Come on, have another go! It's fun to critique things and tell people they are wrong; I wanted to have a turn.
mozz
joined 2 years ago
"Critiquing" is a pretty charitable description
Yeah, I get that, I think that's probably more why it's provoking resistance; he phrased it deliberately provocatively and wound up excluding some avenues that still produce books and people making a living (like working as an academic / teacher and also doing writing). It just kinda irritated me like, hey, I can draw a really strong and surprising conclusion from this data, and people's reaction "that conclusion is surprising" -> "therefore is wrong" -> "no need to look further, I figured it out for you and corrected you, that was easy next pls"
Just looking down the list of academy members and grabbing some at random I see:
- Claude Dagens, 84-year-old priest
- Dany Laferrière, working writer who lives in Miami
- Jean-Luc Marion, retired professor
- Andreï Makine, working writer
- Christian Jambet, philosopher, IDK what he does to pay the bills but his last published work was an essay in 2016
It looks to me like 20% of the part of the list I examined is made up of working writers in France, i.e. one of five. So extrapolating out, we know somewhere in France there are 8 well-known people in this one group who make a living just on writing. I don't know that that means that it is hard to make a living as a writer, but it definitely isn't an argument that it isn't hard to any particular level to make a living as a writer.
Again: The argument is not that writers don't exist, it is that it is a real difficult (like astronomically difficult) field to break into and make a full-time living at. I don't know why that statement is provoking this incredible level of resistance -- maybe because he phrased it so provocatively, I guess, and ignored some plausible ways you can work as an academic and also do writing and the two can support one another, which okay, fair play -- but regardless of that if you didn't like that guy's fairly detailed metrics, and instead are holding up this as your argument, I think you need to try again.
Yeah. I mean the article could be right or wrong, although it seems to me at first glance to be plausible + relevant. But the number of people coming out to just purely jeer at the conclusions like "FUK U THERES PLENTY OF WRITERS THIS DUDE IS RONG, CITATION: MY DICK" -- no real attempt to disagree with anything he's saying other than that they don't like it -- is distressing to me.
Goes well right alongside “bribing politicians is free speech” and “peace rallies are terrorism”
Well, you’re just stating your narrative, with 0 metrics; why is that any better?
I am sure there are many more people who are writing books than who are billionaires. His point was, how many are making a living at it as their primary career.
Did you read his breakdown? He made a pretty compelling case that that number is about 500.
When Steven Spielberg shot Jaws, the sea was changing all the time. If you look at that film one moment it’s choppy, one moment it’s flat. You don’t need to do that anymore.
See I take the opposite message away from this. The point is, it doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be masterpiece cinema or accomplish the goal.
Great paintings can have brushstrokes. It doesn’t need to look photorealistic to what the thing looks like; in fact you could make the argument that’s counterproductive. Great video games have constrained mechanics; you can’t do everything “realistic,” and in fact the pursuit of hyper realism seems etc etc you get the point.
Maybe I’m oversimplifying what he’s saying, and he just means that the craft of movie making is now easier and we can eliminate some detail-focused bullshit that used to create logistical problems with shooting… but it sounds more to me like “and NOW we can sink millions of dollars into fuckin around with the background of the shots and that’ll finally fix what was wrong with Jaws and all the movies now will be better than Jaws as a result” which sounds like totally missing the point if that’s what he’s saying.
I was very very lucky in terms of getting a good education (both from my parents and from the schools I went to), and it was absolutely shocking to me when I first started doing political arguments with some people I'd known for quite a while and realized they had no idea how to think for themselves.
Like even the basics of, if source X says one thing and then later on in the same article says some incompatible thing, then that source is not the truth. Never mind about even comparing one day's statements to the next day's, or against real science or anything like that.
They just go with who's real confident and forceful in their presentation and sounds like they have firm authority over what's going on, and then they go all-in on believing whatever crazy shit that changes day to day that that person is saying. Like I say it was real shocking (and also, how if I tried to break down inconsistencies with what their source was saying, they'd just get confused and upset and disoriented, and ultimately reject what I was saying.)
(*) the money is payed in Russian Rubles
I want to say something sarcastic, but this is fuckin heartbreaking. You know their life expectancy, and quality of life up until the day they get fed into the grinder, is near 0. Think of the desperate hope that someone might have signing up for something like this, and then... the result.
I think almost certainly that disinformation based on fake accounts simply posting memes or targeted viewpoints, hoping to send the message through sheer repetition, it still a lot more common than doctored factual information. (Not that that means that faked up disinformation isn't a problem - just saying I think it's still relatively rare as a vehicle for disinformation.)
Why would you even open yourself up to "see, the underlying citation for this thing they're saying is not true" when you might as well not even enter into the sphere of backing up what you're saying with facts, and just state your assertions as if they were facts, instead.