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".
"Memetics" has never been useful to anybody. It grew out of the childish idea that making and sharing memes on the internet is a worthwhile and significant undertaking.
Memetics / Memes were hypo'd by Richard Dawkins in 1976
Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a new type of units of cultural information: memes.
A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication: a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual, making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process of self-reproduction (the memetic life-cycle), leading to spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins, 1976; Moritz, 1991).
Dawkins listed the following three characteristics for any successful replicator:
copying-fidelity:
the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying pattern will quickly become unrecognizable.
fecundity:
the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more copies of a text than an office copying machine.
longevity:
the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have photographed or otherwise reproduced
That is the academic origin of a shaky theory, yes. You never saw pedants posting about it on the internet in significant numbers until the "meme war" crowd had been around for a bit tho. Dawkins has so many ideas that are so much better.
"Meme" warfare (shitposting) works. A well built text-image meme quickly touches millions and fortifies brains to their comfy status quo against vast expensive corporate efforts to reprogram them.
This is why it was so dumb to think "Russians" had an effect in the election.
If there is a god, I'm sure he loves his children very much. But we are not his children - our ideas our. We are bags of meat.
If you set us up in a SIM, as our god, what you'd be watching is human evolution thru the ideas, why are those guys still in caves? Why are those guys doing a Trump boat parade?
You'd track the ideas, the endlessly new memes like the stock market.
Note however that in the case of Darwinian evolution we have a fairly clear sense of what is being selected (genes) and when reproduction happens (the egg hatches, the baby is born). With memetics the units are a little more amorphous (are we talking Christianity? Catholicism? Liberal Catholicism? A commitment to transubstantiation?) as is their reproduction (at what point does one go from non-Christian to Christian?). As a result of this the empirical side of memetics seems hard to get off the ground: how do you measure memes in any meaningful way? (To indicate that this is a real problem: the last issue of the Journal of Memtics came out 17 years ago. Also, an article in that last issue is titled "The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results".)
Old Testament 10 Commandment taught the poor they go to hell if they don't respect property rights. This births Magna Cart 2K years later.
The other religions were worse memes. More brains. Less effective. Each American rules over 25 other Earthlings now.
US lucks into Federalism, bc the founders of the varied states were hell bent on not being controlled by massive population in VA.
The establishes a system of govt where the private sector talent and money (yesterdays talent) rules over bureaucrats, bc they go to whichever states best kiss their ass.
For 250+ years, the US Next Chapter is always determined by which states are being bummer rushed and which are being fled.
Federal Govt has no direct form of revenue for 150 years, and literally the YEAR they get it 1913, when the last gold certificate no longer says Pay to the Bearer on Demand $50 in Gold...
They create the only independent central bank ruled by regional banks (federalism) to ensure the Treasury has bankers lording over it with Monetary policy and of course making sure, govt must borrow from private sector (the talent and money) to deficit spend.
US system of talent ruling causes brain drain of top 1% from all the other countries on Earth.
The goofy analysis that CCP is a real challenge to US is all based on silly assumption the shitty states CA NY IL are what America is next, when we all know TX and FL kick the shit out of CCP (ask me I'll explain how easy it is).
The real lesson is to India to adopt a federalist system, so their brahmin must bow to merchant and warrior castes - how far away are they from adopting the winning memes?
I politely disagree. Memetics is tied to Darwinian evolution. Ideas compete, and only the strongest survive, which means ideas or "memes" evolve in the never ending contest to occupy real estate in our minds. Success looks like widespread imitation. Whatever resonates most clearly and distinctly -- whatever's "catchiest" -- is usually what goes viral.
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.
More than that, a complex world that requires careful thought to well appreciate offers very little for those who require endless opportunities for self-righteous posturing and the straitjacket of moral certitude to keep the doubts at bay.
I've come to really hate the phrase "X has been debunked." It's such a weasely phrase, substituting a word for any specific description of what exactly the error is. Plus, that passive voice absolves the writer of directly owning their own responsibility for disagreeing with whatever the "debunked" thing is.
Plus, "debunk" is such a garbage word. It's weaker and more ambiguous than "disprove," which is usually the word that writer really ought to be using. It's like "refute," which can mean both "disprove with reasoning" or just "attempt to disprove with reasoning." A "debunking" can mean an actual undeniable negative conclusion, or just mean a rhetorical presentation that purports to be negatively conclusive, and when a writer uses the word they usually intend for the reader to be slightly confused about which one they're really talking about.
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.
But that ISN'T Matthew Sweet's main argument. I'd say he has two arguments (at least). First there's the chapter on multitasking, which he says is based on an "experiment [that] was commissioned by the authors of a business self-help book called The Plateau Effect." Then there's the Nature paper, and he's dismissive of the methodology (I think rightly). Not sure if links work here, but it's this one. https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/1479125944241696769?s=20
And he's right to quote the authors. That's not a lie, they do say that, and I'd expect a *book* to be based on a body of research which has been carried out, not one experiment and a suggestion that more may follow.
It is Sweet's main argument. Sweet clearly says it's his second "more serious" criticism.
And no, Sweet is wrong to quote the authors on that. It's a clearly dishonest pull quote taken wildly out of context. It's not the authors conceding anything and it clearly refers to previous research *not* the author's own work.
One author of that paper appears to have taken issue with Hari's conflation of individual vs. collective attention, yet whatever this conflation is is not quoted or discussed. Sweet just says he does it, and the author goes along with it. I don't know if it's true or not, because Sweet doesn't provide any quotes beyond the one by Hari clearly using the word "collective." Frankly, I doubt the author did anything but read Sweet's tweet thread and assume it's all true.
I also think it's hilarious that people honestly are arguing that social media and technology have not interfered with our attention at the individual level. All these people would have agreed with that yesterday. But suddenly this is the craziest, least-supported opinion ever. Really, a bunch of online writers don't like Hari and his success (I don't know anything about him, nor much care, this dislike could be justified or unjustified). You can even see it in your linked review, where the problem the review fixates on is that Hari admits that there's no good longterm studies on individual attention. So then, Stuart Richie exclaims, what's the point of the book! But Sweet criticizes him for exactly the opposite: overstating the evidence! So which is it? Is it that he admits there's no evidence, or that he overstates the evidence? Oh wait, it's just that they hate Hari and you could do this with most pop-sci books.
""No! Hey, you're doing that thing again where you take everything I say out of context! You're trying to make it look like I think Coolsville sucks! No! Don't record that!"
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.
Your life isn't inextricably tied to social media unless you want it to be or are one of those sad and pitiable souls who has to use it to make a living.
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."
Yes! I think of what Bob Dylan's music does to me and I just want to share the whole magical ineffable thing with someone somehow any way I can. Writing is useless but what else am I going to do? A sentence for the ages.
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.)
I think that's really true. When I was the most "in the culture" I remember feeling such a huge waterfall of relief every time I saw a takedown.
I'd say it probably came from the fact that a) I didn't have to read a book and b) I could do that and still feel smart and like I wasn't missing something.
In retrospect, I forgot that it is possible to read a book and find it engaging at the time, and that that can be the point of reading.
But in the end I think this all points to a fundamental problem for anyone who likes books and being smart, which is that it's extremely easy to sound smart about a book you haven't read, and if the thing you're craving is to sound smart, you have to know about books but in some ways it's actually beneficial to only read reviews - you can learn more smart things to say from reading 50 takedowns than from reading one book.
Really well said. I've worked in similar environments (music, then publishing) and when you can find someone to confide in that you don't like x hot new artist or writer or whatever it's such a huge relief. And more often than not they feel the same way. Same w/ the loudly canceling someone with one hand/posting on red scare subreddit with the other thing. Most people in these social and professional milieus almost never believe the things they're saying, it's weird and exhausting.
"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.
No, someone who keeps trying to recapture lightning in a bottle, having done it once.
Having a well-known author walk into an interview where you have the knowledge to detonate a year of her work in one sentence must be mind-blowing. It's a once-in-several-lifetimes experience.
Sweet will never ever get that same high again, and he's going to destroy himself chasing the dragon.
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.
Choices exist as a gradient; some may be less good or more bad than others, but often there's no way to know in advance. So we have to choose, then live with the results. Seems a lot of people aren't happy with that reality.
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.
If it's any consolation the same impulse exists on my side of the aisle (right-wing) as well. Nothing better than seeing some country common sense - and if it's from a minority, there'll be a standing ovation - take down some big city lib.
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/
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".
"Memetics" has never been useful to anybody. It grew out of the childish idea that making and sharing memes on the internet is a worthwhile and significant undertaking.
Thats incorrect.
Memetics / Memes were hypo'd by Richard Dawkins in 1976
Cultural evolution, including the evolution of knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a new type of units of cultural information: memes.
A meme is a cognitive or behavioral pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication: a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual, making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process of self-reproduction (the memetic life-cycle), leading to spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins, 1976; Moritz, 1991).
Dawkins listed the following three characteristics for any successful replicator:
copying-fidelity:
the more faithful the copy, the more will remain of the initial pattern after several rounds of copying. If a painting is reproduced by making photocopies from photocopies, the underlying pattern will quickly become unrecognizable.
fecundity:
the faster the rate of copying, the more the replicator will spread. An industrial printing press can churn out many more copies of a text than an office copying machine.
longevity:
the longer any instance of the replicating pattern survives, the more copies can be made of it. A drawing made by etching lines in the sand is likely to be erased before anybody could have photographed or otherwise reproduced
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MEMES.html
That is the academic origin of a shaky theory, yes. You never saw pedants posting about it on the internet in significant numbers until the "meme war" crowd had been around for a bit tho. Dawkins has so many ideas that are so much better.
"Meme" warfare (shitposting) works. A well built text-image meme quickly touches millions and fortifies brains to their comfy status quo against vast expensive corporate efforts to reprogram them.
This is why it was so dumb to think "Russians" had an effect in the election.
Russians can't meme any better than liberals.
The way to think about memetics is like this:
If there is a god, I'm sure he loves his children very much. But we are not his children - our ideas our. We are bags of meat.
If you set us up in a SIM, as our god, what you'd be watching is human evolution thru the ideas, why are those guys still in caves? Why are those guys doing a Trump boat parade?
You'd track the ideas, the endlessly new memes like the stock market.
Note however that in the case of Darwinian evolution we have a fairly clear sense of what is being selected (genes) and when reproduction happens (the egg hatches, the baby is born). With memetics the units are a little more amorphous (are we talking Christianity? Catholicism? Liberal Catholicism? A commitment to transubstantiation?) as is their reproduction (at what point does one go from non-Christian to Christian?). As a result of this the empirical side of memetics seems hard to get off the ground: how do you measure memes in any meaningful way? (To indicate that this is a real problem: the last issue of the Journal of Memtics came out 17 years ago. Also, an article in that last issue is titled "The revealed poverty of the gene-meme analogy – why memetics per se has failed to produce substantive results".)
Old Testament 10 Commandment taught the poor they go to hell if they don't respect property rights. This births Magna Cart 2K years later.
The other religions were worse memes. More brains. Less effective. Each American rules over 25 other Earthlings now.
US lucks into Federalism, bc the founders of the varied states were hell bent on not being controlled by massive population in VA.
The establishes a system of govt where the private sector talent and money (yesterdays talent) rules over bureaucrats, bc they go to whichever states best kiss their ass.
For 250+ years, the US Next Chapter is always determined by which states are being bummer rushed and which are being fled.
Federal Govt has no direct form of revenue for 150 years, and literally the YEAR they get it 1913, when the last gold certificate no longer says Pay to the Bearer on Demand $50 in Gold...
They create the only independent central bank ruled by regional banks (federalism) to ensure the Treasury has bankers lording over it with Monetary policy and of course making sure, govt must borrow from private sector (the talent and money) to deficit spend.
See which memes work?
US system of talent ruling causes brain drain of top 1% from all the other countries on Earth.
The goofy analysis that CCP is a real challenge to US is all based on silly assumption the shitty states CA NY IL are what America is next, when we all know TX and FL kick the shit out of CCP (ask me I'll explain how easy it is).
The real lesson is to India to adopt a federalist system, so their brahmin must bow to merchant and warrior castes - how far away are they from adopting the winning memes?
I politely disagree. Memetics is tied to Darwinian evolution. Ideas compete, and only the strongest survive, which means ideas or "memes" evolve in the never ending contest to occupy real estate in our minds. Success looks like widespread imitation. Whatever resonates most clearly and distinctly -- whatever's "catchiest" -- is usually what goes viral.
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.
More than that, a complex world that requires careful thought to well appreciate offers very little for those who require endless opportunities for self-righteous posturing and the straitjacket of moral certitude to keep the doubts at bay.
Americans? In love with binaries? You don’t say!
And yet it's a binary to divide the world between Americans and everyone else.
Yawn? They did it first
I've come to really hate the phrase "X has been debunked." It's such a weasely phrase, substituting a word for any specific description of what exactly the error is. Plus, that passive voice absolves the writer of directly owning their own responsibility for disagreeing with whatever the "debunked" thing is.
Plus, "debunk" is such a garbage word. It's weaker and more ambiguous than "disprove," which is usually the word that writer really ought to be using. It's like "refute," which can mean both "disprove with reasoning" or just "attempt to disprove with reasoning." A "debunking" can mean an actual undeniable negative conclusion, or just mean a rhetorical presentation that purports to be negatively conclusive, and when a writer uses the word they usually intend for the reader to be slightly confused about which one they're really talking about.
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.
yikes
It’s Yanagihara… I’m replying to you here so you might see it
You know I had it right and then thought I had it wrong and changed it? I'll change it back.
You’re awesome.
But that ISN'T Matthew Sweet's main argument. I'd say he has two arguments (at least). First there's the chapter on multitasking, which he says is based on an "experiment [that] was commissioned by the authors of a business self-help book called The Plateau Effect." Then there's the Nature paper, and he's dismissive of the methodology (I think rightly). Not sure if links work here, but it's this one. https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/1479125944241696769?s=20
And he's right to quote the authors. That's not a lie, they do say that, and I'd expect a *book* to be based on a body of research which has been carried out, not one experiment and a suggestion that more may follow.
Finally, on that Nature paper, the authors weren't happy with Hari's representation of their work either. https://twitter.com/DrMatthewSweet/status/1479494431078289413?s=20
God, I hope links work on Substack comments, because he's a non-Twitter review of Hari's book. https://unherd.com/2022/01/johann-haris-stolen-ideas/
It is Sweet's main argument. Sweet clearly says it's his second "more serious" criticism.
And no, Sweet is wrong to quote the authors on that. It's a clearly dishonest pull quote taken wildly out of context. It's not the authors conceding anything and it clearly refers to previous research *not* the author's own work.
One author of that paper appears to have taken issue with Hari's conflation of individual vs. collective attention, yet whatever this conflation is is not quoted or discussed. Sweet just says he does it, and the author goes along with it. I don't know if it's true or not, because Sweet doesn't provide any quotes beyond the one by Hari clearly using the word "collective." Frankly, I doubt the author did anything but read Sweet's tweet thread and assume it's all true.
I also think it's hilarious that people honestly are arguing that social media and technology have not interfered with our attention at the individual level. All these people would have agreed with that yesterday. But suddenly this is the craziest, least-supported opinion ever. Really, a bunch of online writers don't like Hari and his success (I don't know anything about him, nor much care, this dislike could be justified or unjustified). You can even see it in your linked review, where the problem the review fixates on is that Hari admits that there's no good longterm studies on individual attention. So then, Stuart Richie exclaims, what's the point of the book! But Sweet criticizes him for exactly the opposite: overstating the evidence! So which is it? Is it that he admits there's no evidence, or that he overstates the evidence? Oh wait, it's just that they hate Hari and you could do this with most pop-sci books.
Congratulations, that second paragraph was itself an epic takedown!
""No! Hey, you're doing that thing again where you take everything I say out of context! You're trying to make it look like I think Coolsville sucks! No! Don't record that!"
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.
Thank you, just bookmarked it.
Your life isn't inextricably tied to social media unless you want it to be or are one of those sad and pitiable souls who has to use it to make a living.
I didn't say that life is inextricably tied to social media. I said the world is.
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.
Yes! I think of what Bob Dylan's music does to me and I just want to share the whole magical ineffable thing with someone somehow any way I can. Writing is useless but what else am I going to do? A sentence for the ages.
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.)
I think that's really true. When I was the most "in the culture" I remember feeling such a huge waterfall of relief every time I saw a takedown.
I'd say it probably came from the fact that a) I didn't have to read a book and b) I could do that and still feel smart and like I wasn't missing something.
In retrospect, I forgot that it is possible to read a book and find it engaging at the time, and that that can be the point of reading.
But in the end I think this all points to a fundamental problem for anyone who likes books and being smart, which is that it's extremely easy to sound smart about a book you haven't read, and if the thing you're craving is to sound smart, you have to know about books but in some ways it's actually beneficial to only read reviews - you can learn more smart things to say from reading 50 takedowns than from reading one book.
Really well said. I've worked in similar environments (music, then publishing) and when you can find someone to confide in that you don't like x hot new artist or writer or whatever it's such a huge relief. And more often than not they feel the same way. Same w/ the loudly canceling someone with one hand/posting on red scare subreddit with the other thing. Most people in these social and professional milieus almost never believe the things they're saying, it's weird and exhausting.
Excellent point
"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.
So we've got a pot-kettle situation here.
No, someone who keeps trying to recapture lightning in a bottle, having done it once.
Having a well-known author walk into an interview where you have the knowledge to detonate a year of her work in one sentence must be mind-blowing. It's a once-in-several-lifetimes experience.
Sweet will never ever get that same high again, and he's going to destroy himself chasing the dragon.
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.
Choices exist as a gradient; some may be less good or more bad than others, but often there's no way to know in advance. So we have to choose, then live with the results. Seems a lot of people aren't happy with that reality.
It's too probabilistic, and most people far prefer certainty, even false certainty, over honest uncertainty. The future is always uncertain.
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.
If it's any consolation the same impulse exists on my side of the aisle (right-wing) as well. Nothing better than seeing some country common sense - and if it's from a minority, there'll be a standing ovation - take down some big city lib.
It is a consolation!
It seems to exist a bit less in less binary societies (I.e, Not the US). I often wonder how much the American political system engenders it
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.