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.
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.
"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 a misunderstanding. He was not trying to prevent "Scott Alexander" -> real name inferences. He was only trying to limit the rate of incidental inferences in the other direction; the primary effect of greatly increasing that rate is to harm his professional life.
That seems at best a very narrow sense of "doxxing." If his name is for all practical purposes already public, and he just does not want readers of a specific newspaper to see his name mentioned, does that really count as "doxxing?"
It's not for all practical purposes public. I'm very tech literate and google-literate, and I have tried multiple times to find his name, and was unable to.
Pure curiosity. I tried it a few years ago, I think because he posted something about keeping his identity secret and I was curious how hard it was to find. Then again with these recent articles I did some basic searching.
I'm in the pacific northwest in the entertainment industry. There's a bit of footage we're milking and it seems like things are going to slowly turn back on with higher restrictions of on set production. But long term? I think we'll keep working.
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.
Taleb is not a stoic, but his works provide a great framework for dealing with uncertainty: for example, the whole concept of antifragility... benefiting from misfortunes... seems like core stoic concept, isn't it?
Regarding his behavior. I think he just enjoys being human. After all, if he was ruled by emotions he'd not survive the trader job.
The most basic definition of stoicism is "indifference to fate". In that scope Taleb definitely is a stoic. His approach toward stoicism, though, is less philosophy focused and more (that's kind of unique) targeted toward statistics. Ancient stoics don't write about their philosophy in such a way, but the logic remains similar. The whole concept of antifragility Taleb has promoted is pure "opportunistic" stoicism. Taleb is like a Seneca the Younger, minus some charm ;)
Regarding his online presence, anyone knowing his works also knows that he's using Twitter purely to mess with people. He stated that many times in his Incerto series.
Sometimes it's easy to forget what is the actual core of a given philosophy / enterprise / etc. Hence my whole comment. It's worthwhile to know, I think, that stoicism has a very important component comprised of pure logic, which Taleb seems to be hyped about (not without a reason).
I wouldn't call Taleb a member of the top-3 stoics though. He's balancing on the verge of being an outcast rather than hanging out with mainstream stoic crowds.
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.
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
"This guy" openly and vulnerably writes about his struggles with something that it's not socially acceptable to be bad at. The fact that he's a minor celebrity in IT likely makes that harder to do, not easier. He posted the article to HN himself and is likely to read your comment. I think you're mostly right in your observations but maybe it'd be nice if you try to practice some of what you preach, wrt how you write it.
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
> telling them “I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you” is so much more indirect than asking “wanna get dinner?”
While you may be correct that his statement wasn't direct, I would say your alternative would be the very definition of "indirect".
Being direct in such situations may not be the best approach, and I suspect that is what you're trying to get at. However, "wanna get dinner?" when you want something more than just dinner is almost a textbook definition of indirect.
In human relations a kind of Kolmogorov complexity measure in which we communicate the most information in the least symbols or words --- well illustrated with your 'wanna get dinner' --- I think is adjacent to directness and openness. That is, why was it a guy can't spit it out? I like you and wanna get dinner with you? Fear, feeling, and self-esteem issues more likely. Now, it's probably not street smart to have that out with the potential invitee, however, being open about those feelings with a good friend in a hear-to-heart so that it enables one to move forward more directly to me seems like a win.
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 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.
I suppose you think Olga Tokarczuk or Svetlana Alexievich are more popular with millennials?
David Foster Wallace and Harold Bloom both have called Delillo one of the greatest living authors. I and quite a few other people I know in my age range (mid-20s) have enjoyed him without sensing his work is irrelevant to our demographic. Even his denser works like Underworld read like a 'pageturner' relative to his contemporaries like Pynchon or even Wallace. Let alone other writers in the canon like Dostoyevsky.
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. Zero K specifically felt like a fan fiction version of William Gibson's non sci-fi stuff like Zero History. And most of what he is trying to convey he just says outright in a 3rd person omniscient voice.
I actually think he is very culturally relevant and influential but I sense that if you were to evaluate his writing through the lens of academic comparative literature like the Nobel Prize committee (not the standard literature should be held to imo) it would fall short of most other laureats, Bob Dylan notwithstanding
> 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.
Nobel prizes, atleast in Literature, are given for a body of work and bodies of work take decades to create. Every decade, approximately, is different and every generation is very different. American literature has often been blamed for being insecular and very focused on the American way rather than having a universal appeal. I do not pass judgment on that but I will say that only writers that can appeal to fundamental societal truths, dig deeper into the superficial differences and unearth commonalities in the human condition will be considered great.
If the so-called millenials are not reading DeLillo, the onus is not on DeLillo to say things that appeal to them. Rather, the onus is on them to figure out what DeLillo is saying and see if they identify with him.
(Edit: I am not American and english is not my first language. I like American literature among others.)
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.
This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described). After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was convinced that emergence is not "more than" the sum of the parts, emergence is _precisely_ the sum of its parts.
Ants produce these higher level patterns not because there's some magical thing that "emerges", but because they are precisely evolved to coordinate with each other to create those patterns.
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.