dondawest

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

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.