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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   21428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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Great review! Thanks!

Where are the Mountains, or the Deserts, or the Plains?

That was an interesting feature of Zvi's review:

The Village might be in somewhat of a cold war with The River, but the River is not its natural enemy or mirror. Something else is that.

So what do we call this third group? Not ‘everyone not in the Village or River’ and not ‘the other political party’ but rather: The natural enemies of The Village?

I asked for the LLM consensus is in, and there is a clear winner that I agree is indeed this group’s True Name in this schema, that works on many levels: The Wilderness.

You've now got me down a rabbit hole, as Zvi linked to other reviewers. I enjoyed this particular passage from one

The flip side of Nate not holding back is that sometimes he writes things that seem like clichés. Here he is talking about an artist who was “in the right place at the right time” and made a ton of money from non-fungible tokens: “When I spoke with Winkelmann—a.k.a. Beeple—I was expecting someone with the self-important air of being a serious artist or at least someone whose success had gone to his head. Instead Beeple was extremely down-to-earth, dropping f-bombs about once every fifteen seconds in a thick Wisconsin accent.”

Hey, wait a minute! The macho regular-guy artist . . . that’s standard operating practice in the art world. You’ve heard of Jackson Pollock, right? Who was from Cody, Wyoming—that’s even more earthy than being from Wisconsin. Silver’s quote reminds me uncomfortably of the story from Freakonomics of an unnamed “academic” who says something stupid, only to be shot down by regular-guy “Chuck Esposito, a genial, quick-witted and thoroughly sports-fixated man who runs the race and sports book at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas,” which in turn reminded of the punchline of that joke from grade school: “Hey, man, the smartest guy in the world just jumped out of the plane wearing my backpack.”

I’m not saying that Beeple isn’t a smart, down-to-earth guy; I’m just resisting Nate’s dressing him in rogue’s clothing. In some ways, this sort of thing is almost necessary: Nate’s giving us a tour of a world that he loves, he’s writing about to his friends, and so of course he wants to present them in a positive light. If Nate were to describe Beeple as, for example, “the typical self-important ‘serious artist’ who signals his regular-guy status by cultivating a thick Wisconsin accent and carefully dropping f-bombs into his conversation,” well, what would be the point of that? It’s kind of like sportswriting: with rare exceptions, we like the athletes to be presented in a positive light. Similarly, we are introduced to “Will MacAskill, a boyish-looking Oxford professor of philosophy with an endearing Scottish lilt.” I have a horrible feeling that if I’m not careful I’d be described as a “shifty-eyed academic who speaks in a nasal east-coast suburban accent,” rather than, say, a “charming gray-haired statistician with many of the attributes of the absent-minded professor.”

There's definitely a certain groan-inducing lack of skepticism in the book.

Thanks for linking Zvi's review. He's a bit more of a joiner than I am, so I suspect it will be a bit more of a River's view of the River.

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