's the point of the question, I think.
I mentioned Samuel Crowell's "William Fortyhands" above, which is definitely in the Shakespeare-is-overrated camp (he uses the term "bardolatry"). Unfortunately, he's dead now so you can't ask him anything.
This makes me think that some modern director should do a film adaptation of Webster's tragedies "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfi". Quentin Tarantino would be good for the gory murders, but I don't know if he would get the sophisticated plotting right. Any suggestions?
I love the Duchess of Malfi and I’m lucky to have seen it produced once in a very solid regional production. Alex Cox did a great, imaginative, funny, bloody take on The Revengers Tragedy featuring Eddie Izzard, among others — which isn’t the best play ever but I think his movie of it is the best that could ever be made, if you haven’t seen it and like this kind of thing check it out. Julie Taymor’s movie of Titus Andronicus is pretty good too and in a kind of similar style. I actually think The Duchess of Malfi has maybe too much of a genuine emotional core / is too good of a play for a totally gonzo take like those two movies though.
The once-shared-culture top-40 era yielded thousands of songs that many if not most Americans - if specific to their decade, and by "decade" I mean about fifteen or 20 years - could sing some portion of the lyrics of. This is almost like a faint signal from the past, of the role of music pre-recording. To me anyway. But you need not accept that claim to realize that the "work of digging out the obscure" fails on that metric, in the same way that those endless pop songs perhaps fail, many of them, in terms of "quality", to the musically-gifted or musically-purist. But it further fails in that I doubt many of the musical hipsters will one day burst into their own equivalent of "Under the Redwood Tree" which so happened to be the earworm in my head last evening as I was cooking dinner.
>But it further fails in that I doubt many of the musical hipsters will one day burst into their own equivalent of "Under the Redwood Tree" which so happened to be the earworm in my head last evening as I was cooking dinner.
There are plenty of obscure "hipster" songs I'll randomly get stuck in my head or start singing, I fail to see how whether or not a song is generally popular has much bearing on if it's one of your own personal earworms, or part of your regular humming repertoire. What self-respecting hipster doesn't occasionally break into a shout of "I LOVE YOU JESUS CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTT," after all? (which incidentally, is from a song that's part of what could be described as a hipster alternative to the top 40 canon, if your main point had to do with the social function of having a familiar, codified grouping of songs that multiple people share)
Whatever "obscure" songs you reference - apart from the musical hairshirts - would probably have been a hit pre-1990, or the work of somebody that produced hits, like "Redwood Tree".
Even I, old person, might have heard your song.
I'm not sure people have figured out a way to think/talk about the fact that "popular" music used to be much more varied. Perhaps this is the way: "my" music is obscure/the Beatles? - I don't hear a hit!, etc.
Why on earth are people talking about the Beatles in 2023? Why are the Beatles still the competition? In the 70s people didn't sit around saying, "Actually, 'Swanee' really sucks" and "Fats Waller wasn't really very talented, he was just the beneficiary of technological change".
"Your" special music, that sets you apart, would not have set you apart fifty years ago.
The fact that people keep referring back to the Beatles as if they were current, as if the White Album just came out and they ran down to the record store to get their numbered copy - indicates a discomfort with the hegemony of rap, its anointment at the top of the musical totem pole; or at the very least that they - unlike the New Yorker ;-) - don't find all that much left to say about it.
As much as the song is exactly what you describe it is (and as much as I occasionally start singing it myself), it still speaks lots about hipsterism that out of many hits in its alternative shared consciousness this is the one example that immediately sprung to your mind. As much as ItAotS is a great record, let's face it, that particular passage's fame comes purely from its widely recognized abrasiveness. To put it forward as one's rallying call requires self-consciousness that, I believe, has no equivalent in mainstream culture; a classic example of post-ironic defense of one's unconventional tastes (once misconstrued as ironic detachment, a stereotypical hipster characteristic, but it was before post-irony was even recognized, so we should know better nowadays).
Some of the themes touched on here have to do with people being one-dimensional, or presenting themselves as such. "Imagine building your personality around X" has become a staple way to dismiss people online. But no matter how interesting or high-status X is, I really can't understand people who brand themselves around that thing. I've got a lot of hobbies and interests, and I can't imagine wearing a t-shirt or hat or button that says "this one thing is my whole deal" in a general context (if I was specifically doing to a video game convention, I might wear something about a favorite game, or if I am going to a car show I might wear something about a favorite car, but not out in the general public). I kind of want people to get to know me more organically.
I'm not sure how to articulate this, but I think that Ready Player One need to be a part of this conversation. The film pitched itself as a nostalgia-fueled celebration of nerd stuff, but it mostly just mashed-up elements from some of the most financially successful and popular mainstream films of all time. The book pitched itself as an anthem of obscure nerd culture and trivia, but again, it is mostly trivia about those massively successful mainstream movies and games. The author appears to have pursued nerd-dom more as an identity than a true love, since he can only prove his nerd cred by citing endless lists of obscure trivia, but he can't describe his love of the source materials.
That was such a weird book. The whole setup feels like it's going to be a critique of nerd culture, but the shoe never drops and it just winds up as a celebration of it.
To wit: it's the 2040s and the whole real world has gone to shit and everybody is obsessed with virtual world and 1980s nerd trivia. At some point you expect a moral of "and that's why 1980s nerd trivia is stupid and we all really need to move on" but it never quite arrives, the protagonist just wins everything by being the most 1980s nerd trivia obsessed nerd in the world. Good job protagonist.
I don’t think real nerds compete for nerd cred by describing their love of the source materials. I also don’t think the target audience were nerds, so much as normal people who thought in the 80s that some of the things they liked were nerdy. It tells those people that some people who liked those things were nerds in the bad sense, but that it’s possible to grow beyond that and live a fulfilling life even if you do. You’d expect that moral from anyone who can publish a book through a mainstream publisher.
True; nerd cred seems to be driven by knowledge of trivial minutiae, but surely a nerd's interest in that trivia should be driven by a love of the subject, right? If you read Ready Player Two, Ernest Cline expands into trivia from other areas of pop culture just by copying Wikipedia lists, and he describes his main character's rote memorization of these facts as a virtue. And yet that main character's final end goal is to upload his consciousness into a computer loaded with all the entertainment humanity has created to just eternally consume it. It's very weird, and that wierdness seems related to the topic of the article in ways that would be interesting to unpack.
I think learning trivia as described in the books is something that should ultimately derive from a love of the object of that trivia, but engaging with that trivia is pretty different from engaging with the objects themselves, and might easily get to be more fun than the object was. I think that’s the vibe I got from the books. As for the Wikipedia angle, I suspect the lists on Wikipedia appeared there specifically because they were of interest to historical nerds who added them. Maybe Wikipedia contributed to the metamorphosis of visible nerd culture, since the same facts that once needed commitment to learn are now available easily on the internet.
I still don’t think nerds are the target audience of those books. The games have more value if there are nerds who study them, because that suggests other people find them valuable or important. But the point of the books is that you should seek other things as well. Wanting to escape into inward-looking consumerism is the main character’s goal at the beginning of the second book, and then it is a personality flaw. He gives it up at the end, to do something more important.
> When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.
One word: jazz.
>Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant
If we lived in a timeline where that was real, then if it was good it would have survived the test of time.
Not to rehash others’ comments, but I think you’re deeply wrong about sports in a way that is emblematic of the problem with the entire post. Sports are an incredibly thrilling art form to those who enjoy them, have a rich and ancient history, etc.
My guess is some people derive deep meaning/transcendent joy from MCU movies or watching porn or playing video games, but not many; most just slip into that because it’s easy. Most of those people would experience something they would judge to be superior if they did a harder but more rewarding activity—reading a great book, making great art, gazing at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Any objective analysis of art is silly—the MCU isn’t worse than Tolkien for everyone, and just because you hate Marvel movies and sports doesn’t make them worse than any other leisure hobby. The argument for things being “bad” to base your personality around can only be made with reference to counterfactuals you might find more meaningful.
Sports are bad, because the same things happen over and over every game??? That's a fundamental misunderstanding of sports and why people like them. Also, why is "the same thing happens every time" a knock against sports and not popular "nerd" things like Star Wars/LotR/MCU? They aren't really a shining example of originalness. But anyways I have 4 points of why people like sports:
1. Watching pro sports is a shared experience among everybody in the community - it's no coincidence that US teams represent universities or major US cities. You can feel like you have something in common with your neighbor and common happiness or pain to talk about.
2. If you play a sport, then you'll probably want to watch that sport too, because you can understand what the players are going through physically and mentally, be amazed at how good they are, and try to learn some new techniques.
3. Sports are a great way to get your kids to exercise more, learn to socialize with other kids, learn teamwork, etc. I would argue that no other hobby for kids accomplishes this.
4. Sports are an equal opportunity hobby/sports are very cheap and accessible to play (and watch). Yes football requires lots of equipment and organization... but anyone can buy a soccer ball or basketball and start playing at a public park right away. Other "nerd" entertainment like books, movies, board games, or video games cost more money.
Also I disagree with Scott's implication that an unoriginal thing is bad entertainment by default. He compares sports to a repetitive sitcom with thousands of episodes repeating the same thing... isn't that what actual sitcoms are? I could sketch out the typical setting, plot, and lines of an episode from Friends, The Office, Parks and Rec, Community, Seinfeld, etc. just like I could sketch out the typical plot of a basketball game. Seinfeld is commonly known as "a show about nothing". I really like those shows and I don't think they're bad because they're unoriginal sitcoms. Being original matters a little bit, but it's probably only one small part of being "good" entertainment.
For me, the act of collecting has always required the concept of repurposing or recontextualizing something. I’m a comic book collector, and fanatic enough about it to have spent decades working at a comic book store (that’s where you find your wheat pennies! work retail!), and I like collecting old comics in part because I know they were meant to be disposable—keeping them is in some way subverting their destiny.
Customers would come into the store saying, e.g. “I collect Bowen busts” (little statues of superheroes that used to come out roughly monthly) and I’d be annoyed. I didn’t say it, but what I was thinking was: “You’re not a collector; you just have an implicit contract with Bowen in which they put out a product and your purchase it.” This would go the same for “collectors” of Wolverine appearances or 1 in 100 variants. What’s the point of collecting something with the words “collector’s item” right on it?
I imagine the same thing would apply to coin collecting—getting coins from the mint, slabbed and labeled “for collectors” is no different from buying a box of cereal, while an old buffalo nickle was never intended to leave circulation. I guess you could say that its existence preceded its essence, if you were a existentialist.
Of course, you can also just collect comics because you want to read old series that have not been reprinted, such as Around the Block with Dunc and Lou or Arak Son of Thunder…
"When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me."
Does *playing* sports also seem bad by our usual standards of entertainment? Kids will kick a ball between goals every day without getting bored of it--it seems like that's a more established standard than sitcoms. I play ranked matches in SSBU and I watch pro matches on YouTube sometimes. My own skills and the skills of the pros I watch are continually changing, in addition to the metagame evolving. It doesn't feel repetitive.
> Admit that it would be indistinguishable from other myths, but say that the quality of the Mabinogion is in the style, language, and pacing, not the plot (but most English-speakers enjoy the Mabinogion in translation or summary; does that detract from this claim?)
I think a lot of what makes a story high-quality is in the details. Can the reader/listener/watcher empathize with the characters? Can they understand what's going on? Do the characters behave with some amount of consistency? Does the tone match the plot? Part of what MCU movies get criticism for is factors like these; if you translated the story, but managed to fix those problems, it would probably be considered good, but it's unclear to me how closely it would match the Marvel version.
But, I do think being old and being limited to text or even verbal recitation also is an advantage, because you get credit for creativity for being the first, and you get to avoid criticism like "it's just empty spectacle and bright lights" or "this is just trying to sell me toys." (On the other hand, maybe cynics of the past would say that their myths just exist to prop up the latest warlord who calls himself king, so it's entirely down a shift in perspective and context rather than anything about the story).
I guess the question I would ask is, "*why* are the classics considered the classics?" Is it just that they're just the oldest stories we still have from each culture? Or is there some other reason they survived, that they're actually the best stories from each civilization, and the worst ones were forgotten or we just don't talk about them? For really ancient cultures the former might be the case, but there's plenty of books from e.g. the 1800s that nobody remembers while there's a handful of very famous ones. Ant-Man might just be more like the forgotten morass than A Tale of Two Cities--comparing a 99.9% story to a 75% one doesn't make much sense in the first place.
I think it usually comes down to theme. Most high-brow works have something interesting to say. LOTR in particular strikes me as thematically dense. High-brow stories teach you enduring lessons; low-brow stories arrest your attention with sex and violence.
Obviously, execution is important too. But in the context of high-brow, I think it's more often a prerequisite than the main selling point. Whereas in low-brow, the execution has to carry the story. And there are certainly another class of stories whose main achievement was pioneering.
If sports were pre-scripted to have funny/interesting things happen in them, like a sitcom, they would become much more varied and rich and colourful - ie "good", the way Scott defines "good by the standards of entertainment", here - and not even the most die-hard sports fan would like them. Moreover, I would't imagine they'd appeal to Scott any more for all their added variety and intrigue. I don't think sports are enjoyed for the same reasons as most other forms of entertainment, and can't be measured along the same axes.
....yes, that also goes for reference-class tennis....
[Tried to expand on this below, but I think it sort-of came out more like a love letter to sports-in-general than anything else. Please skip the rest if you don't care why somebody might enjoy sport!]
One one level I think sports can be enjoyed as pure physical spectacle, like a ballet or a Saturn V launch; things that're impossibly far beyond anything you could do yourself and you can't help being impressed/mesmerised by the spectacle.
On another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of chess match, except with eg. lean figures in crash helmets with reaction times like houseflies on amphetamines, big angry-looking muscley men in tights, etc. etc. instead of little black and white figures. On this level it's not about driving the racing car or chasing the ball, it's about how the respective chess players - the race director in a Grand Prix, the hive mind formed from the brain pathways established in countless training sessions - place and move their (loud, brightly-coloured, expensive) pieces, and how their strategies unfold. Beneath the physical spectacle there are multiple striations of chess-like matches, from the speed-chess of a single match (or even a series of manoeuvres within a match) to the drawn-out psychological warfare of a ranked competitive season.
On yet another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of improvisation performance, on a spectrum somewhere between improv. comedy (heavily improvised but largely collaborative) and a tabletop role-playing game (only partially improvised but more adversarial). It's not that a certain thing was said or done so much as that it was said and done "right then!".
I think these factors can trade-off against one another depending on the sport and the observer:
A semiprofessional watching their own club might not derive all that much from the physical spectacle after a decade competing in the sport themself, but they might be much more appreciative of any tactical nuance or grand strategy going on in the underlying chess match.
..whereas a ten-year-old boy seeing their first match might not be able to recognise the feints and bluffs and gambits, but they might have a much stronger sense of "bloody hell, those guys are HUGE! And they're all dressed exactly the same! And look at them RUN!"
..whereas the Bouldering World Cup might have all the strategic depth of a game of Snap but there are some breathtaking feats of improvisation performed by competitors trying to solve a 3.5D geometry problem, on-the-fly, with their bodies.
There's at least one class of sports out there that are scripted for dramatic/funny things to happen: pro wrestling (WWE, AEW, etc). I think sports fans generally look down on this kind of entertainment, and its really only marketed to kids. I think this goes hand in hand with your statement that people like sports for different reasons than other forms of entertainment.
Yeah, I had that in the back of my mind, too! I guess I tend to think of such sports as more a kind of dance - albeit very rough shouty dance performed by very muscley people - or possibly even as a kind of circus act, than as a sport in the traditional sense. I think it nevertheless tends to be categorised as a sport because it evolved from traditional-sense-sports; essentially out of habit.
(Not intended as a criticism of wrestling - there's no reason why my thinking of it as dance/circus should be any more valid than anybody else's thinking of it as sport, of course! And never having seen more than about two minutes' worth of wrestling in my life - if anybody's opinion is less valid, it's probably mine..)
Probably already said by someone else: sports are substitute warfare. In a war, you and some other guys put on uniforms and then go try and beat crap out of some other guys in uniforms from a different town. Amazing how America's most popular sport, football, recreates this dynamic, right? No, no it's not, actually. So I guess there are two ways to look at your aversion to competitive sports, Scott. On the one hand, it probably speaks well for you that you apparently don't have this archaic mental architecture that gets excited by the prospect of defeating/dominating/humiliating other tribes that many of us do. On the other hand, what kind of weirdo doesn't enjoy that prospect at least a little bit?
I never understood polo until I realized that it was cavalry practice. And yep, apparently it goes back to ancient Persia.
> Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth ... I can think of a few possible ways to treat this experiment:
This thought experiment just seems very straightforward to me: the answer is Scott's #3. If you genuinely did a good job of this, your product would be a genuinely different work, whose quality could potentially be much higher than that of Ant-Man.
We see something analogous with film adaptations of novels. They are different works, whose quality can be very different from the source material. It is common for a great novel to have a shitty film adaptation. Occasionally, a shitty novel has a great film adaptation (e.g., The Godfather). But either way, there is no paradox.
Hence, Scott is describing as puzzling something that should not be at all puzzling.
Why would its quality be higher than Ant-Man? Why would Ant-Man, set in medieval Wales, naturally be higher quality than Ant-Man, set in the modern US?
It would be better than Ant-Man if you adapted it well and worse than Ant-Man if you adapted it badly. The setting isn't relevant. Translating Ant-Man into a Welsh myth is the same as just making a new Ant-Man movie.
I think I don't agree with you that the Marvel films are competent in execution. The Marvel films are low in quality because they are poorly made in a variety of ways. We don't need to distinguish between "quality" and "competence in execution", they are the same.
Ern Malley is a special case because the Malley poems are actually pretty good - the perpetrators of the hoax tried to write bad ones on purpose and failed. Nobody got tricked - the target of the hoax assessed their quality correctly, although he got a little too excited about it.
My claim is not that they *would* be; my claim is that they *could* be, depending on the skill and craft of the adapter. It has nothing to do with the setting. Mere change of setting wouldn't of itself increase or decrease the quality. The skill of the adapter could certainly change the quality, though.
The example I gave of The Godfather illustrates the point. The source novel is below average for commercial fiction. The film adaptation is well above average for films. The explanation is simple: Francis Ford Coppola is a much better director than Mario Puzo is a novelist. No puzzle, and no evidence that quality isn't real.
There are some interesting aspects to the latest Ant-man that have counterparts either in myth or at least in High Fantasy: we journey to a magical hidden world where one of our companions [Janet Van Dyne] turns out to have been a very important person in the struggles of that land. There's a lot of other stuff that services the Ant-Man comic tone, and the upcoming Kang plot, but that core seems like it could translate to myth.
> The Ern Malley hoax ... makes me even more doubtful.
This is another pseudo-paradox. The whole point of the Ern Malley hoax was that the thing purported to be high-quality (the poetry of Angry Penguins) was not in fact high-quality. In other words, it wasn't simply the Ern Malley poems that were fake, it was the originals being parodied that were also fake, and the purpose of the hoax was precisely to demonstrate that.
So, not the counter-example that Scott purports.
I "like" and "enjoy" some things I don't think are "good," which I've long realized doesn't quite make sense.
But to take video games as an example: I've spent quite a bit of time on Cat Cafe, a phone game about cute cats running a cafe. I clearly "like" it. I also "like" Outer Wilds, an indie game whose ending made me weep with sorrowful joy. I enjoy both games, but only one is good.
Outer Wilds is good, and not just enjoyable, because it makes me feel deeper and more complex feelings, because it does what it does in a more interesting way (I could write an essay about it), because it requires more investment (you get better at playing it over time)...
What I was trying to get at with my comment (listing popular 70s-00s superhero movies) was not to quibble about the date that nerdy things became popular, it was to say that superhero movies have never been nerdy.
Nerdiness is more about how you engage with the subject matter than the subject matter itself, and watching a two-hour superhero or sci-fi movie once in a while is the sort of low-commitment engagement that's normal and socially acceptable.
Watching a Batman movie is normal, reading a Batman comic is weird. Watching a Star Wars movie is normal, reading the novelisation of a Star Wars movie is weird. Reading fantasy novels is weird, but watching a TV show based on a fantasy novel is fine (and if the TV show is popular enough it might even make reading the novels normal too, for a while).
Why? Because reading is low-status? No, because deep involvement with shallow material is low status, and reading a book about something shallow is a deeper level of involvement than just seeing the movie.
That's why I have a problem with the MCU movies being one of the central examples of nerdy stuff in the essay -- they're really not that nerdy, which is why they're popular. Superhero material isn't intrinsically nerdy, it's just sufficiently shallow that historically most forms of engagement with the material (ie reading comic books or collecting figurines) have been nerdy.
Older superhero movies went out of their way to not be nerdy. They focused on the handful of characters a mass audience would have heard of, and regularly winked to the audience to remind them that it wasn't taking the subject matter at face value or anything. The 60s Batman movie was one giant wink (though that era was brilliant in being adventure for kids and comedy for their parents). The first Reeve Superman film has bits like Clark doing a double take at the open pay phone when looking for a place to change, comments on his "bad outfit, man", and Lois as the mouthpiece for adult cynicism (who of course is won over by a simple heroism that's intentionally played as strange and out of place).
The MCU starts with some of the same apologetic tone (no one uses the name "Iron Man" till the end of the first film, Thor explaining that Asgardians are aliens and their magic is really science). But once it hits its stride it stops doing that, and presents the salad bowl of weirdness that comics universes became decades earlier, without preliminaries and with much less handholding. Actual magic, space gods for which Earth is a nursery in one case and an egg in another, centuries worth of weirdness, conspiracies, aliens, and superpowers dating from before Tony Stark's comparatively tame technology-based heroing. "I'm a Clarke's Law alien" Thor becomes "I'm the God of Thunder" Thor.
By definition, as blockbusters the movies can't appeal only to nerds. But they made mass audiences appreciate a style of storytelling and worldbuilding that *had* been fundamentally nerdy, and that previous superhero outings had intentionally ignored or watered down to make them palatable.
(Or mass audiences were ready to appreciate it due to changes in the zeitgeist, and the MCU took advantage of that. But the failure of other attempts to click the same way suggests that Kevin Feige et al. know something they don't.)
I feel like the MCU movies have been an experiment in "how far can we push the nerdy shit before the mass audience loses interest?"
Turns out the answer is right around Infinity War. A whole plot based around collecting Magical Bullshit Gems That Can Do Literally Anything is fine, but the whole "Oh look now we've got multiverses" thing was a step too far.
I'm an old school fan of the pre-1986 DC multiverse who definitely feels some multiverse fatigue at this point. (Especially since the DC Berlantiverse treaded a lot of that ground on the small screen already.) But I don't know that that's the central issue.
I think the Infinity Saga as it shaped up is a tough act to follow, especially given the genre's tendency to want to Go Bigger. They've also lost some key talent and had some lackluster outings.
That said, I don't think they're doomed. There's a lot of space between "unpredecented cinematic phenomenon" and unprofitable or uninteresting. And there's still plenty of room for one of the next run of characters to catch the unexpected fire that Tony Stark turned out to have.
And if not? Nothing lasts forever. I'm guessing there'll still be a much bigger space for superheroes without training wheels as a genre than there was before, even if the MCU itself spins its wheels or takes a Star Wars style pause in big releases.
Yeah I think the Marvel movies have started on the long journey to becoming a niche nerd interest.
When you need a whiteboard to explain exactly how the Ant Man 9 continuity fits into the timeline established by Alligator Loki 3 then we'll be fully there.
A little while ago I stumbled on some reviews of the 1982 "Conan the Barbarian" movie. The critics were aghast that it actually took itself seriously. They'd been expecting something campy, deliberately schlocky, filled with sly winks at sophisticated viewers so that everyone important knew not to take it seriously. But instead the movie played it straight, took itself seriously, and the critics viewed this as, ironically, barbarians at the gate.
I especially liked the Tower of Set piece, with the gorgeous music and no dialogue.
"A nerd is a geek who would rather be right than get laid." There are fanatics who like their special interest even in a vacuum – call them "geeks." And there is another type of fanatic who uses his interest as a tool of aggression – call him a "nerd" – as in: given the slightest pretext (or, often, apropos of nothing) the nerd will gloat over his superior knowledge of his special interest, apparently deriving more satisfaction from feeling smarter than what he loses by alienating people in the process.
I definitely recognize both types of people you are describing, but don't think that calling the second type a "nerd" matches the common usage of the term.
Hmm. I find all of these categories incomprehensible and not corresponding to any social world I know. Perhaps I'm too old. It just seems like video games and comic books -- things which in my time were associated entirely with childhood -- are now things that many adults like. It makes me feel like there are no adults anymore, but I'm pretty sure it just means I'm old.
I think that's just because it's easier to get kids to adopt new mediums than adults, so often what happens is that a new medium starts making primarily kids' stuff, and then becomes more adult as the initial audience begins to age. There is no intrinsic reason to the medium why sequential pictures that tells a story or games made out of software should only be made for children.
There was at least a lag after the initial audience. I grew up playing Space Invaders, Pac Man, and Donkey Kong, but by the time I was in high school video games seemed childish to most of my peer group. Then some in my cohort picked up playing video games again as adults.
Well, pinball. That was a thing for young adults even in the 60s, and the first videos games I saw were co-installed in pinball arcades.
There were plenty of similar genres in the past ... but the source material wasn’t as frequently coming from things more associated with youth. Westerns, Greek/biblical epics, and medieval nights to take a few examples have plenty of parallels to super hero or sci-fi/fantasy movies. One thing that seems to have gone unobserved by more mainstream culture was the wave of “adult” comics as graphical novels starting in the 80s, that actually is the source for much of the current stuff (at least the better parts) rathe than youth targeted materials -but given they often share the same characters that isn’t always apparent
The problem is that you are conflating production quality and social status in the term “quality” sometimes we just have genre preferences... but often this is heavily intwined with social preferences
If you want to find original nerds in the wild, go to a hamfest. I think that might one of the few places where original style 70s nerds still exists and haven't been polluted with the current pop-culture version of nerd.
I can vouch for this, although Texas HAMs are more often a particular kind of good ol' boy than a pure nerd. But certainly the hamfest draws many sorts of people forth from their lab and/or lair.
Roger roger, you're five nine plus 20dB here.
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
C. S. Lewis had some thoughts related to this, in his essay "Lilies that Fester." The essay was actually taking it from the other end: at the time Lewis was responding, in part, to a society where the fashion was that "high culture" is snobbish and pretentious. But he does spend some time trying to describe what "culture" is, and what it isn't, and compares it directly to enjoying lower forms of art like "Fantasy and Science Fiction" (and he should know, he wrote books in both of those genres).
>"The talk is inimical to the thing talked of, likely to spoil it where it exists
and to prevent its birth where it is unborn.
"Now culture seems to belong to the same class of dangerous and embarrassing words. Whatever else it may mean, it certainly covers deep and genuine enjoyment of literature and the other arts. (By using the word enjoyment 1 do not mean to beg the vexed question about the role of pleasure in our experience of the arts. I mean frui, not delectari; as we speak of a man "enjoying" good health or an estate.) Now if I am certain of anything in the world, I am certain that while a man is, in this sense, enjoying Don Giovanni or the Oresteia he is not caring one farthing about culture. Culture? the irrelevance of it! For just as to be fat or clever means to be fatter or cleverer than most, so to be cultured must mean to be more so than most, and thus the very word carries the mind at once to comparisons, and groupings, and life in society. And what has all that to do with the horns that blow as the statue enters, or Clytaemnestra crying, "Now you have named me aright'? In Howard's End Mr. E. M. Forster excellently describes a girl listening to a symphony. She is not thinking about culture: nor about "Music"; nor even about "this music." She sees the whole world through the music. Culture, like religion, is a name given from outside to activities which are not themselves interested in culture at all, and would be ruined the moment they were."
...
"Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a grocer's. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, "That was a nice cup o' tea, dearie, that was. Did me good." Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
"'The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.'
"I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion; perhaps, even, the wild dog to the over-tame poodle or Peke. "
In the same essay he also makes a good point about seeking out something in order to "develop your personality":
>"At this point some may protest that by culture they do not mean the "enjoyments" themselves, but the whole habit of mind which such experiences, re-acting upon one another, and reflected on, build up as a permanent possession. And some will wish to include the sensitive and enriching social life which, they think, will arise among groups of people who share this habit of mind. But this reinterpretation leaves me with the same difficulty. I can well imagine a lifetime of such enjoyments leading a man to such a habit of mind, but on one condition; namely, that he went to the arts for no such purpose. Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry. For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end. The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience. The desirable habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as a by-product, unsought. The idea of making it one's aim suggests that shattering confidence which Goethe made to Eckermann: "In all my youthful amours the object I had in view was my own ennoblement." To this, I presume, most of us would reply that, even if we believe a love-affair can ennoble a young man, we feel sure that a love-affair undertaken for that purpose would fail of its object. Because of course it wouldn't be a love-affair at all."
If you take someone who likes video games in genre X and force them to review a video game in disliked genre Y, their review is likely to include the criticism that the game in genre Y is "repetitive". In most cases, I think an objective analysis would conclude that genres X and Y are approximately equally repetitive, and I think what's actually going on is that people who are enjoying themselves don't notice (or don't mind) repetition as much.
Complaints that some movies are "pulling your strings" sound a bit similar to me. I bet there's a strong tendency to perceive unsuccessful attempts to engage you as "string-pulling" but successful attempts as "providing actual value" (quality).
I don't want to go too far on this point, because I also think that humans have exploitable bugs that you can use to get them to pay more attention to a thing without actually providing more value/enjoyment/etc, and I think "string-pulling" is a pretty valid criticism of media that does this. (In fact, I wish our culture criticized this more!)
Some things I would consider examples of this: games with daily login rewards; books or TV shows that go out of their way to end every episode/chapter on a cliffhanger; intriguing clues that don't actually point to anything.
Does someone want to argue that the MCU has an unusually-high concentration of "string-pulling" in THAT sense? My first impression is that it doesn't, but I'd be interested to hear arguments that it does.
Eh, the nature of the MCU where you're meant to watch every movie/show so you'll understand the films you actually are about is kinda string-pully. Not the worst offender, but it's there.
I see how that can feel manipulative, but at the same time, that feels a bit like complaining that you can't read only the "good" chapters out of a novel.
Sure, it'd be nice if you could skip parts you're less interested in without that affecting your enjoyment of the other parts. But there are also clear non-manipulative reasons why you might want things to build on each other, and those goals are in tension. It's not obvious to me that the MCU is much off the Pareto-frontier of that tradeoff.
A novel contains, or ought to contain, all the chapters you need to understand and enjoy it. If a novel requires more than its own contents and common knowledge to understand and enjoy, e.g. if it is volume N of a continuity-heavy series or if it is a tie-in to a TV series, it ought to be advertised as such. And usually published novels meet these requirements. Books can in this respect be judged by their cover.
And if the cover says, "to really understand this book, you'll need to have read all the previous books in the series, *and* watched the TV series, and watched these two other series and dozen web shorts and read the following supplementary materials", probably a lot of potential readers are going to be turned off by that.
You and I may understand that the MCU is now at that level. But I'm one of the ones who is turned off by that. Also, the mass-market advertising for MCU products doesn't really explain that part really well. See also Star Wars.
Taking your analysis as a given, it seems like your complaint is some combination of "I don't feel they adequately communicated their level of connectedness" and "I personally don't like this level of connectedness".
I don't want to stop you from making either of those complaints, but I don't feel they fall into the category I'm talking about. I wouldn't describe them as "exploiting bugs in human software to capture attention without offering value in return".
Where does "being the guy who is really, really good at A Thing" count in the hierarchy of identity? Like, a chess grandmaster, or something?
Depends what the thing is. Being a chess grandmaster is quite high status, being really really good at eating baked beans with chopsticks is quite low status.
It’s a continuous thing, you might have “read a few interesting Quanta articles” as your only top-tier thing, have an oil painting you get back to every few months, and go bike riding a little each week.
I agree with the list as a description of the prestige of different activities, but I agree with someone above that Hoffdorf spaces are fine for a while but aren’t a great life passion. I would say a personality arises out of doing things for reasons that are important to you, but I’m biased as someone wishing the time I waste here was worthwhile.
I hung out on the Internet in 1997 when USENET was still a thing and played console RPGs before Final Fantasy 7 made them mainstream. God, I sound like such a hipster...
"The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
What is Scott looking for when he goes to a party and talks with new people? (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party) It seems the driving factor is for something "interesting", which is how he judges his own success at being received. I think that's defined differently depending on what your background is in all the ways Scott complains about some things as 'boring' that others shell out lots of money to be entertained by. It's not that those people are paying money to be bored. It's that Scott's definition of 'interesting' diverges from theirs.
For those who have a difficult time understanding how other people can enjoy sports (while still acknowledging that, somehow, those folks do enjoy sports ...) I would like to suggest spending some time on the YouTube channel "SEC Shorts." This mostly works if one understands football at least a little bit. It works better if one also has some sense for SEC rivalries, but this is not necessary. Being an SEC football fan is *totally* unnecessary.
And the channel is a bunch of short (~5 minutes) FUNNY videos that cover each week of a given SEC season. The videos are comedy gold, but for understanding how folks might care about their local sports-ball team I recommend also reading the comments.
Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esYZ15aIccU
I'm imagining this as being about the Security and Exchange Commission, and mildly interested.
:-)
I'm sure the Security and Exchange Commission cares *deeply* about SouthEastern Conference college football :-)
Why do you need to "build an identity" at all? What even is an "identity"? Baffled by the underlying concepts here. I literally don't understand what "building an identity" means, it's just a blur of static. Somebody please explain this to me from first principles.
I think that an "identity" is the thing that you can loudly proclaim you are, because you don't like the conclusions that they would come to if they were left to form their own opinion of you naturally. It's an exoskeleton that you build around your true self to distract people, maybe even yourself, from who you really are. As I wrote in another comment, being "the ska guy" is preferable to being "the fat guy with a lazy eye".
If you don't feel the need to construct an identity it probably just means you're a well-adjusted person who is comfortable with himself. As a grown-ass adult I'm perfectly comfortable with my natural self, but as a teenager I was perhaps not so much.
I think everyone has an idea in their head of what an ideal person would be like. They would do interesting work they enjoy and that has a positive impact on the world; they’d enjoy spending time with other people in their lives, and support them and learn from them; they’d have interesting hobbies; and of course, none of this would go to their heads. That person would have lots of things demanding their time (though they’d take time for themselves sometimes), and they’d have great reasons for the things they do; but they’d be adaptable enough to change their routine at a moment’s notice if something else important came up. They’d know what was important and why.
We aren’t this person, but we want to be. That creates a tension. We want to think we’re at least sort of close to that person, so we have an answer when we ask ourselves how and how much we’re like that person. The answer we give is our identity.
It's marketing, branding, etc. Personally, I like to think of it as an API.
E.g. if you're a man and you put on a skirt, other men might try to court you. If you identify as a computer geek, luddites are going to ask you to put them back "on the line". If you wear a Black Sabbath t-shirt every day, you're more likely to find other metalheads.
The comment about sports having the same plot over and over again is pretty weird, since one of the hallmarks of nerdery is obsessive rewatching. Soccer games that I watch follow a recognizable pattern, for sure, but they’re not nearly as repetitive as each rewatching I’ve done of Star Wars.
It struck me that hipster and nerd activities differ greatly in gender segregation. Male nerds play Magic: The Gathering while female nerds write fan fiction: they don't interact much, and when they do, it's generally bad. I'm not really up to speed on what hipsters do these days, but I understand it's normal for straight people to meet romantic partners there. Trying that at a nerd activity where the sex ratio is 4:1 is a sick joke.
One nerd activity that seems fairly evenly divided in gender is anime. My college anime club was probably about 50:50 in its gender ratio. Admittedly, the type of anime that people like and certain activities within the fandom can be heavily gender-segregated, but the umbrella of "anime" seems able to bring these groups close enough together to have a common identity and community, at least in certain spaces like anime clubs, and there are also plenty of series that both genders almost universally enjoy (if for different reasons, i.e. liking the action vs enjoying shipping the characters). Online anime communities seem to self-segregate a bit more based on these gender-specific interests (yaoi fangirls vs mecha otaku, maybe), but there still seems to be some common ground of cross-gender socializing.
The joke about the last bit is how many early fujoshi were into robot anime... Early Comiket had a ton of women who liked shipping in the Robot Romance shows, Gundam, and especially Godmars.
As someone in the demo to have snooty tastes/interests, I've always pushed back, thinking it's mostly a pose to signal intelligence, wealth, etc. I don't doubt the proponents really do prefer X (whether it's pour over coffee or derida) to Y (sportsball nsync). But still think it's all about signaling, tribalism, etc. Back in the day, it was easy, if you had more than one set of clothes, or they were clean, or you could speak properly, you were elite, anyone could tell. Now everyone has clothes, speaks roughly the same, etc. So you've got digger to make clear your Bay area or NYC intelligentsia with the right kind of education, politics, etc. And I love the folk who don't get that sportsball is the best value for your entertainment attention span dollar. It's like an NFT, unless you sat there in (quasi) real time and watch playoff Jimmy destroy the bucks, you don't get it (it was phenomenal).
> it doesn't seem mysterious that some people eg like Star Wars, or even love Star Wars. What seems mysterious to me is when this expresses itself as desire to buy thousands of dollars of figurines in the original boxes, or memorize the stats of every class of ship in the Imperial Navy, or something else which doesn't seem very fun on its own merits.
With respect, that's just you not understanding what is and isn't fun.
> Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc
For 70s usage of the word "nerd", we have the theme song to Revenge of the Nerds:
𝘔𝘰𝘮 𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴 𝘶𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 '𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘣𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘪𝘳
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘯 𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘨𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘺-𝘥𝘶𝘵𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘉𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘰𝘯-𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘞𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵-𝘈 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴, 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴' 𝘱𝘦𝘵𝘴
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘦'𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘴
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴, 𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘚𝘰 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢 𝘥𝘰𝘳𝘬, 𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘻 𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘨𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘥, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘏𝘦𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘫𝘰𝘬𝘦'𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶, 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴
This is so explicit that it makes me wonder if the movie's audience might not have been expected to be familiar with the term. We learn a lot about nerds:
1. They are primarily defined by their unpopularity and social awkwardness. Girls hate them.
2. They wear terrible clothes and need glasses. They are unattractive in every other way as well; when they laugh, it sounds stupid instead of infectious. Also, girls hate them.
3. They do well in school and are popular with teachers.
4. They are variously referred to as nerds, dorks, spazzes, and geeks; these are either interchangeable terms or ones that frequently cooccur.
5. As a group, they contrast with "jocks" and "beautiful people".
I have to take issue with some assumptions that Scott would like to make - sci-fi fandom, interest in math, interest in computers, maleness, and poor social skills all do still go together. (Nonconformity with mainstream interests can just be considered an example of poor social skills.) Nothing has happened to the nerd cluster. The typical sci-fi fan is only "closer" to being a socially-adept young woman in the sense that they might be slightly more prevalent now than they once were; there are not enough of them to have shifted the average, median, or mode in a noticeable way. [1] Fantasy really has developed a lot of female fans, but not sci-fi.
Something else that probably plays into this is a redefinition of what can be called "sci-fi". Compare what's happened to "roguelike" games, where the genre still exists and is still called roguelike, but if you search for "roguelike" you find a bunch of games that have nothing in common with Rogue or roguelikes, and people think they should be called "roguelike" too.
So, according to me, the nerd cluster is still around, just as obvious and just as unpopular as ever. "Successor clusters" is the wrong way to think about things; the nerds are still around and haven't divided into new clusters - rather, other clusters have been named according to sharing a single common trait with the nerd cluster, as if nerds made up a significant portion of those other clusters. But that was never true; it's a misperception that occurred when the names were applied. (Compare, again, "roguelikes".)
Use of computers should not be confused with interest in computers or with approval of the people who do things with them. For this I'll call on my memory of a story from Hacker News from someone who developed an anonymous chat platform restricted to his high school, which quickly became very popular -- and who immediately learned, by attempting to join random conversations about his platform, that being responsible for creating and maintaining a tool everyone loved didn't mean he could rise above the level of "actively unpopular".
[1] I'm still sore about Scott making the unsupported assertion in an earlier post that "the rich" isn't generally viewed as a pejorative because its usual usage isn't pejorative. I think this is plainly false; I'll leave a followup comment with citations.
OK, "the rich". Here are all the relevant examples from the first 15 web domains that turn up relevant results in the News on the Web corpus. I append my personal interpretation of how pejorative the usage is on a five-point scale from -2 (strongly pejorative) to 2 (strongly approving). 0 is neutral.
(Notes: a "relevant" result is one in which "the rich" refers to a class of people characterized by money. I'm doing this by domain rather than by result in an attempt to balance two concerns: first, doing a set number of results leaves the search wide open to being dominated by a single source with an agenda, which biases usage. But second, doing one result per source would also give an unrealistic picture of the balance of usage: loud people who constantly complain about "the rich" really do contribute more to the balance of usage of the term "the rich" with their numerous complaints than quiet people who mostly talk about other things do.)
1.A. Technically, we have solved a problem by creating another one. Aviation globally is in the business of freedom. Here, we have made it further elitist, and only for the rich that can afford routine trips. [-1]
2.A. I think that this distribution of wealth would even be worse if [the] wealth of the rich concealed in offshore accounts would be included. [-2]
2.B. The recourse to violence should not and cannot be the only solution. But the rich must accept that the consequence of continuing income inequality will result in violence. [-2]
2.C. The usual solution of the rich is to have economic growth which will then allow the whole population to have a more comfortable life. This is the "trickle-down" philosophy which says that as the rich get richer, their wealth will begin to be shared by the rest of the population. This theory has underestimated the selfishness of the wealthy class. [-2]
2.D. In the Philippines, for example, the children of the rich can afford to send their children to the universities with the highest standards like La Salle, UP and Ateneo. Or even send them to foreign universities. The masses either cannot afford tertiary education or must send their children to colleges and universities with inferior quality. This perpetuates the cycle of poverty. [-1]
3.A. I know of one resident in my estate who owns nine cars. The rich will continue buying more cars and leave them idle at home. Is that the best use of a scarce resource? [-2]
4.A. They have a lots of money. It is unfair when the rich can do whateva their want by breaking law and settling it by paying a summons [-2]
5.A. "A Diamond Is Forever" is a legendary slogan that was coined by a copywriter in the 1940s. It went on to be recognised as a fitting slogan as it connected with the rich and reminded that diamonds are a memorial to love and must be treasured forever. [0]
6.A. "Since the pandemic begun to Nov 2022, billionaires in India have seen their wealth surge by 121%, or INR 3608 crore per day in real terms (Around INR 2.5 crore every minute). The rich have done well for themselves, while the number of hungry Indians has increased from 19 crores to 35 crores," an Oxfam report said. Such a predatory shift in India's economic equity and social justice would not have been possible except with the active participation of civil servants at different levels with their newly acquired 'management' skills. [-2]
6.B. Ergo, although in India the poor are becoming richer, the society is also becoming more unequal, that is, the rich are becoming richer much faster. New World Wealth, a Johannesburg-based company, published a report claiming that India is the second-most unequal country in the world, with millionaires controlling 54% of the wealth. [-2]
7.A. While former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan said demonetisation disrupted India's growth, former Chief Economic Advisor Dr Krishnamurthy Subramanian, while referring to a research paper, said the move had the effect of redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. [0]
7.B. The rich in Pakistan will find ways to convert their cash into gold or USD but they will not declare their true wealth [-2]
8.A. Ethnic and political chauvinism is taking a toll on the lives of ordinary people. The rich amass the lion's share of land and resources, while the poor are silenced with various propaganda slaps. There is oppression and resistance in multiple forms. [-2]
9.A. ...to be incorrect; poor people may pay larger shares of their income than the rich, but it will still be true that the relatively small shares of income paid... [0, article was paywalled]
10.A. To be clear, this work is not about chasing tax avoiders, nor is it about attacking the rich. Wealthy New Zealanders are usually hard-working and creative people who comply with current rules. [-1, the usage explicitly casts "the rich" as targets, while disclaiming that as the speaker's current goal]
10.B. New reports from IRD and the Treasury conclude the obvious: Labour's economic mismanagement has hurt everyday New Zealanders while the rich have got richer, National's Finance spokesperson Nicola Willis says. [-2. Followup: "The Government's decision to embark on a money-printing, borrowing and spending frenzy has led to massive capital gains for some, at the expense of everyday workers"]
9.B. Our tax rules are fair in that the rich do pay tax in New Zealand and in general a person's tax increases as income increases even if income is more widely defined than it is under our income tax legislation [0]
9.C. ...would only go so far towards taxing the rich more (assuming this is the goal). Taxing unrealised gains brings up... [-1, paywalled again]
9.D. ...want to get caught up in tax change they're unequipped to side-step like the rich can. [-2, paywalled]
11.A. Once again I gently suggest that you just buy a house to secure your financial future. No follow-up questions, please. An effective tax rate of 9.5% on annual earnings of $14.6b from just 311 individuals means that any move to bring that effective rate closer to the average earner (32%) would see massive increases in tax revenue each year. As revenue minister David Parker said while presenting the findings, the project was not about "chasing tax avoiders" or "attacking the rich". It's simply a long-overdue step in understanding just how unfair our tax system is. [-1]
12.A. The key findings from that report, prepared by Sapere Research Group, were that the rich pay most of the tax collected in New Zealand. [0]
12.B. Parker said the report was not about chasing tax avoiders or attacking the rich. [-1]
12.C. A poor attempt to demonise the rich. Labour play to a voter base that is blue collar. They will lap-up anything that targets those at the other end of the spectrum. [-1]
-- OK, I'm seeing a lot of news coverage of the same press release about a battle over whether to tax unrealized capital gains in New Zealand. I'm modifying my methods mid-experiment to exclude anything else from New Zealand. --
13.A. This nonsense fills our newspapers. Little wonder. Why would the assorted billionaires who decide what we read each morning want us thinking about taxing the rich so we can fix the mess the Tory Party – which they basically own – made of the country. [-2]
14.A. In some areas, including the rural county where I live, it can take months or even years for homeowners to get a permit to build a garage for their car. But apparently it is permissible for a billionaire to pollute a small city and to cause a number of native species to flee a particularly lovely section of the Rio Grande Valley in search of a quieter and less disruptive new home. F Scott Fitzgerald said that the rich are different from you and me; I suppose it's naive to observe that the rich also seem to have different zoning laws. [-2]
14.B. Every time a SpaceX rocket explodes, I wonder if we should tax the rich more [-1]
15.A. [Biden] then goes on to take aim at his Republican rivals, saying that "around the country MAGA extremists are lining up" to take away personal liberties and cutting social security while lowering taxes for the rich. [-1]
I notice that I have two separate kinds of -1 rating: one for a speaker expressing milder-than-average personal disapproval, and one for a speaker using an expression such as "attack the rich", "tax the rich", or "eat the rich" which, in my view, inherently implies that, in normal idiomatic usage, the rich are bad people who need to get what's coming to them. This second group is informative about usage of the phrase "the rich" while being differently informative about what people think of, or at least what people are currently saying about, rich people.
My sample has 27ish usages from 15 sources. 13 of those are overwhelmingly negative (-2) and 4-5 more are less negative than that, but still negative. 4-5 use a negative idiom targeting the rich. 5 samples are neutral and zero are positive about the rich. Feel free to post your own interpretations.
Thus, the median usage is somewhat disapproving, and comical political caricatures, at 13/27, came very close to being the median usage. The comical caricatures are, by far, the modal usage of the phrase. Two-thirds of usages make it clear that the speaker disapproves of "the rich". "The rich" is, in this sample, NEVER USED in a positive sense, but there are a handful of neutral uses. (In reality, you do see positive uses, almost always cast as explicit defenses against the far more common demonizations.)
I can only conclude that "share of usage in which the term is overtly used as a term of abuse" is irrelevant to whether a term is fit for use in polite company.
The key piece from that song, in my opinion, is that a nerd is not physically attractive. It has very little to do with their interests. And I think that explains a lot about why ugly nerds get offended when attractive people call themselves nerds because they share interests. We can come up with any number of theories about interests or popularity or social status or whatever but when the rubber meets the road, needs are unattractive. Tying your identity to interests is one way to overcome your unattractiveness or find a group of peers where your unattractiveness matters less. If that identity is invaded by attractive people, you will probably not be too happy about it!
Yes definitely
> The key piece from that song, in my opinion, is that a nerd is not physically attractive.
In retrospect, I should have noted that the sixth thing the song teaches us about nerds is that girls hate them.
That said, it's not that they're not physically attractive. They also aren't attractive in other ways.
Yes that’s true. In my mind “physically” was a stand in for a number of different traits other than “bad at socializing”, but of course I didn’t specify that!
Another thought I just had: so much of what defines a nerd or a jock or a popular person, etc is tied up closely to how those terms are defined during adolescence, specifically high school and some what college. Of course these become less relevant later in life. We all probably know of at least a few people who were nerds in high school but are now successful people with a lovely family and an enviable life very different than what they had during adolescence. And also the opposite- the jock that peaked in high school. Actors are often thought of as very “cool” and they are definitely popular, but so many of them were theater nerds! But money and fame can paper over a lot of those warts. It’s possible the rise of the tech industry is doing the same thing for other categories of nerd.
There are *lots* of female science fiction readers. I found this survey: https://www.sfwa.org/2014/01/02/reads-science-fiction/
"For example, Google tells us that among the respondents who read science fiction, fifty-seven percent are male. According to the 2011 U.S. census, the population of internet users is forty-eight percent male, so even after accounting for internet use biases, science fiction readers are ever-so-slightly male. But before we go hog-wild creating male titles, be aware the 2013 U.S. Book Consumer Demographics and Buying Behaviors Annual Review tells us women buy more books and spend more per book. In the end, assume your reader is just as likely to be male as female."
As noted by Ross, and implied by the name of the organization he is representing, "science fiction" is often but not always taken as a shorthand for "science fiction and fantasy". So it's not clear what you are measuring when you ask people whether they read "science fiction".
I believe that when the distinction is made explicit, science fiction winds up with a predominantly male audience and fantasy predominately female, but in neither case overwhelmingly so.
Another point in favour of collecting being well and alive: fashion (especially bags and jewellery). I used to lurk on counterfeit fashion reddit (it got nuked in 2021 or so due to being illegal activity). People have amassed huge collections of counterfeit bags.
They know they're fake. They're not trying to pass them off as real. The majority opinion was that sale of a fake as real was scumbag activity, they appreciate fakes as fakes. But a lot of people described the thrill of the chase and a bit of a gambling element - finding a so-and-so from this collection in a seller's album, clandestinely messaging someone on some message app, scrutinising the article for faults and inaccuracies, the chance that your bag would get seized by customs....
I get the impression that a lot of people could afford a couple of genuine articles, but walking into a store and waving the credit card almost feels too easy after you've bought fakes.
The missing piece for understanding love of sport is tribalism. Sport may be boring for a neutral (at least the 50th game in the season may be) but for a tribalistic fan every moment can feel heightened. It may be analogous to having a truckload of money on the result.
The Argentina fans of the most recent world cup were never bored. Even if the games had been uneventful.
Further, we love _live_ sport. It allows mass synchrony. In fact, it's a superstimulis.
Tribalism and mass synchrony can leave the level of the profane and approach the sacred. Many sporting events have a religious feel to them. It can fill our god-shaped hole. Again, imagine the Argentina fans at the last world cup.
I'd cite traditional evo psych arguments for why tribalism and synchrony appeal to us.
I wrote about this here: https://falliblepieces.substack.com/p/living-for-live-sport
> the other one, of course, is the assumption the the MCU is bad, when it is, in fact one of the human race's greatest artistic achievements
"18 beautiful movies, interconnected into a single tapestry, a surging saga exploring the nature of power and responsibility."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1mbbYKPpHY&ab_channel=CollegeHumor
(This video relates to the post too, not just the comment. Also, it's funny!)
Regarding coin collecting and the possibility of finding rare coins in change, I wonder if someone has compared the drop in popularity in America vs Europe/UK.
If we hypothesize that encountering rare coins in the wild is what mints coin collectors, then I'd speculate that American numismatics would be healthier. Every American coin every minted is still legal tender, and since Americans hate change, every denomination has had the same dimensions for the past 157 years(excepting dollar coins). A quarter minted in 1867 would be counted correctly if you tried to buy a bag of chips in a vending machine today. Thus, despite Gresham's law and generations of collectors, there are still coins in circulation with both intrinsic bullion value and coins are 'historic' and exciting, especially when comparing to the age of the country.
A random anecdote from a google search: this dude has obsessively searched through 320,800 nickels(https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=198187) records that he has a 1.3% rate of interesting coins, and a 1/5000 chance of finding a nickel older than the current Jefferson ones. He has found nickels dating back to the 1800s, and calculates that there still are on the order of a million century plus old nickels not sitting dusty in a collection, but actively circulating.
Or this guy (https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=352071&whichpage=19) who searched through 326,950 pennies on his heroic and noble quest to search through a million, and has found 4 Indian head pennies and 1400 wheat pennies, for about a 1/250 chance of a 'rare' penny. Or this guy (https://www.treasurenet.com/threads/6-month-half-dollars-total-jan-jun-22.673503/) who has found 116 silver half dollars out of 78,000, about 1/700 chance.
Those odds don't seem hobby killing bad by themselves. I'd expect that if I used cash ever, especially on a daily basis, I'd see at least one rare coin in some denomination every month. And even in my very occasional, once a month use of cash, I think I did get a wheat penny as change in past 5 years. I have an uncle who is one of these coin roll hunters and has found some legitimately historic coins, like 3 cent coins from the 1860s and silver coins from the 1890s.
Contrast this to Europe or the UK, where adopting the Euro/decimalization meant that all older coins were taken out of circulation cause they no longer were legal tender and the sizes of coin rolls and vending machines didn't match up. In Europe there is a close to 0% chance of finding a silver coin worth more than face value, a 0% chance of find a coin that could have been spent by Abraham Lincoln(duh, he never went to Europe, insert historical figure from non-USA country here), only modern coins and the commemorative state-quarter equivalents. Maybe there is some other effect where the deep history of Europe muddle this comparison, so looking at Australia, which is a former English colony but has only coins since 1966 in circulation, might prove our hypothesis whether coin collectors are created by encountering rare coins.
There _is_ a new world for nerd that means essentially all of the same stuff as the 1970s meaning, and it is "neckbeard".
Despised and cancelled, just as the nerds were too awkward to know (or often, care) what to say and when; and of obscure taste (whether obscure because bad or obscure because impenetrable).
Neckbeard take: If you hear that word and immediately think, "no, nerds are nice but misunderstood but a neckbeard is actually an awful person because of..."—then consider that maybe in the 1970's you'd've felt the same about nerds.
I still find myself very confused by the idea of "building an identity" and wanting to "identify with things". I don't deny people do it, clearly they do. I just don't get it. I don't have any urge to reduce myself down to some small lossy set of things, and I don't understand why you would or what problem that solves. It's certainly possible I'm just misunderstanding and this is actually something I do, but I don't think so.
Can anyone enlighten me?
Identity in this sense is basically just “which aspects of your self are you passionate about?” When someone asks “what sort of person are you?” what do you answer? What do you like to do and invest your time in that is not just “generic human”? If you had 30 seconds to describe what makes you interesting, what would you point to?
It rarely, except in truly obsessively-to-a-pathological-fault cases, should look like “reducing yourself to a small lossy sense of things”.
I don't know if your questions are meant to be literal or just illustrate a point, but taking them literally:
> When someone asks “what sort of person are you?” what do you answer?
Nobody has ever asked me that question, or similar, and I would find it pretty weird if they did. When I meet people for the first time usually it's either specific questions like "what do you do?", or just open-ended conversation about whatever. Immediately jumping to a question like that and expecting an answer which fully sums up who I am seems weirdly forward, aggressive and impatient.
> What do you like to do and invest your time in that is not just “generic human”?
A bunch of things, but I don't really "identify" with them. They're just one aspect of me. And they change over time.
> If you had 30 seconds to describe what makes you interesting, what would you point to?
I've never considered this before, because what is the situation in which I would need to do that?
it's advertising, but for individuals rather than megacorps. Coca-Cola doesn't want you to understand the minutia of their business operations. They want you to understand "sweetened acid and cute polarbears".
I agree. Like you and others have mentioned, I think lots of people enjoy their hobby per se. Sam's essay has a lot of stuff to untangle.
I think you misunderstood my point about "megacorps", though. I wasn't claiming that geeks' hobbies are induced/hijacked by companies (though they certainly can be). I was claiming it's useful for an individual to build an identity *for the same reasons* that it's useful for a company to build brand.
(person -> identity -> status)
is analogous to
(company -> brand -> profit)
Melting Asphalt had an essay that goes into more depth I think.
https://meltingasphalt.com/the-economics-of-social-status/
Another angle I think lots of people are missing in this comment section: your identity isn't generated by you; it's generated by the community. Since others will inevitably slap some glib label on you, you might as well try to influence that label to your benefit. Most of the time, this simply manifests as things like bathing regularly and wearing cosmetics.
I'm with you, I don't and never have had a consistently favorite movie or book or TV show. Unless I am looking for a specific piece of info, I have never had the slightest urge to look up fandoms or forums or reviews or anything similar about the media I do like. I can handle a few minutes of convo with friends about stuff they've watched recently, but even the things I love and rewatch often, I have zero desire to talk about or read about or be involved in any sense in discussions about them.
I do have a consistent favorite band, the Violent Femmes, but it never occurred to me until just now that there is probably a discussion forum or subreddit or something for their fans. Aside from looking up lyrics and finding tour dates and stuff, I have no idea why anyone would ever seek something like that.
I think the urge to "identify with" stuff is a spectrum, and we are at one end of it. Maybe it's like those no-interior-monologue people.
Edit: Was just trying to think what I would say if someone forced me to identify myself in some way, and I genuinely can't come up with a response in a vacuum so to speak. If a cop demanded it, I'd identify as law-abiding. If a religious or political extremist demanded, I'd identify as whatever got me out of there. If a random demanded it via email so I knew nothing about them, I'd just choose bland markers unlikely to be offensive to anyone. Asking me to identify myself outside of a specific situation seems as unanswerable as what your favorite color of leprechaun piss is.
> I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y.
Here's how a "normal" person does this - takes turns sharing the broad strokes of their lives, and comparing it to the other person's. I might not know your father, but I recognize the broad archetype of "youngest child, moved away after highschool to a bigger city, etc."
Where nerds differ, is that they don't live their own life, they live a proxy life through media or intellectual pursuits. So the broad strokes of their life boils down to "sat in a room and thought about stuff". Even if they *have* done things, the salient features they care about are the proxies.
To me, nerd behaviour speaks to discomfort with the self. It's safer to hide behind polished stories than to be yourself.
Let's understand sports.
Sports aren't all bad, you're just tone deaf to them. It's okay, I am too. Here are two ways to find tone:
- Sports are stories. I learned this from watching the author John Green tape literally hundreds of short videos of himself playing a soccer video game. As he played, he told the story of his team, and once or twice he stopped to explain that this *was* the point of sports: it's a repeating storytelling vehicle, not unlike an ancient epic. The direct equivalent of "it's just men in shirts chasing a ball for four thousand episodes" is "The Silmarillion is boring, Beowulf is boring, there have been one million historical battles and one million fictional battles, and nothing ever changes and there's always some forgettable warrior who ends up king, I do not *care* which warrior it is".
I do not like or care about soccer, but I *very much* liked the epic story of John Green's Wimbledon Wimbly Womblies, captained by John Green and his husband Other John Green, teammates in love and in life. Althought it played out over hundreds of similar episodes, it was a pretty good story. But this is *exactly* the story sports fans are telling themselves.
- Probably most people resonate with *some* of the sports, but unfortunately we are all forcibly exposed to the lowest common denominator in our area. I am an American, and I think football is the MCU of sports: boring, over packaged, over sold. I like a few other sports here and there a bit. My subjective preferences crossed with the dominant local sports means I've not been a sports fan historically.
But I recently tried Formula 1 (culturally dominant in some parts of the world, but unheard of in America until recently, so, thanks, Netflix!) and it resonates with me: it's a crooked, chaotic evil engineering competition, put in the hands of people with the same personality as fighter pilots, who zoom around experiencing 5 G turns for *hours*, often crashing and sometimes even catching fire. I was lucky to have my first experience of the sport *in person*, standing with my face pressed up to the fence next to the track, and the volume and physical *power* of the cars made me take a *big* involuntary step backwards. Apparently that's the normal reaction. Wow! I'm a fan and I expect I'll watch this sport on and off for the rest of my life.
It sounds like I am describing a situation, but actually I am expressing a subjective preference. "It's just dudes sitting in cars going around in a circle" is also a preference.
To resonate with no sports, it is probably necessary to be a properly non-physical person. If you believe your body is just a vehicle for your head, and you'd rather live in a totally non-physical world, maybe no sport resonates. If you have any physicality, there's probably some sport for you in an ideal world. Maybe you really like the feeling of being on a trampoline, and you just have yet to try Circue du Soleil, or you love to work on your contact juggling, and you've never seen people do it competitively.
Perhaps you have an example otherwise, but I think this predisposition is more or less equivalent to "being physical" in the sense that one feels intrinsic joy from some physical activity.
In my experience, almost every (including me) enjoys at least one of the Olympic sports. The variety allows for a greater chance that one of the sports maps to a person's enjoyments.
:-). Do you have an olympic sport of choice? Mine is swimming. I like to do it in real life, I like to try to be fast, so I like (once in a while, maybe only once every four years) to see the fastest people try to be fast.
Oh, that's definitely the best thing. I no longer live next door to a surfing ocean, but when I did, I did it three mornings a week, and always felt calm and happy outside the water.
Rogert Kegan had ideas on what you can (or should) build your identity around - here presented in another Chapman post: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
As far as I can tell, building your identity around a thing is Kegan stage 3? Depending on where you sit on the people-vs-things spectrum, a Stage 3 identity might be more about the thing itself or the "thing community" (the fandom, for example). It might be less traditional than building your identity around your family, or your community, but it still reads to me like a variation on the same theme.
If that's true, then one answer to Ghatanathoah's question what the alternative is to build your identity around is that it's ok and necessary to go through this phase, but to attain full modern adulthood, at some point you have to progress to Stage 4 where you still have interests and relationships, but you're not defined by them.
The hallmarks of the latter (excessive) connection are defensiveness and boundary overreach. If one is insecure about whether *other* people love the thing, or whether other people fully accept one loving the thing, then it's typically part of one's identity.
I've seen Freaks and Geeks. My apologies if you are old, but the first two paragraphs seem like a young person sort of opinion.
I am in the middle, and I have already seen a number of people hold on to externally dependent, unvalidated identities for *decades*. A lot of people are the <X person> even when everyone around them won't see it, won't validate it, won't support it. Sometimes it even curdles into the bitter <unrecognized X person who remains an X person against all the world>.
Two easy examples are people who insist that they are artists, and people who insist that they are attractive.
I am almost totally sure (sure to a rare degree) that some MCU fans and some sports fans identify with those things, identify as such people, because they've told me so in no uncertain terms. Okay, maybe the MCU people were saying they were *comic book* people, not MCU people specifically, but, like, go look at the MCU subreddit for a little too long. There's identity even there, MCU specific identity.
Identity itself is very easy to define: it's anything that fills the sentence "I am <noun>". The type of identity mostly depends on the audience of the statement (innermost self, more outer self, parents, social group, even "don't dare to voice it to myself" closet identities), and the intensity of identity is the intensity of feeling behind the statement.
Which means "feel that our love for a thing is with other people’s perception of us in mind." isn't necessary to have an identity. You don't need to tell *me* you're a Fencer to have an identity as a Fencer. You just need to tell yourself. If you tell yourself fervently, and don't care if i see it, it's a strong personal identity but still a weak social identity, because the message "I am a Fencer" is leaking out into social space and you're not making any effort to hide it.
Finally, the pressures of social conformity are fractal by social context. The true test of an identity is to put someone with dual social contexts into a situation where conformity pressure for one class goes one way and conformity pressure for the other class goes the other way. Black people write about the social difficulties of code switching when their social worlds collide.
I like your graph, but I think this is easier.
I like to be corrected, but I'm not sure you're correct! Also, wall of text is fine, don't worry, you're among friends here! :-)
Keep back what personal details you must, but they're extremely relevant because they allow me and others to model the perspective of the thinker. If you were non-Chinese, or Western born Chinese, or born in China Chinese, and you were talking about social connections, I would make different models of the thing in your head that you're actually trying to share with me. If you were Chinese born Chinese, I would assume that you had stronger default assumptions about the value of people behaving the same way as each other, and that you were expecting me to infer more from gentler statements. If you were Western born Chinese, I would assume you were working out tensions between two worldviews and/or trying to share a perspective gained by growing up in two cultures (what the Japanese would call a "third culture kid"). If you were Western, my default assumption, I'd assume that you put such high value in individuality that you sometimes forget other cultures dislike it by default. If you were also young, I would assume you don't even know that yet, and be more forgiving and gentle if you didn't account for it in your message.
Similar patterns apply to young and old, as well as sociable and not so sociable, as well as a number of finer grained contextual variations of such.
>"""Your definition of identity seems to be referring to a specific aspect of identity: self-concept. As I understand him, it seems like Scott is also just referring to a specific aspect of identity: social identity"""
Actually, I am explicitly saying that "I am <noun>" statements (internal and external) cover *all* flavors of identity. Every identity can be mapped to an "I am <noun>", and every "I am <noun>" can be mapped to at least a weak identity, more likely a strong one. I believe this map simplifies your graph and your messages enormously.
>"""Most straightforward I was trying to conjecture that not everyone is even *existing* in this domain of identity."""
Because I am a western born math and logic person married into a Chinese family, I am very close to several old people who were born as old fashioned rural farmers (I like to joke that they were born in 1850) and ended up as working scientists, and in a few of the cases, I am often startled by how little introspective or self analytical habit they have. Very smart, very analytical for something like medical device repair, but in certain personal contexts, a switch flips back to a hard rule based system they inherited from farmers. Science, science, science, if you don't eat these dumplings before the flight we're all gonna die, science, science, science.
And yet they have identities! Lots of them! Just as strong as mine. They needn't be verbalized in conversation to map very cleanly to "I am <noun>" statements.
Note that my definition of identity didn't require awareness. Awareness may sharpen and reinforce an identity ("I'm a math guy, so I've got to do more math today"). But closet identities and unverbalized identities are still real identities and they still correspond fairly directly to "I am <noun>" statements that are floating around in the minds (maybe the subconscious minds) of the owners.
>"""Your true test example made me realize I think what you and I have described as ‘true test’ may be better described as ‘queries of self’. """
Queries of self are conscious. One needn't be conscious of the struggle between identities for it to be both real and revealing. If you've ever had a closeted gay friend and watched them act two ways at once, you have probably seen a person unconsciously reveal that they have multiple identities in tension.
Good stuff, thanks for continuing to chat about it.
I find your hierarchy of virtuous interests pretty amusing. On one hand, I think I qualify as having a "top-tier" identity. I'm doing research level pure mathematics: my current study is on families of supersingular hyperelliptic curves over algebraically closed fields of characteristic 2, and I think these mathematical objects are really neat. On the other hand, I also think I qualify as having several "lower-tier" identities. I have a bunch of Pokemon plushies lying around in my room and I wear a Time Gear necklace from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky everywhere I go. I'm also obsessed with the children's book series "Wings of Fire" by Tui T. Sutherland: I go to conventions that the author goes to and listen to all her panels, I have a signed copy of my favorite book in the series on my bookshelf and I've gotten the cover of my Kindle Paperwhite signed by her *twice* (I needed to do it a second time because I bought a new Kindle), I'm in Wings of Fire roleplay servers on Discord where I play as various characters that I spent several hours creating, and I've been actively writing Wings of Fire fanfiction for the past five years.
The funny thing is, I would sooner degrade myself for being a math nerd than for being a Wings of Fire nerd. If someone asks me why I like math so much, my answer is usually "I don't know, something's just wrong with my brain I guess." But if someone asks me why I like Wings of Fire so much, I'll give them a straight answer about how deep and interesting each character in the series is. And even though I'm truly fascinated by pure math, I think I'd sooner try connecting with someone over a shared interest in fantasy dragons than a shared interest in algebraic number theory.
Regarding identity levels: I think it's optimal to have one or more traits on each (except perhaps the lower-tier). A person whose only trait is a love of complex mathematical abstraction may be kinda cool, but it would be very difficult to find contact with him.
It’s odd that a man so interested in humanity and human foibles doesn’t seem to understand why sports are good, even when they are bad.
Objectively a 1-0 soccer game is boring to neutrals but subjectively it’s highly entertaining ,if stressful, to the fans involved, particularly if it’s an important game like a World Cup final. Why? Tribalism. Male bonding. Love of country, or city, or even just the team.
Most team sport is about losing more than winning. Even countries generally successful in the soccer world cup can not expect to win most tournaments. Argentina are the WC champions, and one of the most successful teams in the tournament. Prior to their recent win they last won in 1986.
imagine being a life long Argentinian fan watching the last World Cup final. If you are old enough to remember the last win ( as I said in 1986) you may not realistically expect to be around for the next one. If you are a teenager it’s not likely to happen until you are middle aged or perhaps never, either way a win is extremely important and the game - however ugly or boring to outsiders - is going to be an extraordinary tense and exciting match for the fan, quite possibly an experience he may never have again. That’s what makes it extraordinary.
( As it happened the game was objectively good but that doesn’t matter to the actual fans. In fact a boring 1-0 victory is more stressful to the fans all the way through. When you are drawing the other side’s chances are worrying because they can go ahead, at 1 ahead it is still worrying because you might lose your lead. )
In non team sports the amazement is that people can do extraordinary things in gymnastics, athletics, pole vaulting, etc.
And of course, a 1-0 victory can be a thrilling, hard-fought match where both sides showed off amazing skills and it was by the narrowest chance Team A scored, while a 7-0 drubbing can be boring* (or embarrassing, ouch: https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/12090254/aston-villa-7-2-liverpool-dean-smiths-side-demolish-champions) because one side was so evidently superior to the other. Sometimes plucky underdogs do win, but not always.
*Though it depends which team is on the side of the drubbing: sometimes a 7-0 thrashing is high quality entertainment 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBuTEywEQ6U
Heh. A man United fan would point you to the table. Or the FA cup.
it’s one of the problems with games that are high scoring. No real upsets. The little guys in soccer can sneak a goal in a 0-0 game easy enough and then defend like crazy.
Part 5 made me appreciate how rationalist/EAs in general, and Scott in particular, overcorrected on Elephant In The Brain. Not *literally everything* people do is about status, despite what the book says. If you stop and think about it for 5 seconds, it becomes kinda obvious that it can't be true. For one, our brains simply cannot be that perfectly optimized for status-seeking even if it was their only job, since nothing in evolution is ever that perfect. But secondly, in the ancestral adaptation environment (unlike in the present day Bay Area) you just can't afford to single-mindedly focus on status - you would get eaten, or starve, or be killed by an invading tribe, or otherwise will have the reality getting back at you.
I think this overcorrection hurts the community as a whole, and is deteriorating for individual mental well-being (unless you're near the very top of your local social ladder, as Scott I assume is).
The Star Wars game was okay.
Could it be that traditionally (in the hunter-gatherer / village) people know you fairly well including the son of X stuff as well as good at Y bad at Z, so there is a base level of connection (I live in a village). In San Fran etc they don't so you have to try harder for connections with other folk.
I legitimately love the current trend of "X-core" or "X aesthetic". I'm not entirely sure how it fits in with this, but it sure does seem pretty close to the "actually enjoying things and not caring about social status" idea(l).
Yay!
"it doesn’t work for a lot of practical tasks - I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y."
Works like a charm in the sort of small, rural, generational towns I spend my time in.
Scott Alexander commenting about sports is about as useful as me commenting about sewing.
another (belated) response: https://substack.com/profile/14289667-sam-kriss/note/c-15546647
I feel it's important to note whenever people bring up Star Wars in relation to nerd-ness that all 3 of the original trilogy were the highest grossing movies of their year. Main story Star Wars has *always* been mainstream, and what made Star Wars nerds specifically nerds and not just normal fans was getting into the Extended Universe and knowing the specs for multiple different classes of Star Destroyer, or collecting action figures or what have you.
Look at all the nerds debating what a nerd is