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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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 you might be making a category error in regards to the 'quality' thing. MCU absolutely *has* quality. I wouldn't watch it, but defining it as the low end of the quality scale is causing a lot of confusion for you. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnosaur_(film) is closer to the bottom end of the movie quality scale by far than the MCU stuff (potentially touching the "so bad it's good" effect for some people). I've not seen any of the MCU movies and don't really plan to (superhero is not really my genre), but I imagine they have a lot of production value. The plot is probably glib, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily more glib than, say, Jurassic Park, which a lot of people loved and doesn't seem to have much of a backlash (beside the whole "those aren't Velociraptors" style complaints).
Similarly, I *think* you might be making a category error about sci-fi or RPGs being "very popular". You can't really walk up to a random person in the street and have a high chance of them being into either of these things. Sci-fi, as far as I'm aware, is less popular than fantasy, and fantasy is less popular than dramas and thrillers. I would describe it as very niche! There are things that are *even more* niche (e.g. horror I believe is one of those genres, and definitely surrealist fiction), but I'd not put "very" infront of "popular". Yes, there are a lot of people who have seen Star Wars, and for a large amount of them, that'll be all the sci-fi they want. (And arguably it's space fantasy and not sci-fi, but I'll leave the sci-fi definition uncontested here so I don't make my life too easy.)
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)."
That is not a "plot", that is a premise.
Each "episode" (game/match) of whatever sport has its own plot, with dramatic twists galore.
I'm not even a sports fan, but Scott is being unfair.
“Top-tier: Intellectual subfields, especially obscure ones or ones involving pure abstract math. If you can say “I’m really into trans-finite 8-dimensional Hoffdorf groups” and justify this with a discussion of how innately beautiful they are, you’ve got it made.”
As an academic, I know people like this (not all academics are, some fields have this more than others, etc) and I can tell you that this kind of identity construct does *not* age well. At 20, it’s great (there’s a lovely sense of calm that radiates from them); at 30, it’s fine (but starts to seem a little childish); at 40, it seems sad and it is almost always confined to the ex-child prodigy third-tier Hoffdorf theorists.
Notably, and maybe this is my message to ACX readers, the best people at Hoffdorf groups *don’t* do this. The best Hoffdorf people do, actually, have personalities that are load-bearing. This is true even in pure mathematics.
In some fields that require intense and sometimes unpleasant work, being Hoffdorf guy/girl in your 20s can help. Here I’m thinking more of certain parts of the humanities that require reading lots of badly-written secondary sources and getting up on the higher gossip.
But the people who don’t move beyond that lose out in a number of ways:
1. They can’t connect to others, even others in their field. They miss out on the wider experiences, including the intellectual experiences that would make them better at Hoffdorf groups. There’s something deeply incurious about them. Imagine a Shakespeare scholar who would rather know 0.02% more about Two Gentlemen of Verona than read, say, John Donne, or who only cares about John Donne because he illuminates some minor aspect of Shakespearean prosody.
2. Mystical take: intellectual achievement comes in part from a connection to a wide unconscious aspect of one’s experience. But identity construction, by contrast, is a conscious act. Being Haffdorf guy is antithetical to learning more about Haffdorf spaces because Haffdorf spaces are in some way bigger than what you can encompass. Haffdorf spaces go low when you want to go high, as it were.
Reading FdB’s load bearing essay, I feel like he gets it right. In high school I knew people who were really in to math, and others who were really in to being gay. Twenty years later, I’m struck by how, for both groups, it was a useful phase to have gone through. Some of the math types became math profs, some of the gay guys became artists (the gay thing was actually a sensitivity/aesthete thing, turns out some weren’t gay, and there were some gay jocks). Others became b-school profs, or lawyers, or died young of cancer.
But that early identification matured and developed, becoming something that was a small part of their present, that they could draw on, but not define themselves by. It’s useful to remember that phase, because if you’re good you’ll encounter plenty of 20 year olds who are really in it, but even most of them realize that you, yourself, should have probably become a person.
The description of sports as a thousand episodes of a series with the same plot is highly illustrative. I appreciate sports (even moreso chess, go and modern board games) as a realm in which true drama emerges in a relatively natural proportion, as opposed to letting screenwriters artfully pull my marionette strings. The older I get, the more I tire of long serial fiction.
There was a whole lot to read, and not much time to read it. But here is my skimming input.
Nerds meaning has changed over the past few decades. At one time it used to be pretty much synonymous with geek, but over the last few decades it’s become more synonymous with being passionately obsessed over some hobby or subject. And disagreeing with the author... it doesn’t have to be bad.
Now days you can be a car Nerd... though to truly be a nerd you should be very specific... such as being passionate about 1970s mustangs. It also helps if you are passionate about something rather obscure. For instance I am a scooter nerd (Vespas and Lambretta’s) but more specifically I know way to much about German built Vespas from 1955 to 1962.
Obviously there are also nerds into bad stuff, such as Marvel Comics or microbrews (it it was good it would be a major brew), but it’s not a prerequisite.
Also, on behalf of us blue collar workers from flyover country, thank you for shaming Hipsters out of existence... we can finally have out clothing and our beards to ourselves unironically.
I agree that this is the traditional answer, and will note that in traditional communities, it works really well. Drop me into the section of the Plain world I grew up in (which is probably 20,000 people spread over a couple hundred communities), and I will almost certainly find someone to whom I have a "know the same person" connection.
This also works to some extent in smaller professions: I'm an actuary, and if I meet another actuary in my general area of practice, the odds we have worked with some of the same people are incredibly high.
It seems like an important data point that after reading this (very interesting) post, all I can think about is the commenter who claimed that the MCU was one of humanity’s greatest artistic achievements…I feel a tremendous need to explain to them how wrong they are.
As a piece of evidence that there is something kinda interesting/identifiable going on with being a nerd consider the phenomenon of the nerd 'accent.'. Like the gay accent it's far from universal amoung nerds but it's common enough you know it when you hear it.
And, unlike most popular explanations for the gay accent, you can't explain this as an affectation or learned via imitation. When I went to Caltech as a freshman there were tons of people who came in with that 'accent' despite (or more likely because) having been pretty socially isolated and, at that time, lacking any media figures to pattern their speech on.
My hypothesis is that it's largely a result of a certain kind of emotional detachment (eg because your shy/fear being hurt) where you use mastery of facts as a way to converse without having to risk too much emotionally. You then get a kind of lecturing quality but with a sort of hesitance and lack of full throated emotion that ends up kinda nasal. That plus, perhaps, less attention to the social details like the sound of your voice or looks that might prompt another person to alter speech patterns. But that's just a guess.
But my point is that I think there is a psychological natural kind there that isn't just about showing depth of interest.
Also, I'd like to push back on this idea that looking for social reasons people like things somehow isn't taking the idea of liking them seriously.
It's no different than trying to understand the sociology of religion. You don't need to doubt the sincerity or depth of people's religious convictions to notice that the best predictor of what religious beliefs you hold isn't their abstract philosophical plausibility, evidence or usefulness. It's often social factors like what church you grow up in or what beliefs your peer group has that determine what you believe.
The same thing is going on with being into various fandoms. It's not an accident that the people who tend to be into popular stuff tend to be into the same stuff as their peers. Many (most?) people enjoy content more when they can talk about it with peers. OTOH some people seem to be just the opposite and like content less if others in their social circle like it.
There isn't any reason to doubt people like the stuff they like but it's clear that what people like is influenced by social factors and it's interesting to understand how.
I think most things people think of as 'quality' in the status sense meet, or appear to meet, the following criteria:
1) Specialised production (expertise is needed to produce the good; most people couldn't do it and you can't just throw money at it)
2) Specialised consumption (Expertise is needed to consume and enjoy consuming the good to its maximum potential.)
3) A group of high status people already like it (otherwise the thing is weird rather than high quality). I see this as random nucleation rather than something that says much about the thing itself (beyond it being likeable in principle)
Obviously this has a lot to do with affordability, because in a capitalist economy that kind of thing is usually expensive – but cost alone isn't sufficient to count as specialised production/consumption: it's not quality because it's expensive (dear me no), it's quality because it's _aged in hand carved barrels in a single remote village in the Highlands by Jack, our master distiller).
Most attacks and defenses on quality tend to revolve around whether (1) and (2) are truly met. "Sure Marvel is _visually impressive_, but that's just because big studios threw money at it, and I'd rather watch something a bit more refined than 90 minutes or explosions anyway".
Similarly people that are sports _snobs_ are pretty dismissive of rich billionaires buying up players to form teams, and care much more about the performance of specific players, coaching and strategy, etc – things that are perceived as requiring talent to execute and to appreciate.
I did not see this anywhere so thought to share- my parents, who both were teenagers in the 1950's, told me that nerd was actually Drunk spelled backwards, as in a teen boy who doesn't drink and therefore is not in the in-crowd (Ritchie or Potsie on Happy Days, I guess). Square would be another one, but not as mainstream now. Unfortunately my father passed but I think he was the one who told me that. I was never called a nerd to my face as a kid in the 1970's although all the stuff applied to me (except not drinking...). I think when Bill Gates got rich, the tables turned.
"A lot of people’s default personality, if they just do exactly what comes naturally and don’t put any effort into self-presentation or cultivation, is to browse Reddit and play video games. Most people realize this on some level and try to cultivate some personality beyond this, but I think that makes it extra unfair to say “Just use your natural true self!” The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
This struck me as odd. Does this seem true to anyone? I know maybe one or two people who fit this description; everyone else I know likes specific things with a weird, obsessive level of interest, and I'm pretty convinced they would continue to do so if the thing was unpopular. But I could also self select for people like that, so I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts.
This post and the previous one reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about regarding the word “basic”.
These days, I don’t hear it used much — I think I’m actually more likely to hear someone criticizing the concept than actually using it. “The term ‘basic’ is misogynistic! It’s just a way of shaming women for liking feminine things!”
And in the context of “basic b$&*%” or “basic white b%*$&@“ (not sure what the Substack moderation filter is like): yeah, maybe. But I’ve long thought that it should be expanded. That men liking football or Breaking Bad is just as basic as women liking pumpkin spice lattes.
When someone just likes all the TV, movies, music, hobbies, etc. that are most popular in their subculture, which is more likely: that they have tried lots of things and just so happened to only like the ones that are the most socially acceptable to the people around them, or that they just didn’t bother to try anything else and/or dismissed the more unusual stuff out of hand? “Low openness to experience” is one way of putting it, but colloquially, why not say “basic”?
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
I'm a little confused by this "hoax" - the example poem on Wikipedia seems perfectly competent. Like, I don't get very excited about most poems, but there's nothing making me say "ugh, this guy just doesn't understand poetry" or "this poem sounds profound but it's not saying anything." It's free verse, but it's clearly divided up with intention. It has weird imagery, but coherent ones. If you asked me what the poem was about, I would have an answer and a justification. "Great poetry" is subjective, but at the very least, it's not a *bad* poem.
Sure, the authors of the hoax *say* that they just slapped these poems together with no thought or effort, but effort does not correlate with success! I'm a software developer and I often feel that most my code could be slapped together by a monkey with access to Stack Overflow, but apparently that not-very-difficulty-feeling work is worth six figures to the right people.
The wiki article goes on to note that some people liked the poem even knowing that Ern Malley didn't exist!
"I think the traditional answer is that you should build your identity around social relationships (I’m the son of X, husband of Y, friend of Z), career, and maybe a few hobbies."
No, the traditional answer (i.e for most of human history) was that identity was built from family, place (neighborhood/region), language, food, religion, music, custom. Identity was first socially mediated.
Individuality is a separate particular function of identity: a matrix of what/who do I like, one's virtue (a good child, sibling, friend, neighbor, spouse, parent), one's skills (techne), occupation, and one's calling (I am reminded of Arendt treatment of arbeit and beruf).
The universal questions: Who am I and to whom do I belong?
Alienation is not knowing how to the answer these persistent 2 related questions.
Fetishized life collapses identity into individuality and the preference of the individual connected with commodities (to be bought and horded) and increasingly as Debord noted with the commodification of our time in furtherance of fetishized consumption and consumerism.
The fetishized individual then seeks to answer the "to whom do I belong" question by seeking similarly fetishized individuals. Granfallooning. (See also slapstick: Lonesome no more)
The old way of socially created identity first and individuality second was not without its problems. Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan. The levi and the priest with clear social identities walk on by because their "identity" is too narrow to see the neighbor.
But the new way of individuality first can never really work, because it is temporary solution in which the social aspect is just an add on. It is not an organic process that recognizes the essential and proper social first development of identity.
The traditional way is not very helpful to unbridled capitalism and consumerism. Novelty seeking (new products to buy consume and horde) is essential to the individuality first fetishized person aided by affluence -(maybe we should investigate the unintended consequences of child allowances which facilitate the process of fetishized consumerism over social integration).
I think Your experiment in part 1 is actually useful for explaining why a lot of Marvel Fans think that the MCU has gotten a lot worse. I would argue that the first Ant man movie would pass the first experiment. At its core, it's a story about a poor but intelligent man who stole from the rich to feed his family, and ended up imprisoned. His wife moved on and married one of the sheriff's that arrested him. A wise Sage enlists him to steal a magical artifact that the sage created, but is now possessed by an evil wizard who was once his partner. The Hero uses the Sages magic and defeats the evil wizard, bringing him to justice, and rekindling his relationship with his estranged daughter.
The most recent Ant-Man is in category 4. Trying to translate it into a medieval story would result in gibberish, and not have anything relatable to the human condition. I think that's one of the main reasons many fans feel that the MCU has gotten worse
One thing I didn't see mentioned. While "the death of hipsters" might have come to pass, but I think that "death of nerds", or, rather, "death of recommendation algorithms" sounds contrary to everything I see. Algorithms that recommend the same thing to everyone are BAD algorithms. They're bad AI. And what we have right now is the growth in AI. Therefore, I believe that instead of removing algorithms from the loop, we will get better and more personalized algorithms.
I, for one, feel very much in need of one, because I often want to request for example "a song with vocals close to that other song", but it's impossible right now. Algorithms still mostly work in a "if you like blues-rock I'll give you more of blues-rock" - which is still a huge improvement from previous "if you like that one song by a 70's rock band I'll give you other songs by 70's rock bands that sound nothing like it and are actually in a completely different style of rock". If you compare 00's Last.fm recommendations with Spotify's algorithm, it's noticeable.
And modern algorithms can even recommend more obscure bands and tracks - I was pleasantly surprised recently hearing a nice track from a German singer-songwriter that I had never heard about before (admittedly, he's well-known - in Germany, but not in the rest of the world, and I don't live in Germany and only listen to a few German bands that have nothing in common with his music).
Modern algorithms, though, still mostly rely on people, and give you songs that other people who have similar tastes to you listen to - they make no judgement themselves. But with advances in AI, I wonder if it will be soon(-ish) possible for an algorithm to "listen" to the song, and get a feeling for its components, and recommend things to me that sounds like things I love, picking up every little detail from my previous listens (or give me something unexpected, if I ask it to). If so, there will be no death of algorithms, and no death of nerds.
Ah, Star Wars CCG... I got a starter box for Christmas one year, but until I met a friend who actually knew how to play it, it was pretty background to my Star Wars fanaticism.
Once I started playing, though, it became what I spent all of my money on for several years and consumed a great deal of my free time.
I like to think of fiction as being a song, and the audience is the instrument. And not every song sounds good played on every instrument.
Fiction evokes emotions and experiences we've had in our lives. As we encounter different situations through life, different things resonate with us. Stuff that I would have found boring as a younger man makes me cry now. Stuff that I thought was fun and exciting as a kid makes me roll my eyes now. The products haven't changed, I have.
So it shouldn't be weird that some popular stuff leaves you cold. It's not bad, it's just hitting a note that you don't have at the moment. And that's ok.
It would be interesting to do this analysis for politically active people. There are "hipsters" who plumb the ideological depths searching for a new spin on old ideas, and there are "nerds" who consume and replicate the ideas the hipsters deliver.
These are episode of the week procedurals and they’re very popular!
“Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching!”
I think that the mass-marketing of things like the MCU or Star Trek has hollowed them out as nerd items. Part of what made them nerd-fodder is that they dealt with deep subjects, frequently in a low-quality medium due to limited finances.
The work to popularize them involved upping the "production quality" substantially. But it also involved cutting out the deep subjects. The Star Trek television shows frequently dealt with complex subjects about dignity, discrimination, identity and growth. Most of the movies are generic action stuff.
I knew he was a hoax before I read him, but I have to say, I think Ern Malley is pretty good, and occasionally excellent. Take this piece, for example: https://allpoetry.com/Drer:-Innsbruck-1495
I'm not a big sports fan, but for the record every sporting event is just people trying to get a ball in a hole in the way that every historic battle is just dudes trying to walk past each other.
I think it's fair to look at a lot of sports fandom as, not *forming* identity, but as *expressing* identity, and since the reason why this is so is fairly clear with sports, I think it helps understand a lot of other types of fandom.
I actually get the intrinsic appeal of sports. Each game of basketball has the same "plot," but that's only in the sense that each heroic novel has the same plot, or each romantic comedy does— it's the details that matter. Since the details matter, each game has the potential to have a lot of drama, even besides the wonder of watching skilled people do hard things. That said, even fanatics generally admit there are *bad games*, so there are aesthetic criteria being applied even to sports!
But, the intrinsic appeal doesn't explain most sports fandom, the shared experience does. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. Nearly everyone was a University of Kentucky (UK) basketball fan. If UK had an NCAA tournament game during school hours, we stopped school to watch it. Kids and adults both cared about who the players were, how the team was doing, etc. It wasn't just a default topic for conversation, either— caring about the thing alongside other people gives a real sense of commonality. This sense of commonality is why, despite not having lived anywhere near Cincinnati in over a decade, I remain a Cincinnati Bengals fan. It's something I share with friends and family. We can get excited about the same things, get frustrated by the same things, etc. If I couldn't share the experience, I probably wouldn't care. Now that I live in a big metro, I can go to a bar where fans of the Cincinnati Bengals congregate and get an instant sense of community for seventeen or more games a year.
My drive to be a fan of any particular team is pretty low, even if I can enjoy any "good" game of football. Without these social experiences, I wouldn't care about football that much— I'd probably just watch the playoffs, and watch some college games with my dad when I visit back home. I like that I have this connection— not just to family & friends, but also to a region I come from while being a typically transient (for an American of my class).
A lot of MCU fandom probably works like this on a different level. I've had strangers ask me about the latest MCU movie, or want to talk about MCU news (assuming I'd like these things because everyone does), and each time I feel a little bad that I find these movies to be pretty bad and not worth my time. I like having conversations with strangers! I like sharing things with people! And I don't even score highly on agreeableness!
The bigger issues about "identity" is that it's not really a thing. Choosing anything to "base an identity" on is a sure way to wind up miserable, alone, and a prime target for propaganda.
Take the rationalist community for instance. They "community" is based on high ideals of studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues. But the "identity" marker is "being part of the community." Trust me as a dude who spent most of his 20s trying to do this: Absent the community, studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues is just as annoying as being a marvel fan, and just as useless as browsing reddit and playing video games.
Modern culture hates all communities everywhere. It thinks they're lame and annoying and sometimes genuinely dangerous. I don't think this is a conspiracy but I do think various powers that influence culture have strong incentive to keep things this way. If folks must join a community it should be as large as possible with as little member-to-member contact as possible.
This means that people tend to tokenize their identities and their communities: Just wearing Star Wars t-shirts and getting excited about Star Wars online sublimates that need for real community while also ensuring your identity is still mostly about products. Such a person would be happier and healthier if they went to Star Wars conventions and met with other Star Wars people in person and had Star Wars viewing parties, and such. But the more they did that, the less it would be about Star Wars, and the more it would become about the other people in that dude's network.
For a *fantastic* illustration of this, see the Doctor Who Episode "Love and Monsters." A group is formed by people obsessed with searching for the Doctor but ultimately end up basically doing normie things like falling in love and showing off their creative projects. The creative projects are still vaguely Doctor-obsessed but the point is no longer the fetish, it's the other folks involved.
I find the points about MCU being the point where people figured out how to market comic book superhero stories to a mass market interesting. I agree, but also, isn't this what Shakespeare mostly did? His plays were media for the common people of his day and time, many of them retelling old stories. He filled them with fight scenes to keep things exciting. His actors raced through lines to keep the total time way down compared to modern productions of the same plays. (All of this might be wrong, but it's what I was taught in high school).
None of that is a dig against Shakespeare, but it is a dig against glorifying Shakespeare while vilifying the MCU (Note: not personally a fan of either, except I like things written in more archaic language sometimes). I can imagine a world where 300 years from now, literature professors are expounding upon how the MCU combines the styles of mythmaking and epic poetry (large casts of mighty beings beyond our ken, each with many stories about them that the audience already knows), civic religion (Superman is an immigrant, Captain America is a patriot,, etc.), sci-fi/fantasy, and maybe a few others. Maybe Ant-Man is typically experienced as a non-optional day-long interactive holodeck-equivalent story for educating fifth graders on the fundamental nature of quantum physics and its relation to the human-scale world, and maybe historians think the original publication was inspired by the discovery of the laser or fear of falling behind the Russians in technology advancement or something.
The concept of authenticity explains a few of the puzzles here, I think. The original Mona Lisa is higher-status than a copy of it, even if they're undistinguishable to the untrained eye, because the former is authentic. Likewise, the Mabinogion-Ant-Man crossover wouldn't be as authentic as the original Mabinogion, and therefore less interesting. (So it's true that "the “quality” of the Mabinogion comes from something outside the text, like the fact that it’s old".)
Sports are enjoyable because they're not fiction: it's true that no one would watch a sitcom that would be formatted as a sports season, but the difference is that the sitcom wouldn't be authentic. Repetitive though they are, sports come with real stakes and real people playing a real game somewhere in the world.
In general, intellectual or scientific topics are somewhat authentic, because they are closely linked to reality; whereas video games or movie franchises aren't. An interest in an unusual topic is often authentic because no you have to investigate it yourself rather than follow someone else's lead, whereas a "common' topic like culture war politics or the MCU contains a lot of inauthentic ready-made stuff.
As for collecting, it's higher status to collect butterflies (which really exist independently of human actions) than to complete the Pokédex. Stamps are somewhat authentic because they're made for a real purpose, not just for collecting; but baseball cards or NFT profile pictures are intended for collecting and are therefore lower-status, to a first approximation.
Why do we care about authenticity? That is a good question in itself. Maybe it's some sort of culturally evolved defence against people tricking us.
First, I think a fair bit of disagreement on these threads really comes down to whether the MCU is Good or Bad. From the movies I've watched I'm on team "MCU is Bad" but I can't say I've watched them enough to say that definitively about the whole series. But it does seem like an important distinction, if we're going to group Star Wars and the MCU as analogous in this discussion, that the original Star Wars trilogy is pretty universally seen as Good and the MCU is seen by many as Bad.
Second, different reactions people have to levels of engagement in popular things. I.e. how can people claim to be socially oppressed for liking [major media franchise]? I was thinking about this in regards to Zelda. With an upcoming game coming out, three types of Zelda fans I've seen recently:
* casual fans who say "oh I played the original so much! I just saw they're making a new one, I'm gonna waste so much time my spouse is gonna hate me lol"
* people on the internet with really strong opinions on the "Zelda timeline" and encyclopedic knowledge about what all the enemies are called and shit and have played every Zelda game even though you have to own like 10 different Nintendo consoles to do this
* hot chick on Instagram I saw recently with a bunch of tattoos, one of which was a Zelda tattoo
So why is it that average people (group 1) and people with some claim to higher popularity (group 3) both are Zelda fans, but the big time Zelda fans (group 2) are lower popularity?
My hypothesis is that by getting really into it, you are on some level admitting to a ... flatness of personal experience. Where your life is uninteresting enough that the thing that everyone else enjoys in passing and then moves on from, becomes a personality trait for you.
It would be different if getting that into it produced a qualitatively different experience, but for something like consumption of a media franchise people assume that it's not that deep ... you're watching the same movies as them.
As for group 3 ... sex appeal aside, it matters that this girl had a lot of tattoos. Scans differently from someone who only had one tattoo and it was Zelda related. If it's one of many it has a similar effect to a comedian mentioning a life experience many people have but don't normally talk about (don't you hate when you hate to fart but you're on a date and hold it in for hours?), and they get cool points for saying it aloud.
I'm a big film-analysis nerd who loves shit like Citizen Kane and obscure foreign arthouse films. I read and write super pretentious film criticism. I have all the bona-fides of a snob.
I love the MCU, because it's really god damn good. I've seen every single film in theaters. I've had long debates about how Shang Chi uses the Kishotenketsu 4-act structure and simultaneously fits into a standard western 3-act structure, and whether this means it constitutes a new act-structure or proves that acts are subjective.
A common failure of analysis that supports claims like "the MCU is bad" is to collapse "good-bad" to a single axis, when it obviously is made up of many orthogonal axes. We usually trust the listener to know which axis we mean.
"So bad it's good" is a great example. Some movies are so bad you'd rather gouge out your eyes than watch them. But "so bad it's good" movies are generally well-written and have a lot of soul, but the production value is cheap and they don't take themselves seriously or have complicated themes. Even something like "production value" isn't linear, since something like Lawrence of Arabia simultaneously reads as "holy shit the care that went into getting these colors to look right, it cost untold millions" and "wow they really sucked at makeup back in the 60s, this would be unfathomably bad in a modern movie but it's quaint."
“Emotionally, everyone who likes things more prestigious than what I like is a snob who’s faking it, and everyone who likes things less prestigious than what I like is a boor who doesn’t understand true art.”
"I’m not up to date on what goes on in academic literature departments, but Freddie de Boer says they’re increasingly offering “Spiderman Studies” classes in attempts to stay culturally relevant; probably Spiderman professors engage with Spiderman on the same deep level that Shakespeare professors engage with Shakespeare."
Probably for the best. I always thought it was pretty bizarre how we treat analysis of old high status art few people engage with as a normal and reasonable humanities major (fine art, English lit) while analysis of our actual culture is kind of niche.
> People “are constantly meeting strangers and having to communicate their identity to them quickly.”
This is a very strange and foreign concept to me. Why exactly do I have to do this? What is the negative consequence to me if strangers I meet don’t get an instant tutorial on who I am as a person?
I live a life where the way people get to know me is to, ya know, actually get to know me, over time.
"The film's plot chronicles a group of nerds at the fictional Adams College trying to stop the ongoing harassment by the jock fraternity, the Alpha Betas, in addition to the latter's sister sorority, Pi Delta Pi."
This has been a remarkable exchange, and the Krissian 'low quality' bit did less to highlight for me why I have always disliked nerds than the responses to his thesis did.
A ctrl-f on both this and the comments to the original response turn up zero hits for "Berkson", and I believe this is the crucial point. Scott's matrix of quality vs status is a useful step and jogged my memory: 'nerds' are victims of Berkson's paradox because they are people who assume that being attractive, fit, athletic, and socially capable actually and literally are negatively correlated with intelligence. This is not the case, but it is a common illusion which has been reinforced by Hollywood (E.g. Revenge of the Nerds). Note that Hollywood writers/etc were themselves the first victims of this (with resultant expressions going as far back as that awful movie about people with dwarfism before the code imposed more mainstream values on the place). Anyhow, 'nerds' are people who are not particularly (or at least, usefully) intelligent but assume they must be due to their not having other, more socially-rewarded traits. One of the traits they don't have is being able to select things that are high quality/status (that's a 'prestige hierarchy' move) -- note that the people who fell for Ern Malley were the kind of dreadful nerds who run a magazine about garbage non-art.
Producing lower-quality/status things is easier, and at some point saturated the market. This caused people who are not actual nerds in the sense I have outlined above to become interested in them, leading to a confusion where some of the actually usefully intelligent and successful people who comment on this substack falsely think of themselves as nerds and defend the category.
There's nothing 'wrong' with being socially undesirable and also a midwit. It's not anyone's fault. It's not even his fault if he thinks he's smarter than he is because he wears glasses and can't throw a ball. It's not a moral failing. But defending this category as "good" is absurd and morally incoherent.
"But the southwest square could be “writes a wacky Shakespeare fanfiction, Romeo & Juliet II, in blank verse and period-appropriate language”
We already have this! From Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" to the various movies about Shakespeare, and even a sitcom from 2016-2018:
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)"
But that's pretty much what sitcoms *are*! You have a cast of familiar characters who each episode get into wacky hi-jinks and end the episode pretty much as they began, and over the arc of the season even if we learn more about them, they don't really change that much or are affected by what happens. Think of "Friends", it ran for ten seasons and eventually ended up with Ross and Rachel together, as had been heavily hinted at since the first season. Everything changed, yet nothing did.
"Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant (ironically, Sam Kriss is probably the single person alive most qualified to do this)."
We need to stop fooling around, stop looking at funny pictures of cats on the internet or whatever, and put our collective funds together to commission Sam Kriss to produce this Magnum Opus on behalf of humanity.
"The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful."
Am I the only cat who remembers "She" by J.T. LeRoy? I remember European hipsters getting taken in by this, hook line and sinker.
I grew up in a barn, so I read about three pages of "She" before I called bullshit. I managed to finish the book, but only after I decided that I would view it as a sort of a crude form of magical realism and not anything like an actual autobiography. Still, my hipster friends gave me grief, said I was "victim blaming" and even when it came out that J.T. LeRoy didn't actually exist and "She" was a hoax they weren't inclined to forgive.
It ain't just literature, yo. Shortly after the election of Trump, the German magazine "Der Spiegel" published a piece on Fergus Falls, Minnesota, describing the sort of town where people vote for the Orange Buffoon. Needless to say, it came out that, like "She", the piece was entirely fabricated, but because (also like "She") it was fabricated in a way that fully confirmed the prejudices of the readership, it ran and was celebrated for a while.
Re: Ant-Man and the Mabinogion, I was led to understand the problem is that the latest Ant-Man movie is an unholy mess due to several reasons, so that may be an unfair comparison.
As for adaptations of old myths, let me quote from Tumblr:
"Old Welsh lit: Dave punched Steve. This incurred a fine of twelve cattle and a nine-inch rod of silver and is known as one of the Three Mildly Annoying Blows of the Isle of Britain
Old Irish lit: Dave punched Steve so that the top of his skull came out of his chin, and gore flooded the house, and he drove his fists down the street performing his battle-feats so that the corpses were so numerous there was no room for them to fall down. It was like “the fox among the hens” and “the oncoming tide” and “that time Emily had eight drinks when we all know she should stop at six”
Old English lit: Dave, the hard man, the fierce man, the fist-man, gave Steve such a blow the like has not been seen since the feud between the Hylfings and the Wends. Thus it is rightly said that violence only begets more violence, unless of course it is particularly sicknasty. Amen. "
Regarding sports, I will try to explain two reasons to actually watch sports from my own experience (in response to "It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.")
One is that they provide a sense of connection or continuity. While a college student I attended (American aka gridiron) football games with friends, mostly as a social activity. Shortly after I completed my undergraduate studies I moved across the country for grad school. Living far from my old college community, I enjoyed going to a sports bar where the alumni association would gather to watch our alma mater's football games. It was a way to connect with others with whom I had things in common and to feel connected with a community I had been part of during my formative years (and happily, this occurred during a period of significant improvement by the football team, so each season offered the prospect of new heights). Work eventually brought me back to the state in which I had attended college, and since then my interest in watching football has declined somewhat -- I still do, but not as regularly, probably in part because I don't need it for that connection anymore.
The other reason I sometimes watch sporting events is indeed to appreciate the pure athleticism involved. I don't normally watch the local NBA team, but when they make the playoffs I may watch a game or two, since the playoffs pit the best teams against each other, and in an era of load management you are more likely to see the best players on the court during a playoff game than during a regular season game. Similarly, while I certainly don't even attempt to watch most of the Olympics, there are a few sports that I enjoy watching (at least once they have winnowed the field down to the final round or two). These mostly skew towards sports where even a non-expert in the sport can't help but be wowed by the displays of athleticism: gymnastics, various swimming events, freestyle skiing, et cetera, and because it is only once every four years it doesn't feel like a repetitive exercise in watching the same thing over and over.
There are of course other reasons many people watch sports, not all of which I understand. I just wanted to illustrate two that I have experienced to hopefully bring some clarity to the mystery of why some people actually watch sports.
This has me wondering: what are the topics that the social outcasts flock to today? Do they have their own things or are all the kids interested in the same stuff now? I really have no idea or any idea how to find out.
>The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person.
This is probably spoken like a narcissist, or maybe just a naturally interesting person with a lot of interests and personal quirks.
But there is absolutely nothing "boring" about my true self and I don't think I have ever thought so. To the extent I posture or pose, or hide, or construct a false front on top of my true self, it is almost always to hide facets I find undesirable, or to impress someone, or whatever.
It is pretty much never because I think they would find me uninteresting, I am super interesting, too interesting in ways.
I will say, if I ever found anyone currently living who liked Jonson more than Shakespeare, I would be *very* interested to hear them out! (Same deal for Marlowe, although that would be a little more understandable.) Jonson and Marlowe fans are not exactly the outgroup relative to Shakespeare fans! And almost all dislike I hear of Shakespeare is based on difficulty in understanding the language, so it would be very interesting to hear a criticism from someone who wasn't put off by that at all -- Jonson's most famous plays are full of contemporary cultural references that make them IMO even harder for a modern audience than most Shakespeare.
The once-shared-culture top-40 era yielded thousands of songs that many if not most Americans - if specific to their decade, and by "decade" I mean about fifteen or 20 years - could sing some portion of the lyrics of. This is almost like a faint signal from the past, of the role of music pre-recording. To me anyway. But you need not accept that claim to realize that the "work of digging out the obscure" fails on that metric, in the same way that those endless pop songs perhaps fail, many of them, in terms of "quality", to the musically-gifted or musically-purist. But it further fails in that I doubt many of the musical hipsters will one day burst into their own equivalent of "Under the Redwood Tree" which so happened to be the earworm in my head last evening as I was cooking dinner.
Some of the themes touched on here have to do with people being one-dimensional, or presenting themselves as such. "Imagine building your personality around X" has become a staple way to dismiss people online. But no matter how interesting or high-status X is, I really can't understand people who brand themselves around that thing. I've got a lot of hobbies and interests, and I can't imagine wearing a t-shirt or hat or button that says "this one thing is my whole deal" in a general context (if I was specifically doing to a video game convention, I might wear something about a favorite game, or if I am going to a car show I might wear something about a favorite car, but not out in the general public). I kind of want people to get to know me more organically.
I'm not sure how to articulate this, but I think that Ready Player One need to be a part of this conversation. The film pitched itself as a nostalgia-fueled celebration of nerd stuff, but it mostly just mashed-up elements from some of the most financially successful and popular mainstream films of all time. The book pitched itself as an anthem of obscure nerd culture and trivia, but again, it is mostly trivia about those massively successful mainstream movies and games. The author appears to have pursued nerd-dom more as an identity than a true love, since he can only prove his nerd cred by citing endless lists of obscure trivia, but he can't describe his love of the source materials.
> When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.
>Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant
If we lived in a timeline where that was real, then if it was good it would have survived the test of time.
On whether it's "really" about status or genuine liking, the ultimate-proximate distinction seems relevant:
If you say it's about status... You could be saying that they don't actually care that much about the thing in itself; they are just pretending to like it in order to achieve some other goal, like status. Like a politician saying what he knows the people want to hear, even though knowing he doesn't actually believe it himself. Possible, but it seems unlikely.
OTOH, they could genuinely like it, and the reason they like it is because it's status-enhancing. It would not at all be surprising if if we were psychologically wired in such a way that we enjoy things that are status enhancing. People seek out sexual opportunities because they genuinely enjoy sex, and people genuinely enjoy sex because throughout evolutionary history, sex led to the conception of children. That doesn't mean people who try to get laid have the ulterior motive of conceiving children, and don't really like sex.
Whether or not status-seeking is the best explanation for the behavior in question is another thing. It may or may not be. But these kinds of explanations for why people do things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Not to rehash others’ comments, but I think you’re deeply wrong about sports in a way that is emblematic of the problem with the entire post. Sports are an incredibly thrilling art form to those who enjoy them, have a rich and ancient history, etc.
My guess is some people derive deep meaning/transcendent joy from MCU movies or watching porn or playing video games, but not many; most just slip into that because it’s easy. Most of those people would experience something they would judge to be superior if they did a harder but more rewarding activity—reading a great book, making great art, gazing at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Any objective analysis of art is silly—the MCU isn’t worse than Tolkien for everyone, and just because you hate Marvel movies and sports doesn’t make them worse than any other leisure hobby. The argument for things being “bad” to base your personality around can only be made with reference to counterfactuals you might find more meaningful.
Sports are bad, because the same things happen over and over every game??? That's a fundamental misunderstanding of sports and why people like them. Also, why is "the same thing happens every time" a knock against sports and not popular "nerd" things like Star Wars/LotR/MCU? They aren't really a shining example of originalness. But anyways I have 4 points of why people like sports:
1. Watching pro sports is a shared experience among everybody in the community - it's no coincidence that US teams represent universities or major US cities. You can feel like you have something in common with your neighbor and common happiness or pain to talk about.
2. If you play a sport, then you'll probably want to watch that sport too, because you can understand what the players are going through physically and mentally, be amazed at how good they are, and try to learn some new techniques.
3. Sports are a great way to get your kids to exercise more, learn to socialize with other kids, learn teamwork, etc. I would argue that no other hobby for kids accomplishes this.
4. Sports are an equal opportunity hobby/sports are very cheap and accessible to play (and watch). Yes football requires lots of equipment and organization... but anyone can buy a soccer ball or basketball and start playing at a public park right away. Other "nerd" entertainment like books, movies, board games, or video games cost more money.
For me, the act of collecting has always required the concept of repurposing or recontextualizing something. I’m a comic book collector, and fanatic enough about it to have spent decades working at a comic book store (that’s where you find your wheat pennies! work retail!), and I like collecting old comics in part because I know they were meant to be disposable—keeping them is in some way subverting their destiny.
Customers would come into the store saying, e.g. “I collect Bowen busts” (little statues of superheroes that used to come out roughly monthly) and I’d be annoyed. I didn’t say it, but what I was thinking was: “You’re not a collector; you just have an implicit contract with Bowen in which they put out a product and your purchase it.” This would go the same for “collectors” of Wolverine appearances or 1 in 100 variants. What’s the point of collecting something with the words “collector’s item” right on it?
I imagine the same thing would apply to coin collecting—getting coins from the mint, slabbed and labeled “for collectors” is no different from buying a box of cereal, while an old buffalo nickle was never intended to leave circulation. I guess you could say that its existence preceded its essence, if you were a existentialist.
Of course, you can also just collect comics because you want to read old series that have not been reprinted, such as Around the Block with Dunc and Lou or Arak Son of Thunder…
"When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me."
Does *playing* sports also seem bad by our usual standards of entertainment? Kids will kick a ball between goals every day without getting bored of it--it seems like that's a more established standard than sitcoms. I play ranked matches in SSBU and I watch pro matches on YouTube sometimes. My own skills and the skills of the pros I watch are continually changing, in addition to the metagame evolving. It doesn't feel repetitive.
> Admit that it would be indistinguishable from other myths, but say that the quality of the Mabinogion is in the style, language, and pacing, not the plot (but most English-speakers enjoy the Mabinogion in translation or summary; does that detract from this claim?)
I think a lot of what makes a story high-quality is in the details. Can the reader/listener/watcher empathize with the characters? Can they understand what's going on? Do the characters behave with some amount of consistency? Does the tone match the plot? Part of what MCU movies get criticism for is factors like these; if you translated the story, but managed to fix those problems, it would probably be considered good, but it's unclear to me how closely it would match the Marvel version.
But, I do think being old and being limited to text or even verbal recitation also is an advantage, because you get credit for creativity for being the first, and you get to avoid criticism like "it's just empty spectacle and bright lights" or "this is just trying to sell me toys." (On the other hand, maybe cynics of the past would say that their myths just exist to prop up the latest warlord who calls himself king, so it's entirely down a shift in perspective and context rather than anything about the story).
I guess the question I would ask is, "*why* are the classics considered the classics?" Is it just that they're just the oldest stories we still have from each culture? Or is there some other reason they survived, that they're actually the best stories from each civilization, and the worst ones were forgotten or we just don't talk about them? For really ancient cultures the former might be the case, but there's plenty of books from e.g. the 1800s that nobody remembers while there's a handful of very famous ones. Ant-Man might just be more like the forgotten morass than A Tale of Two Cities--comparing a 99.9% story to a 75% one doesn't make much sense in the first place.
If sports were pre-scripted to have funny/interesting things happen in them, like a sitcom, they would become much more varied and rich and colourful - ie "good", the way Scott defines "good by the standards of entertainment", here - and not even the most die-hard sports fan would like them. Moreover, I would't imagine they'd appeal to Scott any more for all their added variety and intrigue. I don't think sports are enjoyed for the same reasons as most other forms of entertainment, and can't be measured along the same axes.
....yes, that also goes for reference-class tennis....
[Tried to expand on this below, but I think it sort-of came out more like a love letter to sports-in-general than anything else. Please skip the rest if you don't care why somebody might enjoy sport!]
One one level I think sports can be enjoyed as pure physical spectacle, like a ballet or a Saturn V launch; things that're impossibly far beyond anything you could do yourself and you can't help being impressed/mesmerised by the spectacle.
On another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of chess match, except with eg. lean figures in crash helmets with reaction times like houseflies on amphetamines, big angry-looking muscley men in tights, etc. etc. instead of little black and white figures. On this level it's not about driving the racing car or chasing the ball, it's about how the respective chess players - the race director in a Grand Prix, the hive mind formed from the brain pathways established in countless training sessions - place and move their (loud, brightly-coloured, expensive) pieces, and how their strategies unfold. Beneath the physical spectacle there are multiple striations of chess-like matches, from the speed-chess of a single match (or even a series of manoeuvres within a match) to the drawn-out psychological warfare of a ranked competitive season.
On yet another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of improvisation performance, on a spectrum somewhere between improv. comedy (heavily improvised but largely collaborative) and a tabletop role-playing game (only partially improvised but more adversarial). It's not that a certain thing was said or done so much as that it was said and done "right then!".
I think these factors can trade-off against one another depending on the sport and the observer:
A semiprofessional watching their own club might not derive all that much from the physical spectacle after a decade competing in the sport themself, but they might be much more appreciative of any tactical nuance or grand strategy going on in the underlying chess match.
..whereas a ten-year-old boy seeing their first match might not be able to recognise the feints and bluffs and gambits, but they might have a much stronger sense of "bloody hell, those guys are HUGE! And they're all dressed exactly the same! And look at them RUN!"
..whereas the Bouldering World Cup might have all the strategic depth of a game of Snap but there are some breathtaking feats of improvisation performed by competitors trying to solve a 3.5D geometry problem, on-the-fly, with their bodies.
Probably already said by someone else: sports are substitute warfare. In a war, you and some other guys put on uniforms and then go try and beat crap out of some other guys in uniforms from a different town. Amazing how America's most popular sport, football, recreates this dynamic, right? No, no it's not, actually. So I guess there are two ways to look at your aversion to competitive sports, Scott. On the one hand, it probably speaks well for you that you apparently don't have this archaic mental architecture that gets excited by the prospect of defeating/dominating/humiliating other tribes that many of us do. On the other hand, what kind of weirdo doesn't enjoy that prospect at least a little bit?
> Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth ... I can think of a few possible ways to treat this experiment:
This thought experiment just seems very straightforward to me: the answer is Scott's #3. If you genuinely did a good job of this, your product would be a genuinely different work, whose quality could potentially be much higher than that of Ant-Man.
We see something analogous with film adaptations of novels. They are different works, whose quality can be very different from the source material. It is common for a great novel to have a shitty film adaptation. Occasionally, a shitty novel has a great film adaptation (e.g., The Godfather). But either way, there is no paradox.
Hence, Scott is describing as puzzling something that should not be at all puzzling.
> The Ern Malley hoax ... makes me even more doubtful.
This is another pseudo-paradox. The whole point of the Ern Malley hoax was that the thing purported to be high-quality (the poetry of Angry Penguins) was not in fact high-quality. In other words, it wasn't simply the Ern Malley poems that were fake, it was the originals being parodied that were also fake, and the purpose of the hoax was precisely to demonstrate that.
I "like" and "enjoy" some things I don't think are "good," which I've long realized doesn't quite make sense.
But to take video games as an example: I've spent quite a bit of time on Cat Cafe, a phone game about cute cats running a cafe. I clearly "like" it. I also "like" Outer Wilds, an indie game whose ending made me weep with sorrowful joy. I enjoy both games, but only one is good.
Outer Wilds is good, and not just enjoyable, because it makes me feel deeper and more complex feelings, because it does what it does in a more interesting way (I could write an essay about it), because it requires more investment (you get better at playing it over time)...
What I was trying to get at with my comment (listing popular 70s-00s superhero movies) was not to quibble about the date that nerdy things became popular, it was to say that superhero movies have never been nerdy.
Nerdiness is more about how you engage with the subject matter than the subject matter itself, and watching a two-hour superhero or sci-fi movie once in a while is the sort of low-commitment engagement that's normal and socially acceptable.
Watching a Batman movie is normal, reading a Batman comic is weird. Watching a Star Wars movie is normal, reading the novelisation of a Star Wars movie is weird. Reading fantasy novels is weird, but watching a TV show based on a fantasy novel is fine (and if the TV show is popular enough it might even make reading the novels normal too, for a while).
Why? Because reading is low-status? No, because deep involvement with shallow material is low status, and reading a book about something shallow is a deeper level of involvement than just seeing the movie.
That's why I have a problem with the MCU movies being one of the central examples of nerdy stuff in the essay -- they're really not that nerdy, which is why they're popular. Superhero material isn't intrinsically nerdy, it's just sufficiently shallow that historically most forms of engagement with the material (ie reading comic books or collecting figurines) have been nerdy.
"A nerd is a geek who would rather be right than get laid." There are fanatics who like their special interest even in a vacuum – call them "geeks." And there is another type of fanatic who uses his interest as a tool of aggression – call him a "nerd" – as in: given the slightest pretext (or, often, apropos of nothing) the nerd will gloat over his superior knowledge of his special interest, apparently deriving more satisfaction from feeling smarter than what he loses by alienating people in the process.
Hmm. I find all of these categories incomprehensible and not corresponding to any social world I know. Perhaps I'm too old. It just seems like video games and comic books -- things which in my time were associated entirely with childhood -- are now things that many adults like. It makes me feel like there are no adults anymore, but I'm pretty sure it just means I'm old.
The problem is that you are conflating production quality and social status in the term “quality” sometimes we just have genre preferences... but often this is heavily intwined with social preferences
If you want to find original nerds in the wild, go to a hamfest. I think that might one of the few places where original style 70s nerds still exists and haven't been polluted with the current pop-culture version of nerd.
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
C. S. Lewis had some thoughts related to this, in his essay "Lilies that Fester." The essay was actually taking it from the other end: at the time Lewis was responding, in part, to a society where the fashion was that "high culture" is snobbish and pretentious. But he does spend some time trying to describe what "culture" is, and what it isn't, and compares it directly to enjoying lower forms of art like "Fantasy and Science Fiction" (and he should know, he wrote books in both of those genres).
>"The talk is inimical to the thing talked of, likely to spoil it where it exists
and to prevent its birth where it is unborn.
"Now culture seems to belong to the same class of dangerous and embarrassing words. Whatever else it may mean, it certainly covers deep and genuine enjoyment of literature and the other arts. (By using the word enjoyment 1 do not mean to beg the vexed question about the role of pleasure in our experience of the arts. I mean frui, not delectari; as we speak of a man "enjoying" good health or an estate.) Now if I am certain of anything in the world, I am certain that while a man is, in this sense, enjoying Don Giovanni or the Oresteia he is not caring one farthing about culture. Culture? the irrelevance of it! For just as to be fat or clever means to be fatter or cleverer than most, so to be cultured must mean to be more so than most, and thus the very word carries the mind at once to comparisons, and groupings, and life in society. And what has all that to do with the horns that blow as the statue enters, or Clytaemnestra crying, "Now you have named me aright'? In Howard's End Mr. E. M. Forster excellently describes a girl listening to a symphony. She is not thinking about culture: nor about "Music"; nor even about "this music." She sees the whole world through the music. Culture, like religion, is a name given from outside to activities which are not themselves interested in culture at all, and would be ruined the moment they were."
...
"Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a grocer's. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, "That was a nice cup o' tea, dearie, that was. Did me good." Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
"'The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.'
"I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion; perhaps, even, the wild dog to the over-tame poodle or Peke. "
If you take someone who likes video games in genre X and force them to review a video game in disliked genre Y, their review is likely to include the criticism that the game in genre Y is "repetitive". In most cases, I think an objective analysis would conclude that genres X and Y are approximately equally repetitive, and I think what's actually going on is that people who are enjoying themselves don't notice (or don't mind) repetition as much.
Complaints that some movies are "pulling your strings" sound a bit similar to me. I bet there's a strong tendency to perceive unsuccessful attempts to engage you as "string-pulling" but successful attempts as "providing actual value" (quality).
I don't want to go too far on this point, because I also think that humans have exploitable bugs that you can use to get them to pay more attention to a thing without actually providing more value/enjoyment/etc, and I think "string-pulling" is a pretty valid criticism of media that does this. (In fact, I wish our culture criticized this more!)
Some things I would consider examples of this: games with daily login rewards; books or TV shows that go out of their way to end every episode/chapter on a cliffhanger; intriguing clues that don't actually point to anything.
Does someone want to argue that the MCU has an unusually-high concentration of "string-pulling" in THAT sense? My first impression is that it doesn't, but I'd be interested to hear arguments that it does.
I hung out on the Internet in 1997 when USENET was still a thing and played console RPGs before Final Fantasy 7 made them mainstream. God, I sound like such a hipster...
"The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
What is Scott looking for when he goes to a party and talks with new people? (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party) It seems the driving factor is for something "interesting", which is how he judges his own success at being received. I think that's defined differently depending on what your background is in all the ways Scott complains about some things as 'boring' that others shell out lots of money to be entertained by. It's not that those people are paying money to be bored. It's that Scott's definition of 'interesting' diverges from theirs.
For those who have a difficult time understanding how other people can enjoy sports (while still acknowledging that, somehow, those folks do enjoy sports ...) I would like to suggest spending some time on the YouTube channel "SEC Shorts." This mostly works if one understands football at least a little bit. It works better if one also has some sense for SEC rivalries, but this is not necessary. Being an SEC football fan is *totally* unnecessary.
And the channel is a bunch of short (~5 minutes) FUNNY videos that cover each week of a given SEC season. The videos are comedy gold, but for understanding how folks might care about their local sports-ball team I recommend also reading the comments.
Why do you need to "build an identity" at all? What even is an "identity"? Baffled by the underlying concepts here. I literally don't understand what "building an identity" means, it's just a blur of static. Somebody please explain this to me from first principles.
The comment about sports having the same plot over and over again is pretty weird, since one of the hallmarks of nerdery is obsessive rewatching. Soccer games that I watch follow a recognizable pattern, for sure, but they’re not nearly as repetitive as each rewatching I’ve done of Star Wars.
It struck me that hipster and nerd activities differ greatly in gender segregation. Male nerds play Magic: The Gathering while female nerds write fan fiction: they don't interact much, and when they do, it's generally bad. I'm not really up to speed on what hipsters do these days, but I understand it's normal for straight people to meet romantic partners there. Trying that at a nerd activity where the sex ratio is 4:1 is a sick joke.
As someone in the demo to have snooty tastes/interests, I've always pushed back, thinking it's mostly a pose to signal intelligence, wealth, etc. I don't doubt the proponents really do prefer X (whether it's pour over coffee or derida) to Y (sportsball nsync). But still think it's all about signaling, tribalism, etc. Back in the day, it was easy, if you had more than one set of clothes, or they were clean, or you could speak properly, you were elite, anyone could tell. Now everyone has clothes, speaks roughly the same, etc. So you've got digger to make clear your Bay area or NYC intelligentsia with the right kind of education, politics, etc. And I love the folk who don't get that sportsball is the best value for your entertainment attention span dollar. It's like an NFT, unless you sat there in (quasi) real time and watch playoff Jimmy destroy the bucks, you don't get it (it was phenomenal).
> it doesn't seem mysterious that some people eg like Star Wars, or even love Star Wars. What seems mysterious to me is when this expresses itself as desire to buy thousands of dollars of figurines in the original boxes, or memorize the stats of every class of ship in the Imperial Navy, or something else which doesn't seem very fun on its own merits.
With respect, that's just you not understanding what is and isn't fun.
> Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc
For 70s usage of the word "nerd", we have the theme song to Revenge of the Nerds:
𝘔𝘰𝘮 𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴 𝘶𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 '𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘣𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘪𝘳
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘯 𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘨𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘺-𝘥𝘶𝘵𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘉𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘰𝘯-𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘞𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵-𝘈 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴, 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴' 𝘱𝘦𝘵𝘴
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘦'𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘴
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴, 𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘚𝘰 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢 𝘥𝘰𝘳𝘬, 𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘻 𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘨𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘥, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘏𝘦𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘫𝘰𝘬𝘦'𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶, 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴
This is so explicit that it makes me wonder if the movie's audience might not have been expected to be familiar with the term. We learn a lot about nerds:
1. They are primarily defined by their unpopularity and social awkwardness. Girls hate them.
2. They wear terrible clothes and need glasses. They are unattractive in every other way as well; when they laugh, it sounds stupid instead of infectious. Also, girls hate them.
3. They do well in school and are popular with teachers.
4. They are variously referred to as nerds, dorks, spazzes, and geeks; these are either interchangeable terms or ones that frequently cooccur.
5. As a group, they contrast with "jocks" and "beautiful people".
I have to take issue with some assumptions that Scott would like to make - sci-fi fandom, interest in math, interest in computers, maleness, and poor social skills all do still go together. (Nonconformity with mainstream interests can just be considered an example of poor social skills.) Nothing has happened to the nerd cluster. The typical sci-fi fan is only "closer" to being a socially-adept young woman in the sense that they might be slightly more prevalent now than they once were; there are not enough of them to have shifted the average, median, or mode in a noticeable way. [1] Fantasy really has developed a lot of female fans, but not sci-fi.
Something else that probably plays into this is a redefinition of what can be called "sci-fi". Compare what's happened to "roguelike" games, where the genre still exists and is still called roguelike, but if you search for "roguelike" you find a bunch of games that have nothing in common with Rogue or roguelikes, and people think they should be called "roguelike" too.
So, according to me, the nerd cluster is still around, just as obvious and just as unpopular as ever. "Successor clusters" is the wrong way to think about things; the nerds are still around and haven't divided into new clusters - rather, other clusters have been named according to sharing a single common trait with the nerd cluster, as if nerds made up a significant portion of those other clusters. But that was never true; it's a misperception that occurred when the names were applied. (Compare, again, "roguelikes".)
Use of computers should not be confused with interest in computers or with approval of the people who do things with them. For this I'll call on my memory of a story from Hacker News from someone who developed an anonymous chat platform restricted to his high school, which quickly became very popular -- and who immediately learned, by attempting to join random conversations about his platform, that being responsible for creating and maintaining a tool everyone loved didn't mean he could rise above the level of "actively unpopular".
[1] I'm still sore about Scott making the unsupported assertion in an earlier post that "the rich" isn't generally viewed as a pejorative because its usual usage isn't pejorative. I think this is plainly false; I'll leave a followup comment with citations.
Another point in favour of collecting being well and alive: fashion (especially bags and jewellery). I used to lurk on counterfeit fashion reddit (it got nuked in 2021 or so due to being illegal activity). People have amassed huge collections of counterfeit bags.
They know they're fake. They're not trying to pass them off as real. The majority opinion was that sale of a fake as real was scumbag activity, they appreciate fakes as fakes. But a lot of people described the thrill of the chase and a bit of a gambling element - finding a so-and-so from this collection in a seller's album, clandestinely messaging someone on some message app, scrutinising the article for faults and inaccuracies, the chance that your bag would get seized by customs....
I get the impression that a lot of people could afford a couple of genuine articles, but walking into a store and waving the credit card almost feels too easy after you've bought fakes.
The missing piece for understanding love of sport is tribalism. Sport may be boring for a neutral (at least the 50th game in the season may be) but for a tribalistic fan every moment can feel heightened. It may be analogous to having a truckload of money on the result.
The Argentina fans of the most recent world cup were never bored. Even if the games had been uneventful.
Further, we love _live_ sport. It allows mass synchrony. In fact, it's a superstimulis.
Tribalism and mass synchrony can leave the level of the profane and approach the sacred. Many sporting events have a religious feel to them. It can fill our god-shaped hole. Again, imagine the Argentina fans at the last world cup.
I'd cite traditional evo psych arguments for why tribalism and synchrony appeal to us.
Regarding coin collecting and the possibility of finding rare coins in change, I wonder if someone has compared the drop in popularity in America vs Europe/UK.
If we hypothesize that encountering rare coins in the wild is what mints coin collectors, then I'd speculate that American numismatics would be healthier. Every American coin every minted is still legal tender, and since Americans hate change, every denomination has had the same dimensions for the past 157 years(excepting dollar coins). A quarter minted in 1867 would be counted correctly if you tried to buy a bag of chips in a vending machine today. Thus, despite Gresham's law and generations of collectors, there are still coins in circulation with both intrinsic bullion value and coins are 'historic' and exciting, especially when comparing to the age of the country.
A random anecdote from a google search: this dude has obsessively searched through 320,800 nickels(https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=198187) records that he has a 1.3% rate of interesting coins, and a 1/5000 chance of finding a nickel older than the current Jefferson ones. He has found nickels dating back to the 1800s, and calculates that there still are on the order of a million century plus old nickels not sitting dusty in a collection, but actively circulating.
Those odds don't seem hobby killing bad by themselves. I'd expect that if I used cash ever, especially on a daily basis, I'd see at least one rare coin in some denomination every month. And even in my very occasional, once a month use of cash, I think I did get a wheat penny as change in past 5 years. I have an uncle who is one of these coin roll hunters and has found some legitimately historic coins, like 3 cent coins from the 1860s and silver coins from the 1890s.
Contrast this to Europe or the UK, where adopting the Euro/decimalization meant that all older coins were taken out of circulation cause they no longer were legal tender and the sizes of coin rolls and vending machines didn't match up. In Europe there is a close to 0% chance of finding a silver coin worth more than face value, a 0% chance of find a coin that could have been spent by Abraham Lincoln(duh, he never went to Europe, insert historical figure from non-USA country here), only modern coins and the commemorative state-quarter equivalents. Maybe there is some other effect where the deep history of Europe muddle this comparison, so looking at Australia, which is a former English colony but has only coins since 1966 in circulation, might prove our hypothesis whether coin collectors are created by encountering rare coins.
There _is_ a new world for nerd that means essentially all of the same stuff as the 1970s meaning, and it is "neckbeard".
Despised and cancelled, just as the nerds were too awkward to know (or often, care) what to say and when; and of obscure taste (whether obscure because bad or obscure because impenetrable).
Neckbeard take: If you hear that word and immediately think, "no, nerds are nice but misunderstood but a neckbeard is actually an awful person because of..."—then consider that maybe in the 1970's you'd've felt the same about nerds.
I still find myself very confused by the idea of "building an identity" and wanting to "identify with things". I don't deny people do it, clearly they do. I just don't get it. I don't have any urge to reduce myself down to some small lossy set of things, and I don't understand why you would or what problem that solves. It's certainly possible I'm just misunderstanding and this is actually something I do, but I don't think so.
> I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y.
Here's how a "normal" person does this - takes turns sharing the broad strokes of their lives, and comparing it to the other person's. I might not know your father, but I recognize the broad archetype of "youngest child, moved away after highschool to a bigger city, etc."
Where nerds differ, is that they don't live their own life, they live a proxy life through media or intellectual pursuits. So the broad strokes of their life boils down to "sat in a room and thought about stuff". Even if they *have* done things, the salient features they care about are the proxies.
To me, nerd behaviour speaks to discomfort with the self. It's safer to hide behind polished stories than to be yourself.
Sports aren't all bad, you're just tone deaf to them. It's okay, I am too. Here are two ways to find tone:
- Sports are stories. I learned this from watching the author John Green tape literally hundreds of short videos of himself playing a soccer video game. As he played, he told the story of his team, and once or twice he stopped to explain that this *was* the point of sports: it's a repeating storytelling vehicle, not unlike an ancient epic. The direct equivalent of "it's just men in shirts chasing a ball for four thousand episodes" is "The Silmarillion is boring, Beowulf is boring, there have been one million historical battles and one million fictional battles, and nothing ever changes and there's always some forgettable warrior who ends up king, I do not *care* which warrior it is".
I do not like or care about soccer, but I *very much* liked the epic story of John Green's Wimbledon Wimbly Womblies, captained by John Green and his husband Other John Green, teammates in love and in life. Althought it played out over hundreds of similar episodes, it was a pretty good story. But this is *exactly* the story sports fans are telling themselves.
- Probably most people resonate with *some* of the sports, but unfortunately we are all forcibly exposed to the lowest common denominator in our area. I am an American, and I think football is the MCU of sports: boring, over packaged, over sold. I like a few other sports here and there a bit. My subjective preferences crossed with the dominant local sports means I've not been a sports fan historically.
But I recently tried Formula 1 (culturally dominant in some parts of the world, but unheard of in America until recently, so, thanks, Netflix!) and it resonates with me: it's a crooked, chaotic evil engineering competition, put in the hands of people with the same personality as fighter pilots, who zoom around experiencing 5 G turns for *hours*, often crashing and sometimes even catching fire. I was lucky to have my first experience of the sport *in person*, standing with my face pressed up to the fence next to the track, and the volume and physical *power* of the cars made me take a *big* involuntary step backwards. Apparently that's the normal reaction. Wow! I'm a fan and I expect I'll watch this sport on and off for the rest of my life.
It sounds like I am describing a situation, but actually I am expressing a subjective preference. "It's just dudes sitting in cars going around in a circle" is also a preference.
To resonate with no sports, it is probably necessary to be a properly non-physical person. If you believe your body is just a vehicle for your head, and you'd rather live in a totally non-physical world, maybe no sport resonates. If you have any physicality, there's probably some sport for you in an ideal world. Maybe you really like the feeling of being on a trampoline, and you just have yet to try Circue du Soleil, or you love to work on your contact juggling, and you've never seen people do it competitively.
As far as I can tell, building your identity around a thing is Kegan stage 3? Depending on where you sit on the people-vs-things spectrum, a Stage 3 identity might be more about the thing itself or the "thing community" (the fandom, for example). It might be less traditional than building your identity around your family, or your community, but it still reads to me like a variation on the same theme.
If that's true, then one answer to Ghatanathoah's question what the alternative is to build your identity around is that it's ok and necessary to go through this phase, but to attain full modern adulthood, at some point you have to progress to Stage 4 where you still have interests and relationships, but you're not defined by them.
I find your hierarchy of virtuous interests pretty amusing. On one hand, I think I qualify as having a "top-tier" identity. I'm doing research level pure mathematics: my current study is on families of supersingular hyperelliptic curves over algebraically closed fields of characteristic 2, and I think these mathematical objects are really neat. On the other hand, I also think I qualify as having several "lower-tier" identities. I have a bunch of Pokemon plushies lying around in my room and I wear a Time Gear necklace from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky everywhere I go. I'm also obsessed with the children's book series "Wings of Fire" by Tui T. Sutherland: I go to conventions that the author goes to and listen to all her panels, I have a signed copy of my favorite book in the series on my bookshelf and I've gotten the cover of my Kindle Paperwhite signed by her *twice* (I needed to do it a second time because I bought a new Kindle), I'm in Wings of Fire roleplay servers on Discord where I play as various characters that I spent several hours creating, and I've been actively writing Wings of Fire fanfiction for the past five years.
The funny thing is, I would sooner degrade myself for being a math nerd than for being a Wings of Fire nerd. If someone asks me why I like math so much, my answer is usually "I don't know, something's just wrong with my brain I guess." But if someone asks me why I like Wings of Fire so much, I'll give them a straight answer about how deep and interesting each character in the series is. And even though I'm truly fascinated by pure math, I think I'd sooner try connecting with someone over a shared interest in fantasy dragons than a shared interest in algebraic number theory.
Regarding identity levels: I think it's optimal to have one or more traits on each (except perhaps the lower-tier). A person whose only trait is a love of complex mathematical abstraction may be kinda cool, but it would be very difficult to find contact with him.
It’s odd that a man so interested in humanity and human foibles doesn’t seem to understand why sports are good, even when they are bad.
Objectively a 1-0 soccer game is boring to neutrals but subjectively it’s highly entertaining ,if stressful, to the fans involved, particularly if it’s an important game like a World Cup final. Why? Tribalism. Male bonding. Love of country, or city, or even just the team.
Most team sport is about losing more than winning. Even countries generally successful in the soccer world cup can not expect to win most tournaments. Argentina are the WC champions, and one of the most successful teams in the tournament. Prior to their recent win they last won in 1986.
imagine being a life long Argentinian fan watching the last World Cup final. If you are old enough to remember the last win ( as I said in 1986) you may not realistically expect to be around for the next one. If you are a teenager it’s not likely to happen until you are middle aged or perhaps never, either way a win is extremely important and the game - however ugly or boring to outsiders - is going to be an extraordinary tense and exciting match for the fan, quite possibly an experience he may never have again. That’s what makes it extraordinary.
( As it happened the game was objectively good but that doesn’t matter to the actual fans. In fact a boring 1-0 victory is more stressful to the fans all the way through. When you are drawing the other side’s chances are worrying because they can go ahead, at 1 ahead it is still worrying because you might lose your lead. )
In non team sports the amazement is that people can do extraordinary things in gymnastics, athletics, pole vaulting, etc.
Part 5 made me appreciate how rationalist/EAs in general, and Scott in particular, overcorrected on Elephant In The Brain. Not *literally everything* people do is about status, despite what the book says. If you stop and think about it for 5 seconds, it becomes kinda obvious that it can't be true. For one, our brains simply cannot be that perfectly optimized for status-seeking even if it was their only job, since nothing in evolution is ever that perfect. But secondly, in the ancestral adaptation environment (unlike in the present day Bay Area) you just can't afford to single-mindedly focus on status - you would get eaten, or starve, or be killed by an invading tribe, or otherwise will have the reality getting back at you.
I think this overcorrection hurts the community as a whole, and is deteriorating for individual mental well-being (unless you're near the very top of your local social ladder, as Scott I assume is).
Could it be that traditionally (in the hunter-gatherer / village) people know you fairly well including the son of X stuff as well as good at Y bad at Z, so there is a base level of connection (I live in a village). In San Fran etc they don't so you have to try harder for connections with other folk.
I legitimately love the current trend of "X-core" or "X aesthetic". I'm not entirely sure how it fits in with this, but it sure does seem pretty close to the "actually enjoying things and not caring about social status" idea(l).
"it doesn’t work for a lot of practical tasks - I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y."
Works like a charm in the sort of small, rural, generational towns I spend my time in.
I feel it's important to note whenever people bring up Star Wars in relation to nerd-ness that all 3 of the original trilogy were the highest grossing movies of their year. Main story Star Wars has *always* been mainstream, and what made Star Wars nerds specifically nerds and not just normal fans was getting into the Extended Universe and knowing the specs for multiple different classes of Star Destroyer, or collecting action figures or what have you.
I 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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)
> 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
I think you might be making a category error in regards to the 'quality' thing. MCU absolutely *has* quality. I wouldn't watch it, but defining it as the low end of the quality scale is causing a lot of confusion for you. Something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnosaur_(film) is closer to the bottom end of the movie quality scale by far than the MCU stuff (potentially touching the "so bad it's good" effect for some people). I've not seen any of the MCU movies and don't really plan to (superhero is not really my genre), but I imagine they have a lot of production value. The plot is probably glib, but I'm not convinced it's necessarily more glib than, say, Jurassic Park, which a lot of people loved and doesn't seem to have much of a backlash (beside the whole "those aren't Velociraptors" style complaints).
Similarly, I *think* you might be making a category error about sci-fi or RPGs being "very popular". You can't really walk up to a random person in the street and have a high chance of them being into either of these things. Sci-fi, as far as I'm aware, is less popular than fantasy, and fantasy is less popular than dramas and thrillers. I would describe it as very niche! There are things that are *even more* niche (e.g. horror I believe is one of those genres, and definitely surrealist fiction), but I'd not put "very" infront of "popular". Yes, there are a lot of people who have seen Star Wars, and for a large amount of them, that'll be all the sci-fi they want. (And arguably it's space fantasy and not sci-fi, but I'll leave the sci-fi definition uncontested here so I don't make my life too easy.)
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)."
That is not a "plot", that is a premise.
Each "episode" (game/match) of whatever sport has its own plot, with dramatic twists galore.
I'm not even a sports fan, but Scott is being unfair.
(“Access” should be “axis” – silly voice recognition software!)
“Top-tier: Intellectual subfields, especially obscure ones or ones involving pure abstract math. If you can say “I’m really into trans-finite 8-dimensional Hoffdorf groups” and justify this with a discussion of how innately beautiful they are, you’ve got it made.”
As an academic, I know people like this (not all academics are, some fields have this more than others, etc) and I can tell you that this kind of identity construct does *not* age well. At 20, it’s great (there’s a lovely sense of calm that radiates from them); at 30, it’s fine (but starts to seem a little childish); at 40, it seems sad and it is almost always confined to the ex-child prodigy third-tier Hoffdorf theorists.
Notably, and maybe this is my message to ACX readers, the best people at Hoffdorf groups *don’t* do this. The best Hoffdorf people do, actually, have personalities that are load-bearing. This is true even in pure mathematics.
In some fields that require intense and sometimes unpleasant work, being Hoffdorf guy/girl in your 20s can help. Here I’m thinking more of certain parts of the humanities that require reading lots of badly-written secondary sources and getting up on the higher gossip.
But the people who don’t move beyond that lose out in a number of ways:
1. They can’t connect to others, even others in their field. They miss out on the wider experiences, including the intellectual experiences that would make them better at Hoffdorf groups. There’s something deeply incurious about them. Imagine a Shakespeare scholar who would rather know 0.02% more about Two Gentlemen of Verona than read, say, John Donne, or who only cares about John Donne because he illuminates some minor aspect of Shakespearean prosody.
2. Mystical take: intellectual achievement comes in part from a connection to a wide unconscious aspect of one’s experience. But identity construction, by contrast, is a conscious act. Being Haffdorf guy is antithetical to learning more about Haffdorf spaces because Haffdorf spaces are in some way bigger than what you can encompass. Haffdorf spaces go low when you want to go high, as it were.
Reading FdB’s load bearing essay, I feel like he gets it right. In high school I knew people who were really in to math, and others who were really in to being gay. Twenty years later, I’m struck by how, for both groups, it was a useful phase to have gone through. Some of the math types became math profs, some of the gay guys became artists (the gay thing was actually a sensitivity/aesthete thing, turns out some weren’t gay, and there were some gay jocks). Others became b-school profs, or lawyers, or died young of cancer.
But that early identification matured and developed, becoming something that was a small part of their present, that they could draw on, but not define themselves by. It’s useful to remember that phase, because if you’re good you’ll encounter plenty of 20 year olds who are really in it, but even most of them realize that you, yourself, should have probably become a person.
The description of sports as a thousand episodes of a series with the same plot is highly illustrative. I appreciate sports (even moreso chess, go and modern board games) as a realm in which true drama emerges in a relatively natural proportion, as opposed to letting screenwriters artfully pull my marionette strings. The older I get, the more I tire of long serial fiction.
There was a whole lot to read, and not much time to read it. But here is my skimming input.
Nerds meaning has changed over the past few decades. At one time it used to be pretty much synonymous with geek, but over the last few decades it’s become more synonymous with being passionately obsessed over some hobby or subject. And disagreeing with the author... it doesn’t have to be bad.
Now days you can be a car Nerd... though to truly be a nerd you should be very specific... such as being passionate about 1970s mustangs. It also helps if you are passionate about something rather obscure. For instance I am a scooter nerd (Vespas and Lambretta’s) but more specifically I know way to much about German built Vespas from 1955 to 1962.
Obviously there are also nerds into bad stuff, such as Marvel Comics or microbrews (it it was good it would be a major brew), but it’s not a prerequisite.
Also, on behalf of us blue collar workers from flyover country, thank you for shaming Hipsters out of existence... we can finally have out clothing and our beards to ourselves unironically.
"I’m the son of X, husband of Y, friend of Z"
I agree that this is the traditional answer, and will note that in traditional communities, it works really well. Drop me into the section of the Plain world I grew up in (which is probably 20,000 people spread over a couple hundred communities), and I will almost certainly find someone to whom I have a "know the same person" connection.
This also works to some extent in smaller professions: I'm an actuary, and if I meet another actuary in my general area of practice, the odds we have worked with some of the same people are incredibly high.
It seems like an important data point that after reading this (very interesting) post, all I can think about is the commenter who claimed that the MCU was one of humanity’s greatest artistic achievements…I feel a tremendous need to explain to them how wrong they are.
So: what explains that impulse?
As a piece of evidence that there is something kinda interesting/identifiable going on with being a nerd consider the phenomenon of the nerd 'accent.'. Like the gay accent it's far from universal amoung nerds but it's common enough you know it when you hear it.
And, unlike most popular explanations for the gay accent, you can't explain this as an affectation or learned via imitation. When I went to Caltech as a freshman there were tons of people who came in with that 'accent' despite (or more likely because) having been pretty socially isolated and, at that time, lacking any media figures to pattern their speech on.
My hypothesis is that it's largely a result of a certain kind of emotional detachment (eg because your shy/fear being hurt) where you use mastery of facts as a way to converse without having to risk too much emotionally. You then get a kind of lecturing quality but with a sort of hesitance and lack of full throated emotion that ends up kinda nasal. That plus, perhaps, less attention to the social details like the sound of your voice or looks that might prompt another person to alter speech patterns. But that's just a guess.
But my point is that I think there is a psychological natural kind there that isn't just about showing depth of interest.
Also, I'd like to push back on this idea that looking for social reasons people like things somehow isn't taking the idea of liking them seriously.
It's no different than trying to understand the sociology of religion. You don't need to doubt the sincerity or depth of people's religious convictions to notice that the best predictor of what religious beliefs you hold isn't their abstract philosophical plausibility, evidence or usefulness. It's often social factors like what church you grow up in or what beliefs your peer group has that determine what you believe.
The same thing is going on with being into various fandoms. It's not an accident that the people who tend to be into popular stuff tend to be into the same stuff as their peers. Many (most?) people enjoy content more when they can talk about it with peers. OTOH some people seem to be just the opposite and like content less if others in their social circle like it.
There isn't any reason to doubt people like the stuff they like but it's clear that what people like is influenced by social factors and it's interesting to understand how.
I think most things people think of as 'quality' in the status sense meet, or appear to meet, the following criteria:
1) Specialised production (expertise is needed to produce the good; most people couldn't do it and you can't just throw money at it)
2) Specialised consumption (Expertise is needed to consume and enjoy consuming the good to its maximum potential.)
3) A group of high status people already like it (otherwise the thing is weird rather than high quality). I see this as random nucleation rather than something that says much about the thing itself (beyond it being likeable in principle)
Obviously this has a lot to do with affordability, because in a capitalist economy that kind of thing is usually expensive – but cost alone isn't sufficient to count as specialised production/consumption: it's not quality because it's expensive (dear me no), it's quality because it's _aged in hand carved barrels in a single remote village in the Highlands by Jack, our master distiller).
Most attacks and defenses on quality tend to revolve around whether (1) and (2) are truly met. "Sure Marvel is _visually impressive_, but that's just because big studios threw money at it, and I'd rather watch something a bit more refined than 90 minutes or explosions anyway".
Similarly people that are sports _snobs_ are pretty dismissive of rich billionaires buying up players to form teams, and care much more about the performance of specific players, coaching and strategy, etc – things that are perceived as requiring talent to execute and to appreciate.
I did not see this anywhere so thought to share- my parents, who both were teenagers in the 1950's, told me that nerd was actually Drunk spelled backwards, as in a teen boy who doesn't drink and therefore is not in the in-crowd (Ritchie or Potsie on Happy Days, I guess). Square would be another one, but not as mainstream now. Unfortunately my father passed but I think he was the one who told me that. I was never called a nerd to my face as a kid in the 1970's although all the stuff applied to me (except not drinking...). I think when Bill Gates got rich, the tables turned.
"A lot of people’s default personality, if they just do exactly what comes naturally and don’t put any effort into self-presentation or cultivation, is to browse Reddit and play video games. Most people realize this on some level and try to cultivate some personality beyond this, but I think that makes it extra unfair to say “Just use your natural true self!” The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
This struck me as odd. Does this seem true to anyone? I know maybe one or two people who fit this description; everyone else I know likes specific things with a weird, obsessive level of interest, and I'm pretty convinced they would continue to do so if the thing was unpopular. But I could also self select for people like that, so I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts.
This post and the previous one reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about regarding the word “basic”.
These days, I don’t hear it used much — I think I’m actually more likely to hear someone criticizing the concept than actually using it. “The term ‘basic’ is misogynistic! It’s just a way of shaming women for liking feminine things!”
And in the context of “basic b$&*%” or “basic white b%*$&@“ (not sure what the Substack moderation filter is like): yeah, maybe. But I’ve long thought that it should be expanded. That men liking football or Breaking Bad is just as basic as women liking pumpkin spice lattes.
When someone just likes all the TV, movies, music, hobbies, etc. that are most popular in their subculture, which is more likely: that they have tried lots of things and just so happened to only like the ones that are the most socially acceptable to the people around them, or that they just didn’t bother to try anything else and/or dismissed the more unusual stuff out of hand? “Low openness to experience” is one way of putting it, but colloquially, why not say “basic”?
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
I'm a little confused by this "hoax" - the example poem on Wikipedia seems perfectly competent. Like, I don't get very excited about most poems, but there's nothing making me say "ugh, this guy just doesn't understand poetry" or "this poem sounds profound but it's not saying anything." It's free verse, but it's clearly divided up with intention. It has weird imagery, but coherent ones. If you asked me what the poem was about, I would have an answer and a justification. "Great poetry" is subjective, but at the very least, it's not a *bad* poem.
Sure, the authors of the hoax *say* that they just slapped these poems together with no thought or effort, but effort does not correlate with success! I'm a software developer and I often feel that most my code could be slapped together by a monkey with access to Stack Overflow, but apparently that not-very-difficulty-feeling work is worth six figures to the right people.
The wiki article goes on to note that some people liked the poem even knowing that Ern Malley didn't exist!
"I think the traditional answer is that you should build your identity around social relationships (I’m the son of X, husband of Y, friend of Z), career, and maybe a few hobbies."
No, the traditional answer (i.e for most of human history) was that identity was built from family, place (neighborhood/region), language, food, religion, music, custom. Identity was first socially mediated.
Individuality is a separate particular function of identity: a matrix of what/who do I like, one's virtue (a good child, sibling, friend, neighbor, spouse, parent), one's skills (techne), occupation, and one's calling (I am reminded of Arendt treatment of arbeit and beruf).
The universal questions: Who am I and to whom do I belong?
Alienation is not knowing how to the answer these persistent 2 related questions.
Fetishized life collapses identity into individuality and the preference of the individual connected with commodities (to be bought and horded) and increasingly as Debord noted with the commodification of our time in furtherance of fetishized consumption and consumerism.
The fetishized individual then seeks to answer the "to whom do I belong" question by seeking similarly fetishized individuals. Granfallooning. (See also slapstick: Lonesome no more)
The old way of socially created identity first and individuality second was not without its problems. Consider the parable of the Good Samaritan. The levi and the priest with clear social identities walk on by because their "identity" is too narrow to see the neighbor.
But the new way of individuality first can never really work, because it is temporary solution in which the social aspect is just an add on. It is not an organic process that recognizes the essential and proper social first development of identity.
The traditional way is not very helpful to unbridled capitalism and consumerism. Novelty seeking (new products to buy consume and horde) is essential to the individuality first fetishized person aided by affluence -(maybe we should investigate the unintended consequences of child allowances which facilitate the process of fetishized consumerism over social integration).
I think Your experiment in part 1 is actually useful for explaining why a lot of Marvel Fans think that the MCU has gotten a lot worse. I would argue that the first Ant man movie would pass the first experiment. At its core, it's a story about a poor but intelligent man who stole from the rich to feed his family, and ended up imprisoned. His wife moved on and married one of the sheriff's that arrested him. A wise Sage enlists him to steal a magical artifact that the sage created, but is now possessed by an evil wizard who was once his partner. The Hero uses the Sages magic and defeats the evil wizard, bringing him to justice, and rekindling his relationship with his estranged daughter.
The most recent Ant-Man is in category 4. Trying to translate it into a medieval story would result in gibberish, and not have anything relatable to the human condition. I think that's one of the main reasons many fans feel that the MCU has gotten worse
One thing I didn't see mentioned. While "the death of hipsters" might have come to pass, but I think that "death of nerds", or, rather, "death of recommendation algorithms" sounds contrary to everything I see. Algorithms that recommend the same thing to everyone are BAD algorithms. They're bad AI. And what we have right now is the growth in AI. Therefore, I believe that instead of removing algorithms from the loop, we will get better and more personalized algorithms.
I, for one, feel very much in need of one, because I often want to request for example "a song with vocals close to that other song", but it's impossible right now. Algorithms still mostly work in a "if you like blues-rock I'll give you more of blues-rock" - which is still a huge improvement from previous "if you like that one song by a 70's rock band I'll give you other songs by 70's rock bands that sound nothing like it and are actually in a completely different style of rock". If you compare 00's Last.fm recommendations with Spotify's algorithm, it's noticeable.
And modern algorithms can even recommend more obscure bands and tracks - I was pleasantly surprised recently hearing a nice track from a German singer-songwriter that I had never heard about before (admittedly, he's well-known - in Germany, but not in the rest of the world, and I don't live in Germany and only listen to a few German bands that have nothing in common with his music).
Modern algorithms, though, still mostly rely on people, and give you songs that other people who have similar tastes to you listen to - they make no judgement themselves. But with advances in AI, I wonder if it will be soon(-ish) possible for an algorithm to "listen" to the song, and get a feeling for its components, and recommend things to me that sounds like things I love, picking up every little detail from my previous listens (or give me something unexpected, if I ask it to). If so, there will be no death of algorithms, and no death of nerds.
Ah, Star Wars CCG... I got a starter box for Christmas one year, but until I met a friend who actually knew how to play it, it was pretty background to my Star Wars fanaticism.
Once I started playing, though, it became what I spent all of my money on for several years and consumed a great deal of my free time.
I like to think of fiction as being a song, and the audience is the instrument. And not every song sounds good played on every instrument.
Fiction evokes emotions and experiences we've had in our lives. As we encounter different situations through life, different things resonate with us. Stuff that I would have found boring as a younger man makes me cry now. Stuff that I thought was fun and exciting as a kid makes me roll my eyes now. The products haven't changed, I have.
So it shouldn't be weird that some popular stuff leaves you cold. It's not bad, it's just hitting a note that you don't have at the moment. And that's ok.
It would be interesting to do this analysis for politically active people. There are "hipsters" who plumb the ideological depths searching for a new spin on old ideas, and there are "nerds" who consume and replicate the ideas the hipsters deliver.
These are episode of the week procedurals and they’re very popular!
“Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching!”
I think that the mass-marketing of things like the MCU or Star Trek has hollowed them out as nerd items. Part of what made them nerd-fodder is that they dealt with deep subjects, frequently in a low-quality medium due to limited finances.
The work to popularize them involved upping the "production quality" substantially. But it also involved cutting out the deep subjects. The Star Trek television shows frequently dealt with complex subjects about dignity, discrimination, identity and growth. Most of the movies are generic action stuff.
I knew he was a hoax before I read him, but I have to say, I think Ern Malley is pretty good, and occasionally excellent. Take this piece, for example: https://allpoetry.com/Drer:-Innsbruck-1495
This is wonderful, and surely less obscrue than other poems, even other poems that I like (such as Wallace Stevens’s “Blanche Mc Carthy” (http://web.mit.edu/cordelia/www/Poems/blanche_mccarthy.html).
Which proves nothing, and asserts nothing other than the Ern Malley hoaxers were unsuccessful at writing bad poetry.
I'm not a big sports fan, but for the record every sporting event is just people trying to get a ball in a hole in the way that every historic battle is just dudes trying to walk past each other.
Regarding the Ant-Man as a Mabinogion myth hypothetical, a retelling of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope as a medieval Irish epic does exist: https://headofdonnbo.wordpress.com/2015/12/10/the-tatooine-cycle/
I think it's fair to look at a lot of sports fandom as, not *forming* identity, but as *expressing* identity, and since the reason why this is so is fairly clear with sports, I think it helps understand a lot of other types of fandom.
I actually get the intrinsic appeal of sports. Each game of basketball has the same "plot," but that's only in the sense that each heroic novel has the same plot, or each romantic comedy does— it's the details that matter. Since the details matter, each game has the potential to have a lot of drama, even besides the wonder of watching skilled people do hard things. That said, even fanatics generally admit there are *bad games*, so there are aesthetic criteria being applied even to sports!
But, the intrinsic appeal doesn't explain most sports fandom, the shared experience does. I grew up in a small town in Kentucky. Nearly everyone was a University of Kentucky (UK) basketball fan. If UK had an NCAA tournament game during school hours, we stopped school to watch it. Kids and adults both cared about who the players were, how the team was doing, etc. It wasn't just a default topic for conversation, either— caring about the thing alongside other people gives a real sense of commonality. This sense of commonality is why, despite not having lived anywhere near Cincinnati in over a decade, I remain a Cincinnati Bengals fan. It's something I share with friends and family. We can get excited about the same things, get frustrated by the same things, etc. If I couldn't share the experience, I probably wouldn't care. Now that I live in a big metro, I can go to a bar where fans of the Cincinnati Bengals congregate and get an instant sense of community for seventeen or more games a year.
My drive to be a fan of any particular team is pretty low, even if I can enjoy any "good" game of football. Without these social experiences, I wouldn't care about football that much— I'd probably just watch the playoffs, and watch some college games with my dad when I visit back home. I like that I have this connection— not just to family & friends, but also to a region I come from while being a typically transient (for an American of my class).
A lot of MCU fandom probably works like this on a different level. I've had strangers ask me about the latest MCU movie, or want to talk about MCU news (assuming I'd like these things because everyone does), and each time I feel a little bad that I find these movies to be pretty bad and not worth my time. I like having conversations with strangers! I like sharing things with people! And I don't even score highly on agreeableness!
The bigger issues about "identity" is that it's not really a thing. Choosing anything to "base an identity" on is a sure way to wind up miserable, alone, and a prime target for propaganda.
Take the rationalist community for instance. They "community" is based on high ideals of studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues. But the "identity" marker is "being part of the community." Trust me as a dude who spent most of his 20s trying to do this: Absent the community, studying prestigious subjects and pursuing virtues is just as annoying as being a marvel fan, and just as useless as browsing reddit and playing video games.
Modern culture hates all communities everywhere. It thinks they're lame and annoying and sometimes genuinely dangerous. I don't think this is a conspiracy but I do think various powers that influence culture have strong incentive to keep things this way. If folks must join a community it should be as large as possible with as little member-to-member contact as possible.
This means that people tend to tokenize their identities and their communities: Just wearing Star Wars t-shirts and getting excited about Star Wars online sublimates that need for real community while also ensuring your identity is still mostly about products. Such a person would be happier and healthier if they went to Star Wars conventions and met with other Star Wars people in person and had Star Wars viewing parties, and such. But the more they did that, the less it would be about Star Wars, and the more it would become about the other people in that dude's network.
For a *fantastic* illustration of this, see the Doctor Who Episode "Love and Monsters." A group is formed by people obsessed with searching for the Doctor but ultimately end up basically doing normie things like falling in love and showing off their creative projects. The creative projects are still vaguely Doctor-obsessed but the point is no longer the fetish, it's the other folks involved.
I find the points about MCU being the point where people figured out how to market comic book superhero stories to a mass market interesting. I agree, but also, isn't this what Shakespeare mostly did? His plays were media for the common people of his day and time, many of them retelling old stories. He filled them with fight scenes to keep things exciting. His actors raced through lines to keep the total time way down compared to modern productions of the same plays. (All of this might be wrong, but it's what I was taught in high school).
None of that is a dig against Shakespeare, but it is a dig against glorifying Shakespeare while vilifying the MCU (Note: not personally a fan of either, except I like things written in more archaic language sometimes). I can imagine a world where 300 years from now, literature professors are expounding upon how the MCU combines the styles of mythmaking and epic poetry (large casts of mighty beings beyond our ken, each with many stories about them that the audience already knows), civic religion (Superman is an immigrant, Captain America is a patriot,, etc.), sci-fi/fantasy, and maybe a few others. Maybe Ant-Man is typically experienced as a non-optional day-long interactive holodeck-equivalent story for educating fifth graders on the fundamental nature of quantum physics and its relation to the human-scale world, and maybe historians think the original publication was inspired by the discovery of the laser or fear of falling behind the Russians in technology advancement or something.
The concept of authenticity explains a few of the puzzles here, I think. The original Mona Lisa is higher-status than a copy of it, even if they're undistinguishable to the untrained eye, because the former is authentic. Likewise, the Mabinogion-Ant-Man crossover wouldn't be as authentic as the original Mabinogion, and therefore less interesting. (So it's true that "the “quality” of the Mabinogion comes from something outside the text, like the fact that it’s old".)
Sports are enjoyable because they're not fiction: it's true that no one would watch a sitcom that would be formatted as a sports season, but the difference is that the sitcom wouldn't be authentic. Repetitive though they are, sports come with real stakes and real people playing a real game somewhere in the world.
In general, intellectual or scientific topics are somewhat authentic, because they are closely linked to reality; whereas video games or movie franchises aren't. An interest in an unusual topic is often authentic because no you have to investigate it yourself rather than follow someone else's lead, whereas a "common' topic like culture war politics or the MCU contains a lot of inauthentic ready-made stuff.
As for collecting, it's higher status to collect butterflies (which really exist independently of human actions) than to complete the Pokédex. Stamps are somewhat authentic because they're made for a real purpose, not just for collecting; but baseball cards or NFT profile pictures are intended for collecting and are therefore lower-status, to a first approximation.
Why do we care about authenticity? That is a good question in itself. Maybe it's some sort of culturally evolved defence against people tricking us.
OK two quick points.
First, I think a fair bit of disagreement on these threads really comes down to whether the MCU is Good or Bad. From the movies I've watched I'm on team "MCU is Bad" but I can't say I've watched them enough to say that definitively about the whole series. But it does seem like an important distinction, if we're going to group Star Wars and the MCU as analogous in this discussion, that the original Star Wars trilogy is pretty universally seen as Good and the MCU is seen by many as Bad.
Second, different reactions people have to levels of engagement in popular things. I.e. how can people claim to be socially oppressed for liking [major media franchise]? I was thinking about this in regards to Zelda. With an upcoming game coming out, three types of Zelda fans I've seen recently:
* casual fans who say "oh I played the original so much! I just saw they're making a new one, I'm gonna waste so much time my spouse is gonna hate me lol"
* people on the internet with really strong opinions on the "Zelda timeline" and encyclopedic knowledge about what all the enemies are called and shit and have played every Zelda game even though you have to own like 10 different Nintendo consoles to do this
* hot chick on Instagram I saw recently with a bunch of tattoos, one of which was a Zelda tattoo
So why is it that average people (group 1) and people with some claim to higher popularity (group 3) both are Zelda fans, but the big time Zelda fans (group 2) are lower popularity?
My hypothesis is that by getting really into it, you are on some level admitting to a ... flatness of personal experience. Where your life is uninteresting enough that the thing that everyone else enjoys in passing and then moves on from, becomes a personality trait for you.
It would be different if getting that into it produced a qualitatively different experience, but for something like consumption of a media franchise people assume that it's not that deep ... you're watching the same movies as them.
As for group 3 ... sex appeal aside, it matters that this girl had a lot of tattoos. Scans differently from someone who only had one tattoo and it was Zelda related. If it's one of many it has a similar effect to a comedian mentioning a life experience many people have but don't normally talk about (don't you hate when you hate to fart but you're on a date and hold it in for hours?), and they get cool points for saying it aloud.
I'm a big film-analysis nerd who loves shit like Citizen Kane and obscure foreign arthouse films. I read and write super pretentious film criticism. I have all the bona-fides of a snob.
I love the MCU, because it's really god damn good. I've seen every single film in theaters. I've had long debates about how Shang Chi uses the Kishotenketsu 4-act structure and simultaneously fits into a standard western 3-act structure, and whether this means it constitutes a new act-structure or proves that acts are subjective.
A common failure of analysis that supports claims like "the MCU is bad" is to collapse "good-bad" to a single axis, when it obviously is made up of many orthogonal axes. We usually trust the listener to know which axis we mean.
"So bad it's good" is a great example. Some movies are so bad you'd rather gouge out your eyes than watch them. But "so bad it's good" movies are generally well-written and have a lot of soul, but the production value is cheap and they don't take themselves seriously or have complicated themes. Even something like "production value" isn't linear, since something like Lawrence of Arabia simultaneously reads as "holy shit the care that went into getting these colors to look right, it cost untold millions" and "wow they really sucked at makeup back in the 60s, this would be unfathomably bad in a modern movie but it's quaint."
“Emotionally, everyone who likes things more prestigious than what I like is a snob who’s faking it, and everyone who likes things less prestigious than what I like is a boor who doesn’t understand true art.”
See also, Kingsley Amis’s “berks and wankers.”
"I’m not up to date on what goes on in academic literature departments, but Freddie de Boer says they’re increasingly offering “Spiderman Studies” classes in attempts to stay culturally relevant; probably Spiderman professors engage with Spiderman on the same deep level that Shakespeare professors engage with Shakespeare."
Probably for the best. I always thought it was pretty bizarre how we treat analysis of old high status art few people engage with as a normal and reasonable humanities major (fine art, English lit) while analysis of our actual culture is kind of niche.
New life goal: move from Okay-tier to Upper-tier
> People “are constantly meeting strangers and having to communicate their identity to them quickly.”
This is a very strange and foreign concept to me. Why exactly do I have to do this? What is the negative consequence to me if strangers I meet don’t get an instant tutorial on who I am as a person?
I live a life where the way people get to know me is to, ya know, actually get to know me, over time.
The confusion over definitions sounds like a rewatch of this series of classics of cinema is in order:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_of_the_Nerds
"The film's plot chronicles a group of nerds at the fictional Adams College trying to stop the ongoing harassment by the jock fraternity, the Alpha Betas, in addition to the latter's sister sorority, Pi Delta Pi."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDJmRYBTd4w&list=PLnueMi3HAhzKKsVfiX2BtO0E54DatxZJx&index=2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6-PR0cFFKY
This has been a remarkable exchange, and the Krissian 'low quality' bit did less to highlight for me why I have always disliked nerds than the responses to his thesis did.
A ctrl-f on both this and the comments to the original response turn up zero hits for "Berkson", and I believe this is the crucial point. Scott's matrix of quality vs status is a useful step and jogged my memory: 'nerds' are victims of Berkson's paradox because they are people who assume that being attractive, fit, athletic, and socially capable actually and literally are negatively correlated with intelligence. This is not the case, but it is a common illusion which has been reinforced by Hollywood (E.g. Revenge of the Nerds). Note that Hollywood writers/etc were themselves the first victims of this (with resultant expressions going as far back as that awful movie about people with dwarfism before the code imposed more mainstream values on the place). Anyhow, 'nerds' are people who are not particularly (or at least, usefully) intelligent but assume they must be due to their not having other, more socially-rewarded traits. One of the traits they don't have is being able to select things that are high quality/status (that's a 'prestige hierarchy' move) -- note that the people who fell for Ern Malley were the kind of dreadful nerds who run a magazine about garbage non-art.
Producing lower-quality/status things is easier, and at some point saturated the market. This caused people who are not actual nerds in the sense I have outlined above to become interested in them, leading to a confusion where some of the actually usefully intelligent and successful people who comment on this substack falsely think of themselves as nerds and defend the category.
There's nothing 'wrong' with being socially undesirable and also a midwit. It's not anyone's fault. It's not even his fault if he thinks he's smarter than he is because he wears glasses and can't throw a ball. It's not a moral failing. But defending this category as "good" is absurd and morally incoherent.
"But the southwest square could be “writes a wacky Shakespeare fanfiction, Romeo & Juliet II, in blank verse and period-appropriate language”
We already have this! From Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" to the various movies about Shakespeare, and even a sitcom from 2016-2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTYGmza0Skc&t=30s
"Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other)"
But that's pretty much what sitcoms *are*! You have a cast of familiar characters who each episode get into wacky hi-jinks and end the episode pretty much as they began, and over the arc of the season even if we learn more about them, they don't really change that much or are affected by what happens. Think of "Friends", it ran for ten seasons and eventually ended up with Ross and Rachel together, as had been heavily hinted at since the first season. Everything changed, yet nothing did.
"Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant (ironically, Sam Kriss is probably the single person alive most qualified to do this)."
We need to stop fooling around, stop looking at funny pictures of cats on the internet or whatever, and put our collective funds together to commission Sam Kriss to produce this Magnum Opus on behalf of humanity.
"Effective Altruism" and stuff.
"The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful."
Am I the only cat who remembers "She" by J.T. LeRoy? I remember European hipsters getting taken in by this, hook line and sinker.
I grew up in a barn, so I read about three pages of "She" before I called bullshit. I managed to finish the book, but only after I decided that I would view it as a sort of a crude form of magical realism and not anything like an actual autobiography. Still, my hipster friends gave me grief, said I was "victim blaming" and even when it came out that J.T. LeRoy didn't actually exist and "She" was a hoax they weren't inclined to forgive.
It ain't just literature, yo. Shortly after the election of Trump, the German magazine "Der Spiegel" published a piece on Fergus Falls, Minnesota, describing the sort of town where people vote for the Orange Buffoon. Needless to say, it came out that, like "She", the piece was entirely fabricated, but because (also like "She") it was fabricated in a way that fully confirmed the prejudices of the readership, it ran and was celebrated for a while.
Re: Ant-Man and the Mabinogion, I was led to understand the problem is that the latest Ant-Man movie is an unholy mess due to several reasons, so that may be an unfair comparison.
As for adaptations of old myths, let me quote from Tumblr:
https://www.tumblr.com/sunshinemoonrx/700721026916548608/old-welsh-lit-dave-punched-steve-this-incurred-a?source=share
"Old Welsh lit: Dave punched Steve. This incurred a fine of twelve cattle and a nine-inch rod of silver and is known as one of the Three Mildly Annoying Blows of the Isle of Britain
Old Irish lit: Dave punched Steve so that the top of his skull came out of his chin, and gore flooded the house, and he drove his fists down the street performing his battle-feats so that the corpses were so numerous there was no room for them to fall down. It was like “the fox among the hens” and “the oncoming tide” and “that time Emily had eight drinks when we all know she should stop at six”
Old English lit: Dave, the hard man, the fierce man, the fist-man, gave Steve such a blow the like has not been seen since the feud between the Hylfings and the Wends. Thus it is rightly said that violence only begets more violence, unless of course it is particularly sicknasty. Amen. "
Regarding sports, I will try to explain two reasons to actually watch sports from my own experience (in response to "It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.")
One is that they provide a sense of connection or continuity. While a college student I attended (American aka gridiron) football games with friends, mostly as a social activity. Shortly after I completed my undergraduate studies I moved across the country for grad school. Living far from my old college community, I enjoyed going to a sports bar where the alumni association would gather to watch our alma mater's football games. It was a way to connect with others with whom I had things in common and to feel connected with a community I had been part of during my formative years (and happily, this occurred during a period of significant improvement by the football team, so each season offered the prospect of new heights). Work eventually brought me back to the state in which I had attended college, and since then my interest in watching football has declined somewhat -- I still do, but not as regularly, probably in part because I don't need it for that connection anymore.
The other reason I sometimes watch sporting events is indeed to appreciate the pure athleticism involved. I don't normally watch the local NBA team, but when they make the playoffs I may watch a game or two, since the playoffs pit the best teams against each other, and in an era of load management you are more likely to see the best players on the court during a playoff game than during a regular season game. Similarly, while I certainly don't even attempt to watch most of the Olympics, there are a few sports that I enjoy watching (at least once they have winnowed the field down to the final round or two). These mostly skew towards sports where even a non-expert in the sport can't help but be wowed by the displays of athleticism: gymnastics, various swimming events, freestyle skiing, et cetera, and because it is only once every four years it doesn't feel like a repetitive exercise in watching the same thing over and over.
There are of course other reasons many people watch sports, not all of which I understand. I just wanted to illustrate two that I have experienced to hopefully bring some clarity to the mystery of why some people actually watch sports.
This has me wondering: what are the topics that the social outcasts flock to today? Do they have their own things or are all the kids interested in the same stuff now? I really have no idea or any idea how to find out.
>The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person.
This is probably spoken like a narcissist, or maybe just a naturally interesting person with a lot of interests and personal quirks.
But there is absolutely nothing "boring" about my true self and I don't think I have ever thought so. To the extent I posture or pose, or hide, or construct a false front on top of my true self, it is almost always to hide facets I find undesirable, or to impress someone, or whatever.
It is pretty much never because I think they would find me uninteresting, I am super interesting, too interesting in ways.
I will say, if I ever found anyone currently living who liked Jonson more than Shakespeare, I would be *very* interested to hear them out! (Same deal for Marlowe, although that would be a little more understandable.) Jonson and Marlowe fans are not exactly the outgroup relative to Shakespeare fans! And almost all dislike I hear of Shakespeare is based on difficulty in understanding the language, so it would be very interesting to hear a criticism from someone who wasn't put off by that at all -- Jonson's most famous plays are full of contemporary cultural references that make them IMO even harder for a modern audience than most Shakespeare.
The once-shared-culture top-40 era yielded thousands of songs that many if not most Americans - if specific to their decade, and by "decade" I mean about fifteen or 20 years - could sing some portion of the lyrics of. This is almost like a faint signal from the past, of the role of music pre-recording. To me anyway. But you need not accept that claim to realize that the "work of digging out the obscure" fails on that metric, in the same way that those endless pop songs perhaps fail, many of them, in terms of "quality", to the musically-gifted or musically-purist. But it further fails in that I doubt many of the musical hipsters will one day burst into their own equivalent of "Under the Redwood Tree" which so happened to be the earworm in my head last evening as I was cooking dinner.
Some of the themes touched on here have to do with people being one-dimensional, or presenting themselves as such. "Imagine building your personality around X" has become a staple way to dismiss people online. But no matter how interesting or high-status X is, I really can't understand people who brand themselves around that thing. I've got a lot of hobbies and interests, and I can't imagine wearing a t-shirt or hat or button that says "this one thing is my whole deal" in a general context (if I was specifically doing to a video game convention, I might wear something about a favorite game, or if I am going to a car show I might wear something about a favorite car, but not out in the general public). I kind of want people to get to know me more organically.
I'm not sure how to articulate this, but I think that Ready Player One need to be a part of this conversation. The film pitched itself as a nostalgia-fueled celebration of nerd stuff, but it mostly just mashed-up elements from some of the most financially successful and popular mainstream films of all time. The book pitched itself as an anthem of obscure nerd culture and trivia, but again, it is mostly trivia about those massively successful mainstream movies and games. The author appears to have pursued nerd-dom more as an identity than a true love, since he can only prove his nerd cred by citing endless lists of obscure trivia, but he can't describe his love of the source materials.
> When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me.
One word: jazz.
>Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth - The Tale Of Albanaidd Hir, The Warrior Who Could Turn Into An Ant
If we lived in a timeline where that was real, then if it was good it would have survived the test of time.
On whether it's "really" about status or genuine liking, the ultimate-proximate distinction seems relevant:
If you say it's about status... You could be saying that they don't actually care that much about the thing in itself; they are just pretending to like it in order to achieve some other goal, like status. Like a politician saying what he knows the people want to hear, even though knowing he doesn't actually believe it himself. Possible, but it seems unlikely.
OTOH, they could genuinely like it, and the reason they like it is because it's status-enhancing. It would not at all be surprising if if we were psychologically wired in such a way that we enjoy things that are status enhancing. People seek out sexual opportunities because they genuinely enjoy sex, and people genuinely enjoy sex because throughout evolutionary history, sex led to the conception of children. That doesn't mean people who try to get laid have the ulterior motive of conceiving children, and don't really like sex.
Whether or not status-seeking is the best explanation for the behavior in question is another thing. It may or may not be. But these kinds of explanations for why people do things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1745691610393528
Not to rehash others’ comments, but I think you’re deeply wrong about sports in a way that is emblematic of the problem with the entire post. Sports are an incredibly thrilling art form to those who enjoy them, have a rich and ancient history, etc.
My guess is some people derive deep meaning/transcendent joy from MCU movies or watching porn or playing video games, but not many; most just slip into that because it’s easy. Most of those people would experience something they would judge to be superior if they did a harder but more rewarding activity—reading a great book, making great art, gazing at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Any objective analysis of art is silly—the MCU isn’t worse than Tolkien for everyone, and just because you hate Marvel movies and sports doesn’t make them worse than any other leisure hobby. The argument for things being “bad” to base your personality around can only be made with reference to counterfactuals you might find more meaningful.
Sports are bad, because the same things happen over and over every game??? That's a fundamental misunderstanding of sports and why people like them. Also, why is "the same thing happens every time" a knock against sports and not popular "nerd" things like Star Wars/LotR/MCU? They aren't really a shining example of originalness. But anyways I have 4 points of why people like sports:
1. Watching pro sports is a shared experience among everybody in the community - it's no coincidence that US teams represent universities or major US cities. You can feel like you have something in common with your neighbor and common happiness or pain to talk about.
2. If you play a sport, then you'll probably want to watch that sport too, because you can understand what the players are going through physically and mentally, be amazed at how good they are, and try to learn some new techniques.
3. Sports are a great way to get your kids to exercise more, learn to socialize with other kids, learn teamwork, etc. I would argue that no other hobby for kids accomplishes this.
4. Sports are an equal opportunity hobby/sports are very cheap and accessible to play (and watch). Yes football requires lots of equipment and organization... but anyone can buy a soccer ball or basketball and start playing at a public park right away. Other "nerd" entertainment like books, movies, board games, or video games cost more money.
For me, the act of collecting has always required the concept of repurposing or recontextualizing something. I’m a comic book collector, and fanatic enough about it to have spent decades working at a comic book store (that’s where you find your wheat pennies! work retail!), and I like collecting old comics in part because I know they were meant to be disposable—keeping them is in some way subverting their destiny.
Customers would come into the store saying, e.g. “I collect Bowen busts” (little statues of superheroes that used to come out roughly monthly) and I’d be annoyed. I didn’t say it, but what I was thinking was: “You’re not a collector; you just have an implicit contract with Bowen in which they put out a product and your purchase it.” This would go the same for “collectors” of Wolverine appearances or 1 in 100 variants. What’s the point of collecting something with the words “collector’s item” right on it?
I imagine the same thing would apply to coin collecting—getting coins from the mint, slabbed and labeled “for collectors” is no different from buying a box of cereal, while an old buffalo nickle was never intended to leave circulation. I guess you could say that its existence preceded its essence, if you were a existentialist.
Of course, you can also just collect comics because you want to read old series that have not been reprinted, such as Around the Block with Dunc and Lou or Arak Son of Thunder…
"When I said sports were bad, I didn’t mean this as a final value judgment. I meant that, by our usual standards of entertainment, sports are bad. Imagine a sitcom which had several thousand episodes, each with the exact same plot (some people try to get a ball from one side of the court to the other). At some point, surely most people would stop watching! I appreciate the something something human spirit, and I’m happy to know that, somewhere in the world, sports are happening. It’s just the decision to actually watch them that confuses me."
Does *playing* sports also seem bad by our usual standards of entertainment? Kids will kick a ball between goals every day without getting bored of it--it seems like that's a more established standard than sitcoms. I play ranked matches in SSBU and I watch pro matches on YouTube sometimes. My own skills and the skills of the pros I watch are continually changing, in addition to the metagame evolving. It doesn't feel repetitive.
> Admit that it would be indistinguishable from other myths, but say that the quality of the Mabinogion is in the style, language, and pacing, not the plot (but most English-speakers enjoy the Mabinogion in translation or summary; does that detract from this claim?)
I think a lot of what makes a story high-quality is in the details. Can the reader/listener/watcher empathize with the characters? Can they understand what's going on? Do the characters behave with some amount of consistency? Does the tone match the plot? Part of what MCU movies get criticism for is factors like these; if you translated the story, but managed to fix those problems, it would probably be considered good, but it's unclear to me how closely it would match the Marvel version.
But, I do think being old and being limited to text or even verbal recitation also is an advantage, because you get credit for creativity for being the first, and you get to avoid criticism like "it's just empty spectacle and bright lights" or "this is just trying to sell me toys." (On the other hand, maybe cynics of the past would say that their myths just exist to prop up the latest warlord who calls himself king, so it's entirely down a shift in perspective and context rather than anything about the story).
I guess the question I would ask is, "*why* are the classics considered the classics?" Is it just that they're just the oldest stories we still have from each culture? Or is there some other reason they survived, that they're actually the best stories from each civilization, and the worst ones were forgotten or we just don't talk about them? For really ancient cultures the former might be the case, but there's plenty of books from e.g. the 1800s that nobody remembers while there's a handful of very famous ones. Ant-Man might just be more like the forgotten morass than A Tale of Two Cities--comparing a 99.9% story to a 75% one doesn't make much sense in the first place.
If sports were pre-scripted to have funny/interesting things happen in them, like a sitcom, they would become much more varied and rich and colourful - ie "good", the way Scott defines "good by the standards of entertainment", here - and not even the most die-hard sports fan would like them. Moreover, I would't imagine they'd appeal to Scott any more for all their added variety and intrigue. I don't think sports are enjoyed for the same reasons as most other forms of entertainment, and can't be measured along the same axes.
....yes, that also goes for reference-class tennis....
[Tried to expand on this below, but I think it sort-of came out more like a love letter to sports-in-general than anything else. Please skip the rest if you don't care why somebody might enjoy sport!]
One one level I think sports can be enjoyed as pure physical spectacle, like a ballet or a Saturn V launch; things that're impossibly far beyond anything you could do yourself and you can't help being impressed/mesmerised by the spectacle.
On another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of chess match, except with eg. lean figures in crash helmets with reaction times like houseflies on amphetamines, big angry-looking muscley men in tights, etc. etc. instead of little black and white figures. On this level it's not about driving the racing car or chasing the ball, it's about how the respective chess players - the race director in a Grand Prix, the hive mind formed from the brain pathways established in countless training sessions - place and move their (loud, brightly-coloured, expensive) pieces, and how their strategies unfold. Beneath the physical spectacle there are multiple striations of chess-like matches, from the speed-chess of a single match (or even a series of manoeuvres within a match) to the drawn-out psychological warfare of a ranked competitive season.
On yet another level I think sports can be enjoyed as a sort of improvisation performance, on a spectrum somewhere between improv. comedy (heavily improvised but largely collaborative) and a tabletop role-playing game (only partially improvised but more adversarial). It's not that a certain thing was said or done so much as that it was said and done "right then!".
I think these factors can trade-off against one another depending on the sport and the observer:
A semiprofessional watching their own club might not derive all that much from the physical spectacle after a decade competing in the sport themself, but they might be much more appreciative of any tactical nuance or grand strategy going on in the underlying chess match.
..whereas a ten-year-old boy seeing their first match might not be able to recognise the feints and bluffs and gambits, but they might have a much stronger sense of "bloody hell, those guys are HUGE! And they're all dressed exactly the same! And look at them RUN!"
..whereas the Bouldering World Cup might have all the strategic depth of a game of Snap but there are some breathtaking feats of improvisation performed by competitors trying to solve a 3.5D geometry problem, on-the-fly, with their bodies.
Probably already said by someone else: sports are substitute warfare. In a war, you and some other guys put on uniforms and then go try and beat crap out of some other guys in uniforms from a different town. Amazing how America's most popular sport, football, recreates this dynamic, right? No, no it's not, actually. So I guess there are two ways to look at your aversion to competitive sports, Scott. On the one hand, it probably speaks well for you that you apparently don't have this archaic mental architecture that gets excited by the prospect of defeating/dominating/humiliating other tribes that many of us do. On the other hand, what kind of weirdo doesn't enjoy that prospect at least a little bit?
> Suppose we took the Ant-Man movie, translated the plot into concepts that would make sense in medieval Welsh, and wrote it up in the style of a Mabinogion myth ... I can think of a few possible ways to treat this experiment:
This thought experiment just seems very straightforward to me: the answer is Scott's #3. If you genuinely did a good job of this, your product would be a genuinely different work, whose quality could potentially be much higher than that of Ant-Man.
We see something analogous with film adaptations of novels. They are different works, whose quality can be very different from the source material. It is common for a great novel to have a shitty film adaptation. Occasionally, a shitty novel has a great film adaptation (e.g., The Godfather). But either way, there is no paradox.
Hence, Scott is describing as puzzling something that should not be at all puzzling.
> The Ern Malley hoax ... makes me even more doubtful.
This is another pseudo-paradox. The whole point of the Ern Malley hoax was that the thing purported to be high-quality (the poetry of Angry Penguins) was not in fact high-quality. In other words, it wasn't simply the Ern Malley poems that were fake, it was the originals being parodied that were also fake, and the purpose of the hoax was precisely to demonstrate that.
So, not the counter-example that Scott purports.
I "like" and "enjoy" some things I don't think are "good," which I've long realized doesn't quite make sense.
But to take video games as an example: I've spent quite a bit of time on Cat Cafe, a phone game about cute cats running a cafe. I clearly "like" it. I also "like" Outer Wilds, an indie game whose ending made me weep with sorrowful joy. I enjoy both games, but only one is good.
Outer Wilds is good, and not just enjoyable, because it makes me feel deeper and more complex feelings, because it does what it does in a more interesting way (I could write an essay about it), because it requires more investment (you get better at playing it over time)...
What I was trying to get at with my comment (listing popular 70s-00s superhero movies) was not to quibble about the date that nerdy things became popular, it was to say that superhero movies have never been nerdy.
Nerdiness is more about how you engage with the subject matter than the subject matter itself, and watching a two-hour superhero or sci-fi movie once in a while is the sort of low-commitment engagement that's normal and socially acceptable.
Watching a Batman movie is normal, reading a Batman comic is weird. Watching a Star Wars movie is normal, reading the novelisation of a Star Wars movie is weird. Reading fantasy novels is weird, but watching a TV show based on a fantasy novel is fine (and if the TV show is popular enough it might even make reading the novels normal too, for a while).
Why? Because reading is low-status? No, because deep involvement with shallow material is low status, and reading a book about something shallow is a deeper level of involvement than just seeing the movie.
That's why I have a problem with the MCU movies being one of the central examples of nerdy stuff in the essay -- they're really not that nerdy, which is why they're popular. Superhero material isn't intrinsically nerdy, it's just sufficiently shallow that historically most forms of engagement with the material (ie reading comic books or collecting figurines) have been nerdy.
"A nerd is a geek who would rather be right than get laid." There are fanatics who like their special interest even in a vacuum – call them "geeks." And there is another type of fanatic who uses his interest as a tool of aggression – call him a "nerd" – as in: given the slightest pretext (or, often, apropos of nothing) the nerd will gloat over his superior knowledge of his special interest, apparently deriving more satisfaction from feeling smarter than what he loses by alienating people in the process.
Hmm. I find all of these categories incomprehensible and not corresponding to any social world I know. Perhaps I'm too old. It just seems like video games and comic books -- things which in my time were associated entirely with childhood -- are now things that many adults like. It makes me feel like there are no adults anymore, but I'm pretty sure it just means I'm old.
The problem is that you are conflating production quality and social status in the term “quality” sometimes we just have genre preferences... but often this is heavily intwined with social preferences
If you want to find original nerds in the wild, go to a hamfest. I think that might one of the few places where original style 70s nerds still exists and haven't been polluted with the current pop-culture version of nerd.
>My lack of a good answer to this experiment makes me reluctant to make too much hinge on abstracted “quality”, separate from “ability to make many people very much enjoy the thing” or “competence at execution” (both of which the Marvel movies have). The Ern Malley hoax, where lots of people who supposedly had good taste were tricked into declaring something high-quality when it superficially appeared to have the characteristics of high-quality things (mildly incomprehensible, used big words, written by someone who toiled in obscurity and died tragically) makes me even more doubtful.
C. S. Lewis had some thoughts related to this, in his essay "Lilies that Fester." The essay was actually taking it from the other end: at the time Lewis was responding, in part, to a society where the fashion was that "high culture" is snobbish and pretentious. But he does spend some time trying to describe what "culture" is, and what it isn't, and compares it directly to enjoying lower forms of art like "Fantasy and Science Fiction" (and he should know, he wrote books in both of those genres).
>"The talk is inimical to the thing talked of, likely to spoil it where it exists
and to prevent its birth where it is unborn.
"Now culture seems to belong to the same class of dangerous and embarrassing words. Whatever else it may mean, it certainly covers deep and genuine enjoyment of literature and the other arts. (By using the word enjoyment 1 do not mean to beg the vexed question about the role of pleasure in our experience of the arts. I mean frui, not delectari; as we speak of a man "enjoying" good health or an estate.) Now if I am certain of anything in the world, I am certain that while a man is, in this sense, enjoying Don Giovanni or the Oresteia he is not caring one farthing about culture. Culture? the irrelevance of it! For just as to be fat or clever means to be fatter or cleverer than most, so to be cultured must mean to be more so than most, and thus the very word carries the mind at once to comparisons, and groupings, and life in society. And what has all that to do with the horns that blow as the statue enters, or Clytaemnestra crying, "Now you have named me aright'? In Howard's End Mr. E. M. Forster excellently describes a girl listening to a symphony. She is not thinking about culture: nor about "Music"; nor even about "this music." She sees the whole world through the music. Culture, like religion, is a name given from outside to activities which are not themselves interested in culture at all, and would be ruined the moment they were."
...
"Suppose you had spent an evening among very young and very transparent snobs who were feigning a discriminating enjoyment of a great port, though anyone who knew could see very well that, if they had ever drunk port in their lives before, it came from a grocer's. And then suppose that on your journey home you went into a grubby little tea-shop and there heard an old body in a feather boa say to another old body, with a smack of her lips, "That was a nice cup o' tea, dearie, that was. Did me good." Would you not, at that moment, feel that this was like fresh mountain air? For here, at last, would be something real. Here would be a mind really concerned about that in which it expressed concern. Here would be pleasure, here would be undebauched experience, spontaneous and compulsive, from the fountain-head. A live dog is better than a dead lion. In the same way, after a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
"'The child whose love is here, at least doth reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.'
"I should still prefer the live dog to the dead lion; perhaps, even, the wild dog to the over-tame poodle or Peke. "
If you take someone who likes video games in genre X and force them to review a video game in disliked genre Y, their review is likely to include the criticism that the game in genre Y is "repetitive". In most cases, I think an objective analysis would conclude that genres X and Y are approximately equally repetitive, and I think what's actually going on is that people who are enjoying themselves don't notice (or don't mind) repetition as much.
Complaints that some movies are "pulling your strings" sound a bit similar to me. I bet there's a strong tendency to perceive unsuccessful attempts to engage you as "string-pulling" but successful attempts as "providing actual value" (quality).
I don't want to go too far on this point, because I also think that humans have exploitable bugs that you can use to get them to pay more attention to a thing without actually providing more value/enjoyment/etc, and I think "string-pulling" is a pretty valid criticism of media that does this. (In fact, I wish our culture criticized this more!)
Some things I would consider examples of this: games with daily login rewards; books or TV shows that go out of their way to end every episode/chapter on a cliffhanger; intriguing clues that don't actually point to anything.
Does someone want to argue that the MCU has an unusually-high concentration of "string-pulling" in THAT sense? My first impression is that it doesn't, but I'd be interested to hear arguments that it does.
Where does "being the guy who is really, really good at A Thing" count in the hierarchy of identity? Like, a chess grandmaster, or something?
I hung out on the Internet in 1997 when USENET was still a thing and played console RPGs before Final Fantasy 7 made them mainstream. God, I sound like such a hipster...
"The natural true self is exactly the boring thing we’re trying to get away from in favor of becoming a more interesting person."
What is Scott looking for when he goes to a party and talks with new people? (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/every-bay-area-house-party) It seems the driving factor is for something "interesting", which is how he judges his own success at being received. I think that's defined differently depending on what your background is in all the ways Scott complains about some things as 'boring' that others shell out lots of money to be entertained by. It's not that those people are paying money to be bored. It's that Scott's definition of 'interesting' diverges from theirs.
For those who have a difficult time understanding how other people can enjoy sports (while still acknowledging that, somehow, those folks do enjoy sports ...) I would like to suggest spending some time on the YouTube channel "SEC Shorts." This mostly works if one understands football at least a little bit. It works better if one also has some sense for SEC rivalries, but this is not necessary. Being an SEC football fan is *totally* unnecessary.
And the channel is a bunch of short (~5 minutes) FUNNY videos that cover each week of a given SEC season. The videos are comedy gold, but for understanding how folks might care about their local sports-ball team I recommend also reading the comments.
Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esYZ15aIccU
Why do you need to "build an identity" at all? What even is an "identity"? Baffled by the underlying concepts here. I literally don't understand what "building an identity" means, it's just a blur of static. Somebody please explain this to me from first principles.
The comment about sports having the same plot over and over again is pretty weird, since one of the hallmarks of nerdery is obsessive rewatching. Soccer games that I watch follow a recognizable pattern, for sure, but they’re not nearly as repetitive as each rewatching I’ve done of Star Wars.
It struck me that hipster and nerd activities differ greatly in gender segregation. Male nerds play Magic: The Gathering while female nerds write fan fiction: they don't interact much, and when they do, it's generally bad. I'm not really up to speed on what hipsters do these days, but I understand it's normal for straight people to meet romantic partners there. Trying that at a nerd activity where the sex ratio is 4:1 is a sick joke.
As someone in the demo to have snooty tastes/interests, I've always pushed back, thinking it's mostly a pose to signal intelligence, wealth, etc. I don't doubt the proponents really do prefer X (whether it's pour over coffee or derida) to Y (sportsball nsync). But still think it's all about signaling, tribalism, etc. Back in the day, it was easy, if you had more than one set of clothes, or they were clean, or you could speak properly, you were elite, anyone could tell. Now everyone has clothes, speaks roughly the same, etc. So you've got digger to make clear your Bay area or NYC intelligentsia with the right kind of education, politics, etc. And I love the folk who don't get that sportsball is the best value for your entertainment attention span dollar. It's like an NFT, unless you sat there in (quasi) real time and watch playoff Jimmy destroy the bucks, you don't get it (it was phenomenal).
> it doesn't seem mysterious that some people eg like Star Wars, or even love Star Wars. What seems mysterious to me is when this expresses itself as desire to buy thousands of dollars of figurines in the original boxes, or memorize the stats of every class of ship in the Imperial Navy, or something else which doesn't seem very fun on its own merits.
With respect, that's just you not understanding what is and isn't fun.
> Comments With Strong Opinions On The Definition Of Nerds, Geeks, Etc
For 70s usage of the word "nerd", we have the theme song to Revenge of the Nerds:
𝘔𝘰𝘮 𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘴 𝘶𝘴 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘭𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘩, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 '𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘭
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘳
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘣𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘪𝘳
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘞𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘯 𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘨𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘺-𝘥𝘶𝘵𝘺 𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘉𝘶𝘵𝘵𝘰𝘯-𝘥𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘵 𝘧𝘶𝘭𝘭 𝘰𝘧 𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴
𝘞𝘦'𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵-𝘈 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴, 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴' 𝘱𝘦𝘵𝘴
𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘶𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘦'𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘰 𝘳𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘴
[𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴, 𝘢𝘯 𝘶𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘶𝘴]
𝘚𝘰 𝘪𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢 𝘥𝘰𝘳𝘬, 𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘻 𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘨𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘥, 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘬
𝘏𝘦𝘺 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘯'𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘥
𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘫𝘰𝘬𝘦'𝘴 𝘰𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶, 𝘪𝘵'𝘴 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘳𝘥𝘴
This is so explicit that it makes me wonder if the movie's audience might not have been expected to be familiar with the term. We learn a lot about nerds:
1. They are primarily defined by their unpopularity and social awkwardness. Girls hate them.
2. They wear terrible clothes and need glasses. They are unattractive in every other way as well; when they laugh, it sounds stupid instead of infectious. Also, girls hate them.
3. They do well in school and are popular with teachers.
4. They are variously referred to as nerds, dorks, spazzes, and geeks; these are either interchangeable terms or ones that frequently cooccur.
5. As a group, they contrast with "jocks" and "beautiful people".
I have to take issue with some assumptions that Scott would like to make - sci-fi fandom, interest in math, interest in computers, maleness, and poor social skills all do still go together. (Nonconformity with mainstream interests can just be considered an example of poor social skills.) Nothing has happened to the nerd cluster. The typical sci-fi fan is only "closer" to being a socially-adept young woman in the sense that they might be slightly more prevalent now than they once were; there are not enough of them to have shifted the average, median, or mode in a noticeable way. [1] Fantasy really has developed a lot of female fans, but not sci-fi.
Something else that probably plays into this is a redefinition of what can be called "sci-fi". Compare what's happened to "roguelike" games, where the genre still exists and is still called roguelike, but if you search for "roguelike" you find a bunch of games that have nothing in common with Rogue or roguelikes, and people think they should be called "roguelike" too.
So, according to me, the nerd cluster is still around, just as obvious and just as unpopular as ever. "Successor clusters" is the wrong way to think about things; the nerds are still around and haven't divided into new clusters - rather, other clusters have been named according to sharing a single common trait with the nerd cluster, as if nerds made up a significant portion of those other clusters. But that was never true; it's a misperception that occurred when the names were applied. (Compare, again, "roguelikes".)
Use of computers should not be confused with interest in computers or with approval of the people who do things with them. For this I'll call on my memory of a story from Hacker News from someone who developed an anonymous chat platform restricted to his high school, which quickly became very popular -- and who immediately learned, by attempting to join random conversations about his platform, that being responsible for creating and maintaining a tool everyone loved didn't mean he could rise above the level of "actively unpopular".
[1] I'm still sore about Scott making the unsupported assertion in an earlier post that "the rich" isn't generally viewed as a pejorative because its usual usage isn't pejorative. I think this is plainly false; I'll leave a followup comment with citations.
Another point in favour of collecting being well and alive: fashion (especially bags and jewellery). I used to lurk on counterfeit fashion reddit (it got nuked in 2021 or so due to being illegal activity). People have amassed huge collections of counterfeit bags.
They know they're fake. They're not trying to pass them off as real. The majority opinion was that sale of a fake as real was scumbag activity, they appreciate fakes as fakes. But a lot of people described the thrill of the chase and a bit of a gambling element - finding a so-and-so from this collection in a seller's album, clandestinely messaging someone on some message app, scrutinising the article for faults and inaccuracies, the chance that your bag would get seized by customs....
I get the impression that a lot of people could afford a couple of genuine articles, but walking into a store and waving the credit card almost feels too easy after you've bought fakes.
The missing piece for understanding love of sport is tribalism. Sport may be boring for a neutral (at least the 50th game in the season may be) but for a tribalistic fan every moment can feel heightened. It may be analogous to having a truckload of money on the result.
The Argentina fans of the most recent world cup were never bored. Even if the games had been uneventful.
Further, we love _live_ sport. It allows mass synchrony. In fact, it's a superstimulis.
Tribalism and mass synchrony can leave the level of the profane and approach the sacred. Many sporting events have a religious feel to them. It can fill our god-shaped hole. Again, imagine the Argentina fans at the last world cup.
I'd cite traditional evo psych arguments for why tribalism and synchrony appeal to us.
> the other one, of course, is the assumption the the MCU is bad, when it is, in fact one of the human race's greatest artistic achievements
"18 beautiful movies, interconnected into a single tapestry, a surging saga exploring the nature of power and responsibility."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1mbbYKPpHY&ab_channel=CollegeHumor
(This video relates to the post too, not just the comment. Also, it's funny!)
Regarding coin collecting and the possibility of finding rare coins in change, I wonder if someone has compared the drop in popularity in America vs Europe/UK.
If we hypothesize that encountering rare coins in the wild is what mints coin collectors, then I'd speculate that American numismatics would be healthier. Every American coin every minted is still legal tender, and since Americans hate change, every denomination has had the same dimensions for the past 157 years(excepting dollar coins). A quarter minted in 1867 would be counted correctly if you tried to buy a bag of chips in a vending machine today. Thus, despite Gresham's law and generations of collectors, there are still coins in circulation with both intrinsic bullion value and coins are 'historic' and exciting, especially when comparing to the age of the country.
A random anecdote from a google search: this dude has obsessively searched through 320,800 nickels(https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=198187) records that he has a 1.3% rate of interesting coins, and a 1/5000 chance of finding a nickel older than the current Jefferson ones. He has found nickels dating back to the 1800s, and calculates that there still are on the order of a million century plus old nickels not sitting dusty in a collection, but actively circulating.
Or this guy (https://www.coincommunity.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=352071&whichpage=19) who searched through 326,950 pennies on his heroic and noble quest to search through a million, and has found 4 Indian head pennies and 1400 wheat pennies, for about a 1/250 chance of a 'rare' penny. Or this guy (https://www.treasurenet.com/threads/6-month-half-dollars-total-jan-jun-22.673503/) who has found 116 silver half dollars out of 78,000, about 1/700 chance.
Those odds don't seem hobby killing bad by themselves. I'd expect that if I used cash ever, especially on a daily basis, I'd see at least one rare coin in some denomination every month. And even in my very occasional, once a month use of cash, I think I did get a wheat penny as change in past 5 years. I have an uncle who is one of these coin roll hunters and has found some legitimately historic coins, like 3 cent coins from the 1860s and silver coins from the 1890s.
Contrast this to Europe or the UK, where adopting the Euro/decimalization meant that all older coins were taken out of circulation cause they no longer were legal tender and the sizes of coin rolls and vending machines didn't match up. In Europe there is a close to 0% chance of finding a silver coin worth more than face value, a 0% chance of find a coin that could have been spent by Abraham Lincoln(duh, he never went to Europe, insert historical figure from non-USA country here), only modern coins and the commemorative state-quarter equivalents. Maybe there is some other effect where the deep history of Europe muddle this comparison, so looking at Australia, which is a former English colony but has only coins since 1966 in circulation, might prove our hypothesis whether coin collectors are created by encountering rare coins.
There _is_ a new world for nerd that means essentially all of the same stuff as the 1970s meaning, and it is "neckbeard".
Despised and cancelled, just as the nerds were too awkward to know (or often, care) what to say and when; and of obscure taste (whether obscure because bad or obscure because impenetrable).
Neckbeard take: If you hear that word and immediately think, "no, nerds are nice but misunderstood but a neckbeard is actually an awful person because of..."—then consider that maybe in the 1970's you'd've felt the same about nerds.
I still find myself very confused by the idea of "building an identity" and wanting to "identify with things". I don't deny people do it, clearly they do. I just don't get it. I don't have any urge to reduce myself down to some small lossy set of things, and I don't understand why you would or what problem that solves. It's certainly possible I'm just misunderstanding and this is actually something I do, but I don't think so.
Can anyone enlighten me?
> I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y.
Here's how a "normal" person does this - takes turns sharing the broad strokes of their lives, and comparing it to the other person's. I might not know your father, but I recognize the broad archetype of "youngest child, moved away after highschool to a bigger city, etc."
Where nerds differ, is that they don't live their own life, they live a proxy life through media or intellectual pursuits. So the broad strokes of their life boils down to "sat in a room and thought about stuff". Even if they *have* done things, the salient features they care about are the proxies.
To me, nerd behaviour speaks to discomfort with the self. It's safer to hide behind polished stories than to be yourself.
Let's understand sports.
Sports aren't all bad, you're just tone deaf to them. It's okay, I am too. Here are two ways to find tone:
- Sports are stories. I learned this from watching the author John Green tape literally hundreds of short videos of himself playing a soccer video game. As he played, he told the story of his team, and once or twice he stopped to explain that this *was* the point of sports: it's a repeating storytelling vehicle, not unlike an ancient epic. The direct equivalent of "it's just men in shirts chasing a ball for four thousand episodes" is "The Silmarillion is boring, Beowulf is boring, there have been one million historical battles and one million fictional battles, and nothing ever changes and there's always some forgettable warrior who ends up king, I do not *care* which warrior it is".
I do not like or care about soccer, but I *very much* liked the epic story of John Green's Wimbledon Wimbly Womblies, captained by John Green and his husband Other John Green, teammates in love and in life. Althought it played out over hundreds of similar episodes, it was a pretty good story. But this is *exactly* the story sports fans are telling themselves.
- Probably most people resonate with *some* of the sports, but unfortunately we are all forcibly exposed to the lowest common denominator in our area. I am an American, and I think football is the MCU of sports: boring, over packaged, over sold. I like a few other sports here and there a bit. My subjective preferences crossed with the dominant local sports means I've not been a sports fan historically.
But I recently tried Formula 1 (culturally dominant in some parts of the world, but unheard of in America until recently, so, thanks, Netflix!) and it resonates with me: it's a crooked, chaotic evil engineering competition, put in the hands of people with the same personality as fighter pilots, who zoom around experiencing 5 G turns for *hours*, often crashing and sometimes even catching fire. I was lucky to have my first experience of the sport *in person*, standing with my face pressed up to the fence next to the track, and the volume and physical *power* of the cars made me take a *big* involuntary step backwards. Apparently that's the normal reaction. Wow! I'm a fan and I expect I'll watch this sport on and off for the rest of my life.
It sounds like I am describing a situation, but actually I am expressing a subjective preference. "It's just dudes sitting in cars going around in a circle" is also a preference.
To resonate with no sports, it is probably necessary to be a properly non-physical person. If you believe your body is just a vehicle for your head, and you'd rather live in a totally non-physical world, maybe no sport resonates. If you have any physicality, there's probably some sport for you in an ideal world. Maybe you really like the feeling of being on a trampoline, and you just have yet to try Circue du Soleil, or you love to work on your contact juggling, and you've never seen people do it competitively.
Rogert Kegan had ideas on what you can (or should) build your identity around - here presented in another Chapman post: https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
As far as I can tell, building your identity around a thing is Kegan stage 3? Depending on where you sit on the people-vs-things spectrum, a Stage 3 identity might be more about the thing itself or the "thing community" (the fandom, for example). It might be less traditional than building your identity around your family, or your community, but it still reads to me like a variation on the same theme.
If that's true, then one answer to Ghatanathoah's question what the alternative is to build your identity around is that it's ok and necessary to go through this phase, but to attain full modern adulthood, at some point you have to progress to Stage 4 where you still have interests and relationships, but you're not defined by them.
I find your hierarchy of virtuous interests pretty amusing. On one hand, I think I qualify as having a "top-tier" identity. I'm doing research level pure mathematics: my current study is on families of supersingular hyperelliptic curves over algebraically closed fields of characteristic 2, and I think these mathematical objects are really neat. On the other hand, I also think I qualify as having several "lower-tier" identities. I have a bunch of Pokemon plushies lying around in my room and I wear a Time Gear necklace from Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky everywhere I go. I'm also obsessed with the children's book series "Wings of Fire" by Tui T. Sutherland: I go to conventions that the author goes to and listen to all her panels, I have a signed copy of my favorite book in the series on my bookshelf and I've gotten the cover of my Kindle Paperwhite signed by her *twice* (I needed to do it a second time because I bought a new Kindle), I'm in Wings of Fire roleplay servers on Discord where I play as various characters that I spent several hours creating, and I've been actively writing Wings of Fire fanfiction for the past five years.
The funny thing is, I would sooner degrade myself for being a math nerd than for being a Wings of Fire nerd. If someone asks me why I like math so much, my answer is usually "I don't know, something's just wrong with my brain I guess." But if someone asks me why I like Wings of Fire so much, I'll give them a straight answer about how deep and interesting each character in the series is. And even though I'm truly fascinated by pure math, I think I'd sooner try connecting with someone over a shared interest in fantasy dragons than a shared interest in algebraic number theory.
Regarding identity levels: I think it's optimal to have one or more traits on each (except perhaps the lower-tier). A person whose only trait is a love of complex mathematical abstraction may be kinda cool, but it would be very difficult to find contact with him.
It’s odd that a man so interested in humanity and human foibles doesn’t seem to understand why sports are good, even when they are bad.
Objectively a 1-0 soccer game is boring to neutrals but subjectively it’s highly entertaining ,if stressful, to the fans involved, particularly if it’s an important game like a World Cup final. Why? Tribalism. Male bonding. Love of country, or city, or even just the team.
Most team sport is about losing more than winning. Even countries generally successful in the soccer world cup can not expect to win most tournaments. Argentina are the WC champions, and one of the most successful teams in the tournament. Prior to their recent win they last won in 1986.
imagine being a life long Argentinian fan watching the last World Cup final. If you are old enough to remember the last win ( as I said in 1986) you may not realistically expect to be around for the next one. If you are a teenager it’s not likely to happen until you are middle aged or perhaps never, either way a win is extremely important and the game - however ugly or boring to outsiders - is going to be an extraordinary tense and exciting match for the fan, quite possibly an experience he may never have again. That’s what makes it extraordinary.
( As it happened the game was objectively good but that doesn’t matter to the actual fans. In fact a boring 1-0 victory is more stressful to the fans all the way through. When you are drawing the other side’s chances are worrying because they can go ahead, at 1 ahead it is still worrying because you might lose your lead. )
In non team sports the amazement is that people can do extraordinary things in gymnastics, athletics, pole vaulting, etc.
Part 5 made me appreciate how rationalist/EAs in general, and Scott in particular, overcorrected on Elephant In The Brain. Not *literally everything* people do is about status, despite what the book says. If you stop and think about it for 5 seconds, it becomes kinda obvious that it can't be true. For one, our brains simply cannot be that perfectly optimized for status-seeking even if it was their only job, since nothing in evolution is ever that perfect. But secondly, in the ancestral adaptation environment (unlike in the present day Bay Area) you just can't afford to single-mindedly focus on status - you would get eaten, or starve, or be killed by an invading tribe, or otherwise will have the reality getting back at you.
I think this overcorrection hurts the community as a whole, and is deteriorating for individual mental well-being (unless you're near the very top of your local social ladder, as Scott I assume is).
The Star Wars game was okay.
Could it be that traditionally (in the hunter-gatherer / village) people know you fairly well including the son of X stuff as well as good at Y bad at Z, so there is a base level of connection (I live in a village). In San Fran etc they don't so you have to try harder for connections with other folk.
I legitimately love the current trend of "X-core" or "X aesthetic". I'm not entirely sure how it fits in with this, but it sure does seem pretty close to the "actually enjoying things and not caring about social status" idea(l).
"it doesn’t work for a lot of practical tasks - I can’t get common ground with someone at a party or start a conversation by introducing myself as the son of X or husband of Y - most people just won’t know X or Y."
Works like a charm in the sort of small, rural, generational towns I spend my time in.
Scott Alexander commenting about sports is about as useful as me commenting about sewing.
another (belated) response: https://substack.com/profile/14289667-sam-kriss/note/c-15546647
I feel it's important to note whenever people bring up Star Wars in relation to nerd-ness that all 3 of the original trilogy were the highest grossing movies of their year. Main story Star Wars has *always* been mainstream, and what made Star Wars nerds specifically nerds and not just normal fans was getting into the Extended Universe and knowing the specs for multiple different classes of Star Destroyer, or collecting action figures or what have you.
Look at all the nerds debating what a nerd is