HN user
You’re missing key information on (2.)
Frere-Jones DID put up capital… intellectual capital. He transferred the rights to famous typefaces he had designed, including Whitney, to the company with the understanding that he would be full partner.
Hoefler shafted F-J so hard it’s unbelievable. The foundry’s reputation was built on Gotham which F-J designed. There’s no other way to see it.
That movie was based on the Haruki Murakami short story “Barn Burning,” though it did reference Gatsby directly in the dialogue
He reminds me of Ayn Rand hating on government handouts while taking them. He promotes stoicism while practicing the opposite.
You can say he’s promoting “logical stoicism” just like Ayn Rand fans can say that “it’s okay to be ideologically against handouts while taking them,” but we both know deep down that these people aren’t practicing what they preach.
I like Taleb a lot but it took me a little while to understand that he was writing an idealized version of himself and his philosophy that is frankly fictional but still has great value.
I’m genuinely surprised that getting doxxed wasn’t part of his playbook. It’s not like he went to the greatest of lengths to hide his identity, Bay Area psychiatrists named Scott is a pretty small pool of people.
This is pure speculation but my hunch is that the Scott Alexander of a few years ago wouldn’t care about being doxxed. I agree with your take on this. Become a well known writer on the internet and doom yourself to being forced to live by the principles you articulate. It gets claustrophobic and cognitively dissonant after a few years. I think he didn’t want to be married to the content he’d created forever, was looking for an excuse to shut down the blog, and when this NYT thing happened it was a blessing in disguise because it allowed him to shut it down without losing face.
I think Scott Alexander would be very sympathetic to this line of reasoning too.
Where u at bro
I almost spit out my coffee when you mentioned TALEB as a stoic, much less a member of the “big three”
He’s as far from stoic as I can possibly imagine. His hairtrigger easily offended argumentative twitter presence is maybe even more sensitive and reactive and thin skinned than trump.
In the interest of intellectual honesty, I just wanted to say that I’m an awesome person and I am literally so cool.
This is likely not true for most people.
I think it’s the most direct way to communicate because the connotations are so culturally well-understood.
“Wanna get dinner and maybe have sex?” might be more direct in a textbook way but it’s also unecessary because the second part is already implied, and unecessary words make a question less direct IMO.
I think “wanna get dinner” is the most direct way possible of stating your intentions unless you’re talking to someone who’s not familiar with, or can’t interpret, cultural shorthand.
This dude’s article could alternately be titled “my experiment with treating everyone like they have autism and seeing how that makes them feel.” Prediction: not great
I don’t think he writes or communicates in a vulnerable way at all.
“I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” = not vulnerable, not a question, not direct, not clear.
Also I don’t respect this article so I don’t feel compelled to demonstrate respect — I’d rather practice what he preaches to demonstrate its fundamental rudeness than do any preaching of my own
He’s using the language of self help (“clear and direct communication!”) but interpreting it in a manner reminiscent of the “truth telling sessions” enacted by Synanon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon
> Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of relationships with them. They told me they weren’t interested in romance but they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another talk.
He considers himself to be a “direct” communicator, when this is an example of very indirect communication. The guy wants to date and/or be intimate with someone — telling them “I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” is so much more indirect than asking “wanna get dinner?” it’s not even funny. His barometer of “clear and direct” is totally off in this case.
This guy’s take on “clear and direct communication” is sophomoric and there’s a reason adults don’t communicate in the most direct manner at all times. Sometimes you need to give the other person plausible deniability: asking “wanna see my etchings?” is a cultural shorthand that is just a more respectful way of asking “wanna sleep together?”, but this guys interpretation of clear and direct communication doesn’t seem to have room for a question like that.
Sometimes speaking vaguely rather than directly is a way of respect to your conversational partner. This guy doesn’t get it
How’s your fitness levels and fitness routine?
My criticism would honestly be that his writing is overly stylized and lacking in nuance. He inherits the hyperbolic, poetic quality of McCarthy but often applies it to the mundane and the result sometimes feels overwrought and overdramatized vs realistic.
Could not agree more.
Bob Dylan and DFW deserve Nobels, IMO. Both of those guys have fans of all generations.
I feel like DeLillo is a “writer’s writer.” People like DFW applaud him, as you point out.
I just don’t agree that DeLillo has anywhere near the amount of influence as, say, DFW.
I’m frequently amazed how large and diverse DFW’s fan group is.
DeLillo seems to only appeal to writers. His work is very obscure, even within educated niches.
I completely disagree. I think Don Delillo has an unbelievably cool writing style (especially how he only writes one paragraph per page and makes sure his words LOOK AESTHETIC in addition to conveying meaning). But DeLillo has essentially zero significance in American culture.
No millennials read or connect with his work, and only very few boomers do. I find Delillo’s work largely hostile to readers that don’t share his exact super-wide frame of references and age.
I like DeLillo but the idea of giving him a Nobel is an absolute joke, save the Nobel for artists who actually influence other artists and cultures. DeLillo just doesn’t have much influence and his highly verbose style is transparently hostile.
The title is extremely sensationalistic, Occam’s razor points to undetectable(by humans) scent trails that lead the ants to the same harvesting locations every year.
There are no revelations about memory or collective consciousness to be found in this article. Every Occam in the world would infer human-undetectable scent trails from the evidence presented here, not some cosmic revelation about “how memory works” like the title and first paragraphs of the article heavily imply.
@pg @dang this title and article in general is outrageously misleading.
I unironically know.
This is a controversial opinion, but one that's shared by almost every close friend of mine: labor laws for adolescents (I hesitate to call them "child labor laws," because infantilizing adolescents is the thing that caused the problem to begin with) have had a disastrous effect on society.
I am in full agreement with this opinion. At 14, I was ready to WORK! After school AND during summer! Yet "Child Labor laws" and related bullshit prevented me from contributing to society at a time when I was fully able and willing to.
Yes, that is exactly the bullying being discussed in this thread
Dude even race is a largely cultural designation.
Also, without codifying nerd identity how do you expect the bullying to end?
One crime is legible to the masses, the other is not. The crimes are in no way parallel.
Agree the justice system is a farce .
The difference between a subculture and a social class is blurry at best. Many social classes are composed of different subcultures — like the nerd social class.
It has always been 'safe' to bully the nerds. No other group of people receives this level of public venomous screed.
It’s because nerds are too busy following our interests to bother attacking back. Defending oneself in general doesn’t work: attacking back does. The maxim “Never defend, always attack” is a maxim for a reason.
The only real “solution” here is to attack back and bully the people who bullied you in the first place. And is that really a solution?
If as nerds, we defend ourselves, then we stay in the frame of the bully. If we attack back, we become bullying nerds.
Society needs scapegoats. For decades and decades, nerds have been safe to pick on. It’s not until you get an extremely aggressive nerd like Bill Gates that a member of the “nerd class” even begins to defend themselves. And aggressive nerds are rare and generally self-interested. Rather than attacking back for the “nerd class” as a whole, they attack companies competing with theirs.
What is the solution to this quandary? Everyone who’s read Girard knows we need scapegoats. If not nerds — oh wait, I mean “tech Bros” — then who else can we scapegoat as a society? The answer should obviously be Wall Street IMO, but that moment seems to have passed when the Occupy movement got culturally supplanted by in-group identity politics.
IMO in order to stop the bullying, we must become bullies ourselves which poses two questions:
* do we really wanna do that?
* and would it even work since Occupy failed so dramatically?
Exactly. Will this new platform provide a safe space for the brilliant minds at /r/fatpeoplehate? /s
The problem with all anti-censorship platforms is that they become hate platforms by default, because only people who get deplatformed have an incentive to move there, and it’s mostly hateful loudmouths who get deplatformed.
A company is something “we” build
It is deeply ironic that the company that elucidates this exact philosophy in its IPO is such a good example of a company built by “one.”
I know. Who is he, Johnny Depp? Signing important documents while stoned and drunk out of his mind? Get outta here.
“Although I did seem to be present, I do not recall it!”
It’s the best dark chuckle I’ve had all year.
I think maybe you and I are just using "certificate" differently. to me, a certificate is very different from a degree.
I agree that we are using this word differently, because to me a degree is a certificate.
there’s definitely no way I could be meaningfully certified as a historian
I agree: because of the nature of history, no meaningful certifications of this knowledge can occur. My point is that PEOPLE STILL ATTEMPT, every single day, to award meaningful certifications in this area, and since people are already attempting, it makes sense to just aid their efforts rather than throw out their efforts entirely on ideological grounds, no matter how correct those ideological grounds may be.
I agree that history is not a field that can have a meaningful certification in an abstract sense. My point is that these certifications STILL HAPPEN in a very real and practical sense; so why not optimize the process that already exists rather than wishfully hoping we could shut down the process entirely on ideological grounds.
the idea of having a meaningful certificate in something like history is sort of ridiculous.
I totally agree. But tell that to the universities.
or are you suggesting that we create hundreds of government history certification agencies?
I’m suggesting that this is what we already have, because universities are tax-exempt, so on a fundamental level all professors already do work for the government. We could just keep all the history professors employed, but in the service of a more meritocratic rubber-stamp than the current rubber-stamp game which is based on prestige and SAT scores and various other bullshit factors.
Right now, professors.
If a government agency, then ... professors employed by government agencies.
It wouldn’t be much different except the government would be involved in a different capacity than they already are.
I did
Why do you think Michelangelo’s David shouldn’t exist? That is one of the oddest opinions I’ve ever encountered in my life.
That study talks about teen brains. I’m talking about teen hormones. And that study fails to account for the facts that:
Mao’s rise was driven by youthful rebellion in China
Many Islamic suicide bombers are teenagers
The Amish have rumspringa
And yes some western teens are graffiti artists.
Teen rebellion cuts across cultures, that study just doesn’t show it because it is solely attempting to refute the univariate “brain” factor. I’m not talking about brains. I’m talking about hormones and risk tolerance. Teen rebellion cuts across cultures. And no single-variable “cross cultural study” can prove otherwise