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.
I'd also beg to differ on Shakespeare. I wouldn't go as far as Harold Bloom did in crediting Shakespeare with "the invention of the human", but in addition to their unmatched linguistic innovation, Shakespeare's plays are characterized by a probably unprecedented depth of characterization. Yes, the plots have their origins in recycled pop culture, but the characters are explored psychologically in a way that seems to have been completely novel and has largely been unmatched since. The plays also tend to have a highly complex structure to them that ties together the various themes addressed from different perspectives in the various subplots, some of which further deepen the characterization by providing foils and doubles for the main characters in secondary subplots. There's a reason Shakespeare is still more widely performed than any other playwright 400 years later, and it's not just the language, as impressive as that is.
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 guess I’m with the guy up top defending the MCU on artistic grounds. There were about a half dozen of those films that were a lot of fun, around 2912-2017. Yes, the basic plot and characterization got pretty much recycled from one to the next (they’re all more or less stories about adolescent boys coming of age and overcoming their daddy issues), but they really captured the zaniness of the source material and they were funny and fun to look at.
I mean… they’re no Shakespeare. Or even Marlowe (who is great!). But they were a lot of fun to watch, starting around the Joss Whedon period, until the formula started to wear thin (my breaking point was Doctor Strange, I think).
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.
Oh, yeah, sorry, I totally misread your comment. Agreed on all points: Marlowe writes better blood opera than Shakespeare, but all of it (Coriolanus, Tamburlaine, Captain America) is great fun in its own particular mode.
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)
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.
I'd also beg to differ on Shakespeare. I wouldn't go as far as Harold Bloom did in crediting Shakespeare with "the invention of the human", but in addition to their unmatched linguistic innovation, Shakespeare's plays are characterized by a probably unprecedented depth of characterization. Yes, the plots have their origins in recycled pop culture, but the characters are explored psychologically in a way that seems to have been completely novel and has largely been unmatched since. The plays also tend to have a highly complex structure to them that ties together the various themes addressed from different perspectives in the various subplots, some of which further deepen the characterization by providing foils and doubles for the main characters in secondary subplots. There's a reason Shakespeare is still more widely performed than any other playwright 400 years later, and it's not just the language, as impressive as that is.
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 guess I’m with the guy up top defending the MCU on artistic grounds. There were about a half dozen of those films that were a lot of fun, around 2912-2017. Yes, the basic plot and characterization got pretty much recycled from one to the next (they’re all more or less stories about adolescent boys coming of age and overcoming their daddy issues), but they really captured the zaniness of the source material and they were funny and fun to look at.
I mean… they’re no Shakespeare. Or even Marlowe (who is great!). But they were a lot of fun to watch, starting around the Joss Whedon period, until the formula started to wear thin (my breaking point was Doctor Strange, I think).
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.
Oh, yeah, sorry, I totally misread your comment. Agreed on all points: Marlowe writes better blood opera than Shakespeare, but all of it (Coriolanus, Tamburlaine, Captain America) is great fun in its own particular mode.
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 totally agree with you. I probably should have posted my comment in reply to the parent, but I wanted to affirm and expand your point.
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.