December 2. Smart blog post by a long-time reader, Idea strength, cringe, and the media environment. The basic idea is that technology has connected us so much that creative work is taking fewer risks:
When artists become more socially connected to each other and to consumers, bold choices get riskier. Every mind in a perceptual network is a vector for cringe. As the network grows more interconnected, the potential for cringe increases. An artistic risk that might have been low in a less connected environment becomes high.
This reminds me of a bit in this YouTube talk, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned. It's by the creator of Picbreeder, a brilliant image-breeding site that no longer works because web browsers can no longer run Java. Anyway, he found out that images bred by individuals are much better than images bred by voting.
One of the comments explains it like this: "Consensus-driven frameworks prematurely optimize and miss the necessary low-fitness stepping stones needed to find creative complex solutions." In simpler language: you have to go through difficult stuff to get to good stuff, and the bigger the crowd, the harder it is to get them to go through difficult stuff. Another example is Hollywood test screenings, which polish out anything really good because someone thinks it's too weird.
But when I think about it more, there are two different things going on here. One is what I've just described, the blandifying effect of the crowd. The other is the long tail of taste: with more creative work available, there's more room to like stuff that fewer people like.
In listening to music, I've gone a long way down that rabbit hole, and the difficult thing is not in how I hear the music. It's not like I'm forcing myself to listen to stuff that sounds bad until I like it. The music always pulls me in, and the difficult thing is the loneliness of loving something that no one else understands. Or, the obstacle to exploring the long tail of taste, is not perceptual but social.
December 9. A year and a half ago, a fan and a cameraman came to make a film about me, and it's just been posted to YouTube, a short doc about Ran Prieur.
I was a little afraid to watch it, but I'm really happy with it. It's weird to see myself from the outside. It reminds me of that Far Side comic, where these two guys are listening to a tape recording of themselves, and saying, "Wow, we sound like total dorks." And the joke is, they are total dorks.
Another thing I noticed is how much happier I am when I'm talking about writing fiction. It's a lot more rewarding than writing this blog, but it's also a lot harder, and has an even smaller audience.
Now I'm thinking about fame. Our culture tells us that fame is an accomplishment, when really it's a lifestyle choice. The difference between the famous and the unknown, is not how good they are at what they do (except athletes). The difference is that some people channel their skill in a way that gives them shallow connections with a lot of people. And unless you're someone like Tom Cruise, I think that's a mistake.
Early in the doc I mention Emily Dickinson. I think, for an introvert, she did it exactly right: she wrote without compromising for an audience, she never had to deal with fame, and people are still reading her stuff two centuries later.
I don't think of my own writing as self-expression. I think of it as something that was always there, and I was just the first person to find it. It's like I'm colonizing a planet, and I'd like to eventually hang out with other people who have come to live there.
December 16. I was reading an article about wealth inequality, and remembered my critique of the word "privilege". I've said that it points to two different kinds of things, but now I can see three. First is things that some people have, that everyone should have, like not going hungry, or being free to travel.
Second is things that some people have, where it's okay that only some people have them. Would you rather live in a mansion or a cottage? Would you rather go to a five star restaurant or a dive bar? It's like asking your favorite color. Just because something costs more money, doesn't mean it should be universally available, or unavailable.
The problem is that money is closely related to the third category, the thing that some people have, that no one should have: power over others. And that's the real problem with wealth inequality: that our whole society is built to make us all NPC's in the game of leveraging money into more money, where only one in a thousand can play.
I was reading an article about personality differences between men and women, which tries to describe some differences without interpreting them as either biological or cultural. I think most of the described differences are cultural. Women are more "compassionate, polite, anxious, self-doubting" because they're still emerging from thousands of years of having lower social status.
Right now, the phrase "women's voices" implies voices of the oppressed, voices of the excluded. Only when it no longer has that meaning, will we know who women are.
December 22-23. The Hypersane Are Among Us. The author is trying to reframe our thinking about weird people, as a spectrum with normal people in the middle, the insane on one side, and the supersane on the other. He thinks he's being helpful: Be nice to that weird person, they might be supersane.
Speaking for the weird people, stop trying to divide us. Consider supposed supersane Nelson Mandela. He started out as a violent militant fighting for racial justice, exactly like American abolitionist John Brown. If history had gone differently, we would see Brown as a saintly patriarch, and Mandela as a failed loony.
Or, the difference between the "insane" and "supersane" is not their personality or their mental state, but how useful they are to the normals.
Sanity is a popularity contest. Seeing something that nobody around you sees is pretty much the definition of insanity. Maybe history will look back and say, "that crazy person was right!" But being sane in an insane world is hardly a recipe for happiness. My examples of "sometimes those who seem a little crazy are the ones who really get it," would be people like Philip K Dick, Vincent Van Gogh, or Emily Bronte, all of whom attempted or succeeded at suicide. But then, maybe they would have been happy if the people around them could keep up.
December 24. For Christmas eve, these are my top five Christmas songs that you won't hear on the radio:
Ramones - Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight)
Clarence Carter - Back Door Santa
Big Star - Jesus Christ
Steve Mauldin - The Abominable O Holy Night
Ramsey Lewis Trio - What Are You Doing New Year's Eve
December 25. For Christmas, I want to write about Jesus. I'm not a Christian, more like a pantheist, and I don't believe in hell, a place with arguably no biblical evidence. So salvation is not necessary, except being saved from the illusions of this world. I like the neo-Gnostic idea that we're in a simulation and Jesus hacked it.
Matt comments, "I think the appeal of Jesus, on one level, is the appeal of Superman. The universe sucks and we want someone to fix it in one fell swoop." I would add: they both came from the sky, they both have magical powers, they both have no character flaws, and they even have a similar iconic posture -- Superman's arms are just more above his head.
As a character, Superman is boring. I would find the story of Jesus more inspiring if he started out as a bad person, and then became a good person, like Ryan Leaf. George Carlin has said that the story of Jesus would be better if he were not the son of God, just some loser who God decided to adopt. Then we'd think twice about being mean to someone, because God might adopt that person next. It turns out there's a fringe Christian doctrine, Adoptionism, that believes this.
Jesus said: Judge not, that ye be not judged. It occurs to me, if you judge anyone for being not as good as you in any way, then your advantage is a matter of luck. If it were skill, then you would have had to climb up from being where they are; and in that case, you would know what it's like to be where they are, and you wouldn't judge them.