I concur that A Little Life was kind of a mess, but I kept reading it -- I was drawn in and wanted to finish even as much of it was so melodramatic as to be silly. A little later when it was revealed to me that my middle schooler was engaging in self-harm it did provide me some practical ideas about how to carefully hunt for objects that could be used to cut.
Memetics is a useful way to answer your friend IMO.
Ideas live in brains. We score idea on how many brains they live in. There is a science to reproducing ideas between brains. And Ideas do battle in each brain with each other.
If someone publishes a "take down" of a book nobody has read, even fewer read the critique, the actual score of the game is not measured in that tiny universe of brains.
Politically, we are generally are concerned in US is not what 300M brains think, but what the top half of brains in each of the 50 states think -state by state - you can see this in what each states most searched porn term is, if you need a shocking metaphor.
What a bunch of like minded twitter brains think is as interesting as "they/them anal".
I think much of the urge to see things as "takedowns" and to find "debunkings" comes from the deep, often desperate desire to have the world be simple, easily understood, black-and-white. A world that admits of tradeoffs and complexities is a scary one indeed, fraught with moral balancing acts and degrees of rightness. Twitter has no truck with these. Better to dismiss uncomfortable ideas with a "So-and-so debunked that!" and be done with them.
Just to note, I really think sometimes people just choose an axe to grind and that's the case of Matthew Sweet here.
Sweet, in his thread, claims that Johann Hari cannot be trusted to handle data. Sweet's main argument comes from Hari's supposed misuse of a Nature study. According to Sweet, the authors that Hari cites themselves concede that the hypothesis of shrinking cultural attention spans isn't true. Sweet, referring to the paper, describes it thusly: "“The phenomenon,” its authors concede, “lacks a strong empirical foundation.”"
However, Sweet is lying. I say lying because this pull quote goes beyond mere cherry picking. Sweet has pulled that quote from the INTRODUCTION of the paper, and the real quote is "In the literature there have been strong hints of an acceleration in different contexts (citations), but so far, the phenomenon has lacked a strong empirical foundation." So they are not conceding, in any way shape or form, that their research lacks a strong empirical foundation. Rather, they are setting up how great their own research is in contrast to previous "lacking" research. This sort of comparison is what scientists do all the time in introductions (source: am a scientist).
The rest of the paper makes clear that the authors aren't conceding anything, they do find evidence of exactly what Sweet is taking issue with. You can read it here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09311-w. It's extremely clear the authors find evidence of an "accelerating dynamics of collective attention" - clear from the title, the abstract, the discussion, everything. No honest person could read that paper and come away with a different conclusion.
Whether or not the study is correct is a whole other matter (it may not be). But Sweet claims Hari misrepresents it. To make this claim he has to go and truncate a random sentence from the Introduction of the paper that is nothing about its conclusions, then himself wildly misrepresent that one sentence as the conclusion.
Btw I care not a whit about Hari, nor his book, nor Sweet, it's just crazy how easy it is to make a name for yourself from this sort "take down" of vapid criticism mixed with dishonest representation.
The problem with the modern world and the ways in which it's now inextricably tied to the internet/social media is that everyone's basically lost at sea, drowning in content, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to understand what is and isn't important. Life is like one big hedonistic treadmill, and I think people sometimes crave binary simplicity. Yes or no, right or wrong, good or bad, etc.
Here's a sentence for the ages: "We write about books so that we share our inability to explain what they mean to us, communally, instead of feeling that alone."
This feels related to other parts of the media ecosystem that you've written about well: constant networking and ass-kissing, and professional precariousness. When a writer acquires a certain trendy quantum of success, everyone wants to be friends with them (or at least align oneself with them), which requires praising them no matter what. This is exhausting both because it may involve lying about their actual opinion of the writer's work and because it generates a huge amount of professional envy that then has to be concealed. (I think the envy is a result both of the professional precariousness and of the fact that the media ecosystem causes a lot of perfectly fine writers to get plaudits that suggests they're the second coming of Renata Adler.) If someone else publishes a well-written pan of the writer's work, it can be a huge relief to have an excuse to leave the church of Jia Tolentino, or whoever. I think that if people in the subculture you're discussing felt allowed not to like certain things--or even allowed not to *love* them!--they would feel less hungry for an excuse to dismiss them. (This is in addition to the cognitive-load explanation--I felt obligated to read that 400-page book, someone told me it was bad, now I don't have to.)
"such spaces serve the public intellect when they point to more reading and work against it when they function as substitutes for more reading."
Being also busy In Real Life, now a new grandpa, I look for public intellectuals who can keep me abreast of current culture, some, specifically as a substitute for reading the whole sources, yet can induce thinking and consideration of ideas. Thus I mostly avoid Tweets, even when linked to by those whose longer posts I do read, since as noted so little real thinking can be expressed there.
I'd rather read two books and some 5-10 reviews of other books, than spend the same time reading one more book without any reviews. (Not to mention my near-addiction to blog post reading.)
Matthew Sweet rose to prominence for a cringe-inducing live critique of Naomi Woolf's book Outrages, where he pointed out that she'd misrepresented and misunderstood key historical evidence. It seems to have gone to his head. Although, it's worth pointing out that Hari has a history of plagiarism and misusing sources.
I know I'm completely missing the point, but I was sent this tweet storm about how horrible even "mild" cases of Covid are by a friend who thinks I'm a bit too unafraid: https://twitter.com/IanRicksecker/status/1478611650760437765?s=20 For those unwilling to click the link, it's 40 tweets about long Covid, and that "mild" often means you suffer from symptoms for months and potentially have damage to many of your organs, including your brain. There's links to a dozen or so medical journal articles that supposedly back up the claims. I'm not particularly interested in reading any of them, and only skimmed the thread itself, and mostly because I'm already working from home, my wife refuses to allow me to take our kid to daycare, and the only other place I go is the grocery story. There's no action to be taken or not taken here, so why should I care?
A few days later, Freddie writes https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/one-more-time-what-do-you-want-us including the paragraph "They hate hearing the objective fact that vaccines have decoupled case rates from hospitalizations and deaths, they hate hearing that a great deal of data suggests that Omicron is less deadly than Delta, they hate hearing that a huge percentage of cases are entirely asymptomatic, they hate hearing that most symptomatic cases of the virus are and always have been mild, they hate being told that many of our rituals like six-foot social distancing are security theater…. Mostly, though, they hate that some of us are trying to move on from Covid, emotionally, even as we continue to comply with what the government is saying are best practices." He says so with a half dozen news links and I'm sure they've each got a few journal articles within them. And again, I didn't bother reading any of it because there's no action to be taken.
It would take 10-40 hours to try and figure out what the medical journal articles actually say, and how far that got stretched in the news articles or the twitter summary or blogpost. The answer is most likely that everybody's wrong a little bit here and there, and that if you squint, they're actually both mostly right, it's just that, etc. etc.
Remember when videos all had titles like “WATCH: gay veteran DESTROYS hateful pro-life mom in supermarket checkout line” and all the comments said stuff like “slow clap it out”? just me?
It feels like a holdover from late-00s Daily Show monologues, or clips from The West Wing - liberals (I am 100% including myself here) love to see someone dismantled beyond all hope of serious rebuttal by an earnest, charismatic Smart Guy. We just love it. This is probably its own genre on TikTok now.
I don't have anything particular to say about the content of the piece (although I broadly agree with the point), but *wow*, that was very well written.
Ah, I see you've stepped into the ants' nest of Trans Women Who Write Vicious Quasi-Academic Screeds Against Each Other. I don't know what it is we get out of it but it seems to be an inescapable part of our community.
I concur that A Little Life was kind of a mess, but I kept reading it -- I was drawn in and wanted to finish even as much of it was so melodramatic as to be silly. A little later when it was revealed to me that my middle schooler was engaging in self-harm it did provide me some practical ideas about how to carefully hunt for objects that could be used to cut.
Memetics is a useful way to answer your friend IMO.
Ideas live in brains. We score idea on how many brains they live in. There is a science to reproducing ideas between brains. And Ideas do battle in each brain with each other.
If someone publishes a "take down" of a book nobody has read, even fewer read the critique, the actual score of the game is not measured in that tiny universe of brains.
Politically, we are generally are concerned in US is not what 300M brains think, but what the top half of brains in each of the 50 states think -state by state - you can see this in what each states most searched porn term is, if you need a shocking metaphor.
What a bunch of like minded twitter brains think is as interesting as "they/them anal".
I think much of the urge to see things as "takedowns" and to find "debunkings" comes from the deep, often desperate desire to have the world be simple, easily understood, black-and-white. A world that admits of tradeoffs and complexities is a scary one indeed, fraught with moral balancing acts and degrees of rightness. Twitter has no truck with these. Better to dismiss uncomfortable ideas with a "So-and-so debunked that!" and be done with them.
This piece is in your top five IMO
Just to note, I really think sometimes people just choose an axe to grind and that's the case of Matthew Sweet here.
Sweet, in his thread, claims that Johann Hari cannot be trusted to handle data. Sweet's main argument comes from Hari's supposed misuse of a Nature study. According to Sweet, the authors that Hari cites themselves concede that the hypothesis of shrinking cultural attention spans isn't true. Sweet, referring to the paper, describes it thusly: "“The phenomenon,” its authors concede, “lacks a strong empirical foundation.”"
However, Sweet is lying. I say lying because this pull quote goes beyond mere cherry picking. Sweet has pulled that quote from the INTRODUCTION of the paper, and the real quote is "In the literature there have been strong hints of an acceleration in different contexts (citations), but so far, the phenomenon has lacked a strong empirical foundation." So they are not conceding, in any way shape or form, that their research lacks a strong empirical foundation. Rather, they are setting up how great their own research is in contrast to previous "lacking" research. This sort of comparison is what scientists do all the time in introductions (source: am a scientist).
The rest of the paper makes clear that the authors aren't conceding anything, they do find evidence of exactly what Sweet is taking issue with. You can read it here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09311-w. It's extremely clear the authors find evidence of an "accelerating dynamics of collective attention" - clear from the title, the abstract, the discussion, everything. No honest person could read that paper and come away with a different conclusion.
Whether or not the study is correct is a whole other matter (it may not be). But Sweet claims Hari misrepresents it. To make this claim he has to go and truncate a random sentence from the Introduction of the paper that is nothing about its conclusions, then himself wildly misrepresent that one sentence as the conclusion.
Btw I care not a whit about Hari, nor his book, nor Sweet, it's just crazy how easy it is to make a name for yourself from this sort "take down" of vapid criticism mixed with dishonest representation.
This finally got me to subscribe, nice to see an adult in the room
The problem with the modern world and the ways in which it's now inextricably tied to the internet/social media is that everyone's basically lost at sea, drowning in content, and it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to understand what is and isn't important. Life is like one big hedonistic treadmill, and I think people sometimes crave binary simplicity. Yes or no, right or wrong, good or bad, etc.
Here's a sentence for the ages: "We write about books so that we share our inability to explain what they mean to us, communally, instead of feeling that alone."
Jeez, Freddie. Thanks.
This feels related to other parts of the media ecosystem that you've written about well: constant networking and ass-kissing, and professional precariousness. When a writer acquires a certain trendy quantum of success, everyone wants to be friends with them (or at least align oneself with them), which requires praising them no matter what. This is exhausting both because it may involve lying about their actual opinion of the writer's work and because it generates a huge amount of professional envy that then has to be concealed. (I think the envy is a result both of the professional precariousness and of the fact that the media ecosystem causes a lot of perfectly fine writers to get plaudits that suggests they're the second coming of Renata Adler.) If someone else publishes a well-written pan of the writer's work, it can be a huge relief to have an excuse to leave the church of Jia Tolentino, or whoever. I think that if people in the subculture you're discussing felt allowed not to like certain things--or even allowed not to *love* them!--they would feel less hungry for an excuse to dismiss them. (This is in addition to the cognitive-load explanation--I felt obligated to read that 400-page book, someone told me it was bad, now I don't have to.)
"such spaces serve the public intellect when they point to more reading and work against it when they function as substitutes for more reading."
Being also busy In Real Life, now a new grandpa, I look for public intellectuals who can keep me abreast of current culture, some, specifically as a substitute for reading the whole sources, yet can induce thinking and consideration of ideas. Thus I mostly avoid Tweets, even when linked to by those whose longer posts I do read, since as noted so little real thinking can be expressed there.
I'd rather read two books and some 5-10 reviews of other books, than spend the same time reading one more book without any reviews. (Not to mention my near-addiction to blog post reading.)
Matthew Sweet rose to prominence for a cringe-inducing live critique of Naomi Woolf's book Outrages, where he pointed out that she'd misrepresented and misunderstood key historical evidence. It seems to have gone to his head. Although, it's worth pointing out that Hari has a history of plagiarism and misusing sources.
I know I'm completely missing the point, but I was sent this tweet storm about how horrible even "mild" cases of Covid are by a friend who thinks I'm a bit too unafraid: https://twitter.com/IanRicksecker/status/1478611650760437765?s=20 For those unwilling to click the link, it's 40 tweets about long Covid, and that "mild" often means you suffer from symptoms for months and potentially have damage to many of your organs, including your brain. There's links to a dozen or so medical journal articles that supposedly back up the claims. I'm not particularly interested in reading any of them, and only skimmed the thread itself, and mostly because I'm already working from home, my wife refuses to allow me to take our kid to daycare, and the only other place I go is the grocery story. There's no action to be taken or not taken here, so why should I care?
A few days later, Freddie writes https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/one-more-time-what-do-you-want-us including the paragraph "They hate hearing the objective fact that vaccines have decoupled case rates from hospitalizations and deaths, they hate hearing that a great deal of data suggests that Omicron is less deadly than Delta, they hate hearing that a huge percentage of cases are entirely asymptomatic, they hate hearing that most symptomatic cases of the virus are and always have been mild, they hate being told that many of our rituals like six-foot social distancing are security theater…. Mostly, though, they hate that some of us are trying to move on from Covid, emotionally, even as we continue to comply with what the government is saying are best practices." He says so with a half dozen news links and I'm sure they've each got a few journal articles within them. And again, I didn't bother reading any of it because there's no action to be taken.
It would take 10-40 hours to try and figure out what the medical journal articles actually say, and how far that got stretched in the news articles or the twitter summary or blogpost. The answer is most likely that everybody's wrong a little bit here and there, and that if you squint, they're actually both mostly right, it's just that, etc. etc.
Remember when videos all had titles like “WATCH: gay veteran DESTROYS hateful pro-life mom in supermarket checkout line” and all the comments said stuff like “slow clap it out”? just me?
It feels like a holdover from late-00s Daily Show monologues, or clips from The West Wing - liberals (I am 100% including myself here) love to see someone dismantled beyond all hope of serious rebuttal by an earnest, charismatic Smart Guy. We just love it. This is probably its own genre on TikTok now.
I don't have anything particular to say about the content of the piece (although I broadly agree with the point), but *wow*, that was very well written.
Ah, I see you've stepped into the ants' nest of Trans Women Who Write Vicious Quasi-Academic Screeds Against Each Other. I don't know what it is we get out of it but it seems to be an inescapable part of our community.