Even in 2012, you could have taken a sliver of mainstream media like "vampire fantasy novels" and failed to read everything in a single year. I think the author simply had a narrower view of what was "important".
Yes, media is now more accessible and a few key areas (TV in particular) have increased output 3 or 4 fold. But I think its likely that as the author's social circle has grown the author is aware of a greater variety of media that they weren't consuming. Additionally, most people have less time to consume things as they age. These are old problems.
It's just one of the costs of individualism. With so much to consume, instant personal choice, and no consistent conduit, there is little chance we have all seen the same stuff.
A way around it is explicitly discussing the issue with mates. I keep some close friends who keep in close parity because we all understand that if we don't all play the same game we will end up playing nothing together. Rando internet friends are great but you don't always get that consistency of long term discussion and a deeper relationship.
We still reach outside of the group of course, I play other games too, but if X wants to play Sea of Thieves then we all jump in else they won't do the same for you when you want to play your game with them.
I think this kind of small scale community building helps a lot, and helps you get the benefits of the internet without the banality of the "all psuedo-anonymous hive mind"
Individualism in the sense that gives us the framework to find our own paths and explore what we personally want from life in a context that can transcend the immediate communities we live in.
One of the downsides is that we don't have to be a big part of those communities anymore, especially with the internet. This results in more fractured cultural diaspora, even amongst people from the same town. I've rarely watched, listened or enjoyed anything my co-workers have because we can select from the near infinite library of the internet. Previously this wasn't an issue even with individualism, because everyone had to watch the same few TV channels and listen to the same few radio stations.
I think it's amazing how diverse the world has become, how niche media can be, and how free we all are to explore what we want from life. But that's just one of the costs.
How one can misspell "entertainment" as "culture"? And the answer is clearly yes, the west consumes too much of it. The stress leads to distraction gluttony which leads to detachment from the real life which leads to stress as one can hardly navigate efficiently the social hive when his mental picture of it is taken from movies, shows, social media, etc.
It's kind of awesome how happy accidents like this come to pollute a myriad of word meanings, though many people have absolutely no clue, and simply cannot fathom how eerily words can divest meanings, such that the meat of their importh is utterly changed. Reading this very paragraph a few centuries ago it would have seemed quite silly, with naughty interpretation.
You can dissect the western claim and find problems with it, you always can with any generalization. Or you can find it accurate enough as westerners have the time and money to spend on entertainment compared to the rest of the world. Suggestion for nitpicking: tell me about Japan.
You're gaslighting. A complete falsehood generated by your imagination is not "accurate enough" for any situation, and crying "nitpick" doesn't magically make you correct about anything.
I do think western culture may be more entertainment centric, as many other countries tend to be more religion centric. Not all of them, of course. But many countries of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East place religion front and center and consequently don't value their entertainment quite as much. In American, for example, a lack of common religion means people relate through the media they consume or the activities they engage in. Culture isn't as moored to age old traditions, but instead people relish in throwing away old traditions and creating their own.
How can one not include entertainment into culture?
The word "culture" always had two meanings, a. what people in some collective do and b. "high culture", the stuff that is somehow supposed to reflect on human condition.
> Doesn’t “celebrities eating bugs” reflect on the human condition?
Of course it does but not literally and seen from a certain perspective. I'm thinking of the shallow aspect of fame and the meaninglessness that comes with it and the desperation to keep the spotlight pointing at them. Celebrities behaviors are an aspect of the human nature after all.
> "high culture", the stuff that is somehow supposed to reflect on human condition.
"High culture" is first and foremost about marketing. Many people care more about things that are marketed as too good for the average man, and products marketed for that group is called "high culture", the name is a part of the marketing.
It is similar to the difference between cheap wine and fine wine, people don't notice a difference until you tell them one is more expensive than the other and then suddenly people start noticing a huge difference.
Before I saw your post, I was indeed about to ask "When did the word 'culture' replace 'entertainment'?"
In my country, where the same phenomenon happened ('divertissement' is now labelled 'culture'), I would say it was less than 10 years ago, perhaps closer to 5 years ago for a systematisation of the use.
During Covid-related lockdowns and other limitations, it reached new highs: how dared we limit access to the vital need which 'culture' is, how dared we forbid 'culture' people ('culture' producers (!)) to work for some time, and so on.
> During Covid-related lockdowns and other limitations, it reached new highs: how dared we limit access to the vital need which 'culture' is, how dared we forbid 'culture' people ('culture' producers (!)) to work for some time, and so on.
The same thing happened in France, using the exact same wording.
I sometimes feel as though entertainment IS becoming a large part of culture. If I never watch TV or listen to the music, nor watch videos on the internet, suddenly I'm cut off from entire conversations that are happening. I feel like I need to be plugged in to entertainment in order to truly understand the culture. But I can't say how much this would be true in 1950s America, or in other countries like Nigeria or Bangladesh
You are probably thinking about "high culture" when you mention "culture". Culture is everything humans do to express themselves, from literature to theatre to entertainment to dancing to philosophy and religion.
The two terms are not interchangeable. Entertainment is included in culture, but the article is about entertainment only but used culture in the title.
Entertainment would be low culture then (?). A lot of modern media (marvel, netflix, most of youtube, anything trending basically) is made to be consumed once and forgotten. They're templated products made to generate the maximum amount of revenues from the least amount of work. Yet this is what people think about when you talk about culture these days (and definitely what they "consume" the most), culture has been made global and is all about marketing (go watch the top 1 movie on netflix right now, red notice, it's objectively bad on almost all aspects yet it cumulated 150 million hours of streaming)
Modern "culture" is almost entirely based on entertainment and pass time. How many times have I recommended a book and a movie to be told it's "too hard", "too serious", "not entertaining"... There is a reason why Marvel movies are always in the top of the charts, unplug your brain, grab you favorite sugary snacks and teleport yourself 3 hours in the future.
We call it "content" for a reason, shapeless and tasteless content to fill up the mere containers we became.
Mass media tends to low culture, yes, for the reason that it has to appeal to common (in both senses of the word) elements and drives: sex, violence, fear, broad humour, etc.
"High culture" is narrower, and of course there's the inevitable discussion of whether or not it is better. I'll note that one era's low or broad culture can become another's high (simple distance in space and time contributes heavily to this, with Shakespeare being a notable case). One of the strong functions of high culture is as a strong signaling / credible signaling device --- if you appreciate or participate in high culture, you're demonstrating that you've put in the time required to learn its nuances and backstory. This serves as an accessible indicator of attributes which are otherwise difficult to assess.
(This shows up in all kinds of cultural, faddish, or in-group behaviour, even in the name they go by, Shibboleths.)
Mass media has become a delivery system for advertising and propaganda (the latter has long been a function). Mass appeal means mass advertising markets, and explains much of the push for it. That said, "high culture" affords a cultural segmentation potentially identifying a more selective, and affluent, market segment --- one with stronger appeal to at least some advertisers.
The practice of adtech and interactively-targeted advertising ... somewhat subverts this relationship.
What would be the distinction between entertainment and literature, theatre and dancing? Let's add poetry, orchestras, opera and folk songs to the list as well - those are decent examples of "culture" while being "entertainment".
> How one can misspell "entertainment" as "culture"?
In the western society "entertainment" is "culture". It is very hard to find real culture. In some countries bookstores are full with thrash. On radio and tv you get the same selection of mediocre till thrash offers. It is like free speach. You are "free" to speak but your voice is lost in 1000000 more voices. And if you finally are able to be heard, police comes at your door.
I absolutely love the show Girls. I loved it so much, I was positively depressed when it ended and I emailed Lena Dunham multiple times to BEG her to revive it. I literally witnessed myself turning into a "fanboy" like I'm 16 again. Normally, if I love something I have reason to consider a "guilty pleasure", I will feel reluctant to publicly say I love it for fear of being judged. But in the case of Girls (and Titanic), I have so often been moved to tears watching them, I have so often experienced the feeling (for me, the mark of great art, because it's the exact same feeling I feel when falling in love) of "death is no longer something to be afraid of because I've just caught a glimpse of something eternal, something that is bound to go on exist forever" - I have so often experienced such feelings watching them, that it's immediately clear to me that it'd be a silly betrayal of my entire being to try and pretend I don't love them. It would be no different from publicly joking about my mom's appearance just to fit in with the cool kids. Have you watched Girls? Yes, it's comedy. Yes it's often silly. But there is so, so much more to it. I'd go so far as to say that anyone who's watched Girls without becoming mesmerised by Lena Dunham by the end, has not really watched the show.
How is Shakespeare different or better than let’s say Girls or Squid Game? I think it is exactly what it was, Girls and Squid Game of its time.
Michelangelo is definitely out of this world. My favorite of his works is Pietà. Every time I looked at it for half an hour and just could not believe the realism. However, while Renaissance was great foe find arts, there is a lot of mediocrity. We are looking at the best, the rest is forgotten or only enjoyed by narrow group of connoisseurs.
Well on the one side there are artists (e.g. Shakespeare) and on the other side is art (e.g. Squid Game).
I understand their reasoning in that classical auteur style works can be more culturally powerful, especially if they are old enough to serve as an example for their time periods. However, it’d be better to compare Michelangelo to any of the millions of sculptors who lived in the 500 years after him. Shakespeare can be compared to Broadway playwrights or movie screenwriters.
The problem with calling entertainment low culture is that it cheapens the original concept while still trying to get the same appreciation and respect for it. Perhaps we should forsake the word "culture" and call it "art" again. And no, "House of Cards" is not art.
I don't think there can be too much culture. But there's this constant battle about your attention which I consider toxic (because it exploits common human traits)
This reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote - although he was talking about technology, it seems appropriate here also :)
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Related to this, I wonder how the average age of HN readership has changed over time.
My guess is it has shifted towards an older audience continually since the beginning. To that end what new things are "against the order of things" today.
I definitely see a change in me with age - when I was young I assumed everything newer is better by default and even disregarded evidence that newer is worse. Change for the sake of change was fun for me even if it was a regression at the end. I've tried as much of new software/technologies as I could and it helped me to become a professional but I would not trust a younger self to make business decisions - I would waste too much money on playing with new stuff.
I still open to new things I just more critical and skeptical - I want some evidence that the change will be positive.
> My guess is it has shifted towards an older audience continually since the beginning. To that end what new things are "against the order of things" today.
May be it has shifted but it seems to me NH audience on average still younger than me and more excited about new stuff.
Extend the idea of NFTs to actual registered ownership of a thing you care about, like the title of your house, or your rental agreement, rather than a fucking pixelated jpg a child would be ashamed of, and it might look like something a bit more representative of a worthwhile future.
I think this isn't quite as implementable as they say it is. If someone breaks into a house, steals the crypto phrase from a little old lady, and moves a house into his name/address, should he really own it?
If a Blockchain contract needs to be ratified by an external entity, is the Blockchain really worth it over a database owned by that external entity?
This is the ultimate example of where you want a centralised database run by the state. Preferably properly "cadastral", so you can drop a coordinate pin anywhere and look up the owner.
What happens when the chain devotes from reality? Let’s take the house title. I stop paying but refuse to sign a transaction giving up ownership. I get a divorce and destroy the key out of spite. I sell the house but have lost the key, can I never transact with my property again?
The chain will drift from reality, in an uncorrectable way, reducing its usefulness over time.
The house of cards you are standing on doesn't seem to pass the "is it worth something to people who don't already have skin in the game?" contrary to the title of a house.
Beanie babies aren't worth much now.
To their credit, Beanie Babies holders were always upfront about their desire to make money. There was none of this fig leaf reasoning about how BBs are really a harbinger of a new paradigm of asset securitization.
There’s always been a lot of cultural stuff, but the key difference is the reduction of shared culture. 30-50 years ago if you wanted to read enough to contextualise The Waste Land[1] it would require a massive amount of ‘high culture’ from earlier centuries (and not just in English). Nowadays it would still be a huge amount of work though perhaps would not require trips to obscure German libraries. But 30-50 years ago, at least where I live, there were only 3-4 tv channels and a few more radio stations and shows could regularly pull tens of millions of viewers because there was nothing else to watch.
The lack of shared culture[2] today means people have less in common. It seems to me that having less in common with people makes them more distant and that there could be negative effects of that. I’ve certainly heard the argument that this reduced shared culture can be connected with the larger political divisions we (feel we) see today. But then 100 years ago when there was no mass shared culture like tv (or maybe there was?) we seemed to not have the same problems, so maybe there is something else at play.
[1] I pick this example because the whole thing is referencing many earlier works in one way or another, and it is a concrete thing rather than a field like ‘literature’.
[2] I suppose one might claim that tv is not culture because it is too pedestrian. I don’t really think that’s true, but if you just pick your favourite kind of high culture (eg theatre/ballet/classical music/poetry/literary fiction), there would likely have been some tv shows about it and, as there were only a few channels, lots of people outside the small set of people who deeply care about the thing would see those shows. It seems a little more egalitarian to me than what we have today, though I suppose if you are interested in those things it is now very easy and cheap to seek them out online.
You're making an interesting analysis, but it seems to me this "reduction" you talk about is just an illusion that comes from a vastly increased choice (it's much easier to find niche stuff thanks to Internet). And perhaps because we actually long for shared culture, and now see this fragmentation much more clearly, there is a feeling of being overwhelmed by it.
Agreed. The subcultures started this trend in the sixties and now they are accelerating this trend since any subculture can mimic the sense of a shared culture with the closed circles of internet media/social networks. We're building filter bubbles ourselves, having less and less time for understanding, leading to suspicion and in the end conflict with subcultures perceived as threat to our way of living.
> The lack of shared culture[2] today means people have less in common. It seems to me that having less in common with people makes them more distant and that there could be negative effects of that.
This is something that we need to adapt to, and I think it's quite possible to adapt to it.
For example, when I was a teenager, a good chunk of my friends and schoolmates listened to the same bands as I did, or at least there was a substantial overlap. I was much too young for the heyday of MTV, but the big names pushed by the record companies were still ones everyone knew and had opinions about, and only occasionally would we introduce each other to our personal discoveries.
Nowadays, with the friends I've made over the past few years, there's usually little or no overlap. So the inevitable 'what kind of music do you listen to?' has changed from 'oh, I like X too! / I don't like X because Y' to a different exercise where you need to communicate why you're really into a certain ukulele youtuber or a Chinese operetta or a Brazilian hip-hop subgenre, to someone who's never heard of them. And then listening and asking interesting questions when they do the same for their favourites.
The rare times you do find some overlaps become pleasant surprises - one of my best friends is into blackgaze and ambient, I'm a folk- and metal-head, and finding out that we had a few experimental/avantgarde bands like Unexpect and Deathspell Omega in both our playlists was delightful when we first met.
>But then 100 years ago when there was no mass shared culture like tv (or maybe there was?) we seemed to not have the same problems, so maybe there is something else at play.
I would say 100 years ago shared culture came from religion, neighbors, and the national conversations one would read about in the news. Religion is increasingly not a part of people's lives be. We still have national conversations through the media, but there too there are so many outlets you can choose a specific narrative that appeals to you and only listen to that. Neighbors are not quite as close as they once were-- the idea of borrowing a cup of sugar from my neighbors sounds crazy in modern times.
I thought newspapers were much less consolidated and more numerous 100 years ago. Maybe tv/internet news counteracts the consolidation. And I thought that politics (the ‘conversation’?) has become a lot more national today than it used to be. But maybe that’s not relevant to your point.
I'm not overloaded by popular culture, I just ignore most of it.
I know what I like, and the rest of it I just pay no attention to. Most popular culture I like is stuff from the last few decades of last century (showing my age I suppose), although occasionally something new comes along that appeals to me, but most new things I just ignore. If someone makes a reference to something I don't get, I'll Google the reference, read enough about it to get the point, then move on.
It isn't just popular culture. Humanity has multiple civilisations whose literatures go back thousands of years. There is just so much, whether books just published last week or ancient manuscripts, that nobody could ever possibly read it all, everybody has to pick out the parts that interest them and pass over the rest. I'm sure for many people there must be some hidden gems which they would have really enjoyed, except for the fact that they'll live their whole life and never once stumble upon them.
Ever since I read The Triumph of Time in high school, my favourite poet has always been Algernon Charles Swinburne. If I had lived in the second half of the 19th century, that would have been rather mainstream, hip and trendy even; in the 21st century, that makes me somewhat idiosyncratic. I don't care. (I also don't care what T. S. Eliot thought about Swinburne, in case anyone wants to bring that up.)
I've passively ignored most of what is popular culture since high school. Which is to say I'm not hiding under a rock, but I'm not feeling left out if I don't have my finger on the pulse.
I _always_ miss some film, tv and music when it's current, but I easily catch up on it years later. Theater is the only cultural genre where you 'use it or lose it', and I accept that bargain.
I have learned that expounding on what you don't know makes you sound like an idiot and/or a snob. Boy, it can be very tempting though when people are talking about reality TV empires.
I don't know if there's too much - but what I think is good is that we're being exposed to much more culture from other, different, people. Whether it's an American listening to Grime music, or a Netflix viewer watching the Squid Game.
The world today lets us see cultures from across time and space much more than the past. Despite the large media companies and global platforms we aren't (or atleast the curious aren't) being fed what curators, journalists or advertisers feel are important.
I feel like this way but not just about entertainment, about everything in general. From one perspective, it's the success of capitalism, such a wide variety of offerings that there is sure to exist something for everyone, on the other hand, the more options you have, the more wrong options you need to avoid.
While having too many options isn't a massive issue for relatively small purchases, if I have a meh lunch or get a car wash that felt lacking, it's no biggie, but for larger purchases it's a bit paralyzing.
My headphones broke recently, and it took me a good week and a half to figure out what I wanted to buy. Search filters help, narrowing it a price range, a type (earbuds were what I ended up deciding on), then gaining access to further filters for things like battery life, but even after all of that, I'm still left with 100s of options, and many of the things I care about are qualitative and can't be filtered for, things like sound quality or ear comfort.
I've been wanting a new laptop for a while and reaching a decision on that seems like an absolutely daunting task. I agree with the article, there really is too much stuff. We have reviewers and aggregators to help alleviate that, we hope that they can curate the best stuff and we don't have to do the work ourselves. But then, there's too many reviewers and aggregators, so now I feel we need an aggregator for aggregators, a reviewer for reviewers, just to figure out who's being paid off by marketing teams, who's churning out surface level reviews for clicks, and who's actually worth listening to.
The author winds up answering "no" to his own question. By thus rendering the entire point of his own article moot, he ironically reveals it to be exactly the type of pointless content that could lead one to question whether we do have too much of it.
I think ultimately it says something good about the tremendous wealth of our society that we can afford to support huge industries employing millions to do nothing but create trivial content. Before mass production people would make textiles at home as piecework, but it was grueling, boring work that paid a pittance. In the current age people can make quite a comfortable living creating online content at home, all while themselves consuming podcasts or peeking at TikTok clips.
I have some sympathy for a media studies professor who appears to have no option, but I’m baffled why people are watching shows they don’t actually like. You don’t have to keep up with stuff just for the sake of keeping up. I log in to Netflix for weeks on end and see nothing new that appeals to me. Music is more reliable, and I’m incredibly grateful to music recommendation algorithms for finding me at least one new artist a week. I don’t sweat listening to their entire back catalogue and integrating it into some gestalt artistic identity to break out at parties though, I just like knowing it’s all there.
There's too much of everything. Over the last 20 years everyone rushed to get everything onto the internet, so it's noisy, messy and can be overwhelming if you aren't careful. Personally, I like to subscribe to Netflix for 30 days a year, catch up on stuff, and then cancel my subscription. Same for Amazon Prime, HBO Max and Disney+. I feel lucky that I never got used to Spotify, because it means I save $11/mo that I can use to buy CDs from artists I know I like (and YouTube/KEXP/KCRW is far better at surfacing excellent music anyway). So I end up with CDs in the car, and listening to Youtube at home. It works. As for TV shows, most of them suck anyway.
I blacklist websites that I feel are bad for me using /etc/hosts, but I still consume too much news. I was thinking about this today and how to alleviate it without hiding my head in the sand. Honestly a weekly news magazine like The Economist would probably be enough.
Ideally I'd have a tool that lets me react once to a given news item and then track it over time, filtering out repetitive or meta news (especially news about other people's reactions to the news), show me only substantive changes over time, and ideally with a weight that (geometrically) increases with proximity. What is humbling is to realize how easily led we are, how things that seem so important, so vital, end up just...forgotten when the news dies down. It's actually quite scary when you think about it, almost as if your reactions to things aren't quite your own! This tool would help recover that control.
The Guardian aims at a particular kind of person who essentially spends their entire life in artistic theory and not the real world. They derive their worth from being able to quote at each other.
For those people I'm sure it does feel like an enormous struggle.
If you watch for enjoyment rather than as an attempt at gaining social cachet then it's fine.
Maybe you are right, I want to be able to talk and discuss topics with friends and peers. I feel that is hard sometimes to know what others are watching and how it matches my taste. I enjoy as much watching and reading media as I enjoy sharing that experience with others.
If you do not enjoy sharing experiences with others, whatever you see is good if you like it.
> rather than as an attempt at gaining social cachet then it's fine.
At least for me, I do not think that watching iZombie, Dune or Cowboy Bebop makes me look better, but it allows to share good moments with friends. To explain the complete plot of a movie or several episodes from a TV show just for a pun or a quick observations is not what we like.
I am ok with you watching just for yourself, but it seems that you do not approve that I or others like to share opinions and talk about media.
Why is that?
All the stuff from before you were born is curated for you by society. It's pre-filtered, the cruft has been removed and for the first few years of your life you have no control over the filter.
Then, as agency is attained, you get increasing exposure to the great unfiltered, and you find hidden treasure and trash and you learn what you actually like and dislike - in preparation for the filter you apply to your own children - which helps to define you, to yourself.
Then you get a job, partner, mortgage / rent, kids, and, just the requirements to being able to afford all that goes with that, removes the time required for 'agency' and so you're locked in a fairly tight decade-era of culture for the rest of your life unless you actively choose otherwise; seeking out the alternative, following rabbit holes, opening yourself to the full spectrum of colour that is within surprisingly easy reach, following threads that your natural tendency for the easy path would be to drop.
Most of my favourite music that I listen to now is recent. My old favourites are from when I hadn't heard my new favourites. Some of my new favourites are contextual around life stages and activities I hadn't reached or participated in earlier.
I missed Mad Men, tried to start it a couple of years ago, realised it's 92 hour-long episodes, and worked out that I didn't have the enthusiasm for it after getting through a few episodes because the combination of my friend-base and entertainment value I was getting from it didn't add up to being worth 92 hours of my time.
Recently watched Berserk upon the recommendation of a work colleague. Worth it.
Squid game, worth it. For me anyway.
Live action Cowboy Bebop, enjoying it a couple of episodes in, will continue.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. But first, you gotta know yourself.
Listen to music you don't like to better calibrate what you do like. Watch the occasional blockbuster movie to help your appreciation for real film.
Can't see, hear, taste, or do it all, find your own channel but make sure to rub up against the edges regularly enough to determine if you need to change channels but didn't realise it yet.
Culture is about stories from which life lessons are learnt, and there are a lot more TV shows, movies, and songs than there are life lessons, so as long as you check those edges occasionally, you'll be pretty well covered.
The Wire destroyed and rebuilt my view of the world, and work, and government, and leadership and morality. The song King Kong as covered by Tom Waits recalibrated my musical brain (which was already uniquely calibrated by Mr. Bungle in the late 90's), The Mighty Boosh and Rick and Morty have been journeys into imagination like I never dreamed.
> Maintaining my fluency was getting harder and harder: I was a media studies professor who was able to devote hours of my ostensible working day to the task of consuming media. I was still falling far behind, and more so every day. In discussing my struggle to metabolise what felt like a never-ending meal, I’m focusing on television. But television was just part of the larger, overwhelming feast. Around the time television options began to expand, so too did the supply (and our access) to so many other forms of culture, from YouTube to digital mixtapes.
In another time and place these would be the insane ramblings of a mad person.
"Too many books" was apparently a problem already 2000 years ago; here's Seneca advising his friend against it, in his letter-2:
[quote]
Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing necessarily happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. [...]
'But I want to read different books at different times,' you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. So read always from authors of proven worth; and if ever you are inclined to turn aside to others, return afterward to the previous ones. Obtain each day some aid against poverty, something against death, and likewise against other calamities. And when you have moved rapidly through many topics, select one to ponder that day and digest. This is what I do as well [...]
This is a sentiment that resonates strongly with me. I've tried to keep up with the latest - whether it's books, movies, or programming libraries - and inevitably, I spread my attention too thin and learn too little about too much.
Now, I've swung the other direction, and begun really dedicating my attention to a narrow set of things in just about every facet of my life.
It's been a journey rather than a clearly defined process. Easing back on TV/movies, for example, has been just as much about self-discovery ("what do I actually enjoy?" is a surprisingly difficult question to answer) as it has about choosing what to watch and when.
Fear of missing out has been a struggle, but not as much of one as it used to be. Learning to accept that I won't have context for things others are talking about has been difficult, and sometimes I still feel left out when some friends are gushing about a show I have no interest in watching. On the other hand, being able to have really deep conversations about the specific shows/movies I devote time to is, in my opinion, worth the trade off. It just feels better.
Outside of pop culture it gets more nuanced, but a few things seem universal. I get more satisfaction out of the things I devote time to. I feel less rushed. I feel more confident talking about the subjects I'm familiar with.
Fully agree. It's a thoroughly losing game to "try to keep up" on many fronts anyway.
In general, I suggest to embrace "JOMO" (joy of missing out) — a killer feature that helps keep our resting heart-rate remarkably consistent and healthy.
Very interesting find which can have one ponder about some ideas on the perspective that nothing is really new, just changing shapes. Even if you consider the advent of AI and us striving to build higher intelligence models to me it all just seems to be stemming from solving problems via abstractions (shortcuts) using evolving frameworks of logic and math. Eventually our interest to automate things and discover all the secret sauce of problem solving got us here. However regarding Seneca you might imagine that a long while ago information retrieval wasn't that efficient and required significant amount of patience and planning which one might argue is being "optimized away" with the technology nowadays. This seems to correspond to how our brain works by optimizing energy expenditure. I remember reading somewhere that such optimization is in principle what causes us to make premature assumptions so that we don't have to do the heavy lifting by thoroughly digesting all the information that is being presented to us which is probably what we can experience in peer interactions or just skimming through those articles and comments daily.
Reading "always from authors of proven worth" raises the question of how new authors might come to develop proven worth.
Most, obviously, wont. Some, however, will. Seneca himself was one of them.
But this remains an interesting problem and question:
- How do we assess quality?
- How do we cope with a superfluity of new information?
- What are the costs of failed assessments and promotion (and there will be failures).
- How many 2nd chances should be afforded to those who've betrayed trust, and worse, attention?
- How do we cultivate new and good interpreters and fabricators of the universe we find ourselves in?
I often call this the vetting problem. There's an essay by Arthur C. Clarke in which he discussed "the servant problem, Sri Lankan style", of how to offer (and interpret) letters of recommendation for household help. (The post-script to the essay is both amusing and insightful.) This appeared in one of his essay collections, though I don't recall which one.
It's also a problem in any activity in which agents and agency exist: the principle-agent problem, regulatory capture, corruption, infidelity, betrayal, and the like. Initial assessments are useful but not definitive; ground truths may change and mistaken assessments may prove durable and even potentially valid. Some truths are self-generating ("if you want to have trust, give it", and rather similarly for distrust), some are self-defeating.
Thank you for the essay reference. You raise many excellent points.
I don't have answers to all the nuanced questions you ask, but on evaluating quality: my approach is to research how involved and "invested" the author is on the topic they're talking about. Also, I'll simply read some articles and chunks of paragraphs from their book to get a sense of tone and competency. I realize these are all value judgments of some kind; but it is inescapable.
A journalist writing about "the benefits of neuroscience"? I'll skip it. I'd rather put the likes of Antonio Damasio, Robert Sapolsky, or Michael Gazzaniga—all of whom have spent decades studying cognitive science—under the rubric of "proven worth". Also, their writing is accessible for the non-specialist and specialist reader alike. Note though, this doesn't mean that the journalist's writing doesn't have any value. It simply doesn't meet my bar of quality (again, value judgement).
Another rough rule of thumb is, usually, books from academic presses have better value-to-noise ratio than popular presses. Even this is slowly degrading, with universities having heavy-duty marketing departments to drum up their books.
I'm somewhat hesitant to invest too deeply in a now-stale HN discussion (a site dynamic I ... dislike), but another element I use, and one that addresses TFA's focus, is what I've been calling "BOTI": Best of the interval.
That borrows from a 43 Folders / Ticker File model (or more generally, a round-robin database). The idea is that after a given interval (hour, day, week, month, year, decade ...), you review a list of possible candidates and select which you think are best. Ideally, there's some opportunity to revisit earlier potential candidates, and there should be an option for hidden gems to enter the pile as well --- items originally passed over but on consideration found deserving attention.
That's the basic idea.
In practice, review itself turns out to be difficult, though there are shortcuts. On HN (using Algolia), you can enter a blank time-limited search to return the top submissions of the previous day, week, month, or year. Or specific earlier periods can be constructed (I've posted a shell script that will generate the URLs for this using Algolia's seconds-since-the-epoch timestamps). HN's choices aren't always optimal, but they're OK, and are cheaply accessible.
I'd like to have a number of filters and systems I could tap similarly.
The other element I'd like to include is reputation-grading sources. That is, which consistently turn out high-quality content, and which either don't, are variable, or straight up contribute noise?[1] So sources (authors, editors, translators, other contributors, publishers) accrue a reputation over time, and can see that admusted.
What happens with repeated selection, filtering, and assessment tends to be quite high quality.
That said, there's still far more published in a year (or posted online in a day) than could be read in a lifetime. Roughly 1 million books/year, and 5 billion Facebook items/day.[2] A well-read person likely reads on the order of 10 books per year over the course of their life (some read more, many less).[3]
An interesting question in an age of abundant ... culture / entertainment / literature / drama / documentary ... becomes what constitutes a common cultural heritage or touchstone? Is it ... the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Star Wars? Shakespeare? The Bible, Koran, Torah, Tao Te Ching, or Upanishads? And how criticial is it that there is, or is not one? (I suspect that this was the bigger question that TFA was leaning at but never quite got 'round to.)
My own awareness of my limited capacity to assimilate culture occurred as I walked into my univerity library the first time. Its local phyisical collection then numbered about 5 million volumes (with 15--20 million or so across multiple affiliated campuses), and ... I was never going to access more than a small set of those. What I realised and discovered was that a mix of intentional seach and serendipitous sampling could prove quite rewarding. Some sections of that collection I came to know fairly well, most I utterly ignored.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Some noise is tolerable, and none probably means a source isn't trying. But an indifference or insensitivity to error also indicates a source is highly inconsistent, if not outright deceptive. I'm inclined to the view that intentional noise and deception are quite probably worse than no information (especially if the source is aware of how to mask that deception). Dante put liars in the penultimate circle of Hell for a reason.
2. Just for grins: if a typical FB post contains 120 characters of text (I'd found similar results on Google+ a couple of years ago, and Twitter-length posts seem ... frequent), and we have 6 characters per word, then 5 billion items -> 100 billion words. At 500 words/page, that's 200 million pages, and at 250 pages/book, about 800,000 books&...
I personally don't feel the need to "keep up" with anything. That may reduce the number of things I can share with strangers I meet, but not that much. When I have a few friends that talk about the same thing for a long time, I tend to take the time to see/read it. Usually I have a good time, and I can talk to them about something that they like a lot. But this is a few movies a year at most.
Someone else quoted something from Seneca against reading too many book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29317420. I feel like the deeper I go into something, the more I get from it. Going deeper could be seeing/reading the thing multiple times, talking about it with friends, researching it. It transforms what can be a passive consumption into an active one. I see a lot of videos, explanations or memes that are based on taking way too seriously something. While this is often used as a joke, I feel like there is value in that. I think everything can be used as a lens through which you can perceive the world, if you spend enough time with it.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadYes, media is now more accessible and a few key areas (TV in particular) have increased output 3 or 4 fold. But I think its likely that as the author's social circle has grown the author is aware of a greater variety of media that they weren't consuming. Additionally, most people have less time to consume things as they age. These are old problems.
A way around it is explicitly discussing the issue with mates. I keep some close friends who keep in close parity because we all understand that if we don't all play the same game we will end up playing nothing together. Rando internet friends are great but you don't always get that consistency of long term discussion and a deeper relationship.
We still reach outside of the group of course, I play other games too, but if X wants to play Sea of Thieves then we all jump in else they won't do the same for you when you want to play your game with them.
I think this kind of small scale community building helps a lot, and helps you get the benefits of the internet without the banality of the "all psuedo-anonymous hive mind"
One of the downsides is that we don't have to be a big part of those communities anymore, especially with the internet. This results in more fractured cultural diaspora, even amongst people from the same town. I've rarely watched, listened or enjoyed anything my co-workers have because we can select from the near infinite library of the internet. Previously this wasn't an issue even with individualism, because everyone had to watch the same few TV channels and listen to the same few radio stations.
I think it's amazing how diverse the world has become, how niche media can be, and how free we all are to explore what we want from life. But that's just one of the costs.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/454772/number-social-med...
I would also think, that trying to keep up is the overloading thing. It's like walking into t a library and thinking you have to read all the books.
The word "culture" always had two meanings, a. what people in some collective do and b. "high culture", the stuff that is somehow supposed to reflect on human condition.
Of course it does but not literally and seen from a certain perspective. I'm thinking of the shallow aspect of fame and the meaninglessness that comes with it and the desperation to keep the spotlight pointing at them. Celebrities behaviors are an aspect of the human nature after all.
"High culture" is first and foremost about marketing. Many people care more about things that are marketed as too good for the average man, and products marketed for that group is called "high culture", the name is a part of the marketing.
It is similar to the difference between cheap wine and fine wine, people don't notice a difference until you tell them one is more expensive than the other and then suddenly people start noticing a huge difference.
In my country, where the same phenomenon happened ('divertissement' is now labelled 'culture'), I would say it was less than 10 years ago, perhaps closer to 5 years ago for a systematisation of the use.
During Covid-related lockdowns and other limitations, it reached new highs: how dared we limit access to the vital need which 'culture' is, how dared we forbid 'culture' people ('culture' producers (!)) to work for some time, and so on.
The same thing happened in France, using the exact same wording.
Modern "culture" is almost entirely based on entertainment and pass time. How many times have I recommended a book and a movie to be told it's "too hard", "too serious", "not entertaining"... There is a reason why Marvel movies are always in the top of the charts, unplug your brain, grab you favorite sugary snacks and teleport yourself 3 hours in the future.
We call it "content" for a reason, shapeless and tasteless content to fill up the mere containers we became.
"High culture" is narrower, and of course there's the inevitable discussion of whether or not it is better. I'll note that one era's low or broad culture can become another's high (simple distance in space and time contributes heavily to this, with Shakespeare being a notable case). One of the strong functions of high culture is as a strong signaling / credible signaling device --- if you appreciate or participate in high culture, you're demonstrating that you've put in the time required to learn its nuances and backstory. This serves as an accessible indicator of attributes which are otherwise difficult to assess.
(This shows up in all kinds of cultural, faddish, or in-group behaviour, even in the name they go by, Shibboleths.)
Mass media has become a delivery system for advertising and propaganda (the latter has long been a function). Mass appeal means mass advertising markets, and explains much of the push for it. That said, "high culture" affords a cultural segmentation potentially identifying a more selective, and affluent, market segment --- one with stronger appeal to at least some advertisers.
The practice of adtech and interactively-targeted advertising ... somewhat subverts this relationship.
In the western society "entertainment" is "culture". It is very hard to find real culture. In some countries bookstores are full with thrash. On radio and tv you get the same selection of mediocre till thrash offers. It is like free speach. You are "free" to speak but your voice is lost in 1000000 more voices. And if you finally are able to be heard, police comes at your door.
But hold on, I thought race was just a social construct? I can't keep up these days.
Michelangelo is definitely out of this world. My favorite of his works is Pietà. Every time I looked at it for half an hour and just could not believe the realism. However, while Renaissance was great foe find arts, there is a lot of mediocrity. We are looking at the best, the rest is forgotten or only enjoyed by narrow group of connoisseurs.
I understand their reasoning in that classical auteur style works can be more culturally powerful, especially if they are old enough to serve as an example for their time periods. However, it’d be better to compare Michelangelo to any of the millions of sculptors who lived in the 500 years after him. Shakespeare can be compared to Broadway playwrights or movie screenwriters.
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
My guess is it has shifted towards an older audience continually since the beginning. To that end what new things are "against the order of things" today.
I still open to new things I just more critical and skeptical - I want some evidence that the change will be positive.
> My guess is it has shifted towards an older audience continually since the beginning. To that end what new things are "against the order of things" today.
May be it has shifted but it seems to me NH audience on average still younger than me and more excited about new stuff.
An engineer in their 20's keeps trying to get me to learn Lisp.
I think they meant the age you feel, not the amount of times the earth spun about the sun while you were around :)
If a Blockchain contract needs to be ratified by an external entity, is the Blockchain really worth it over a database owned by that external entity?
This is the ultimate example of where you want a centralised database run by the state. Preferably properly "cadastral", so you can drop a coordinate pin anywhere and look up the owner.
The chain will drift from reality, in an uncorrectable way, reducing its usefulness over time.
The lack of shared culture[2] today means people have less in common. It seems to me that having less in common with people makes them more distant and that there could be negative effects of that. I’ve certainly heard the argument that this reduced shared culture can be connected with the larger political divisions we (feel we) see today. But then 100 years ago when there was no mass shared culture like tv (or maybe there was?) we seemed to not have the same problems, so maybe there is something else at play.
[1] I pick this example because the whole thing is referencing many earlier works in one way or another, and it is a concrete thing rather than a field like ‘literature’.
[2] I suppose one might claim that tv is not culture because it is too pedestrian. I don’t really think that’s true, but if you just pick your favourite kind of high culture (eg theatre/ballet/classical music/poetry/literary fiction), there would likely have been some tv shows about it and, as there were only a few channels, lots of people outside the small set of people who deeply care about the thing would see those shows. It seems a little more egalitarian to me than what we have today, though I suppose if you are interested in those things it is now very easy and cheap to seek them out online.
This is something that we need to adapt to, and I think it's quite possible to adapt to it.
For example, when I was a teenager, a good chunk of my friends and schoolmates listened to the same bands as I did, or at least there was a substantial overlap. I was much too young for the heyday of MTV, but the big names pushed by the record companies were still ones everyone knew and had opinions about, and only occasionally would we introduce each other to our personal discoveries.
Nowadays, with the friends I've made over the past few years, there's usually little or no overlap. So the inevitable 'what kind of music do you listen to?' has changed from 'oh, I like X too! / I don't like X because Y' to a different exercise where you need to communicate why you're really into a certain ukulele youtuber or a Chinese operetta or a Brazilian hip-hop subgenre, to someone who's never heard of them. And then listening and asking interesting questions when they do the same for their favourites.
The rare times you do find some overlaps become pleasant surprises - one of my best friends is into blackgaze and ambient, I'm a folk- and metal-head, and finding out that we had a few experimental/avantgarde bands like Unexpect and Deathspell Omega in both our playlists was delightful when we first met.
I would say 100 years ago shared culture came from religion, neighbors, and the national conversations one would read about in the news. Religion is increasingly not a part of people's lives be. We still have national conversations through the media, but there too there are so many outlets you can choose a specific narrative that appeals to you and only listen to that. Neighbors are not quite as close as they once were-- the idea of borrowing a cup of sugar from my neighbors sounds crazy in modern times.
I know what I like, and the rest of it I just pay no attention to. Most popular culture I like is stuff from the last few decades of last century (showing my age I suppose), although occasionally something new comes along that appeals to me, but most new things I just ignore. If someone makes a reference to something I don't get, I'll Google the reference, read enough about it to get the point, then move on.
It isn't just popular culture. Humanity has multiple civilisations whose literatures go back thousands of years. There is just so much, whether books just published last week or ancient manuscripts, that nobody could ever possibly read it all, everybody has to pick out the parts that interest them and pass over the rest. I'm sure for many people there must be some hidden gems which they would have really enjoyed, except for the fact that they'll live their whole life and never once stumble upon them.
Ever since I read The Triumph of Time in high school, my favourite poet has always been Algernon Charles Swinburne. If I had lived in the second half of the 19th century, that would have been rather mainstream, hip and trendy even; in the 21st century, that makes me somewhat idiosyncratic. I don't care. (I also don't care what T. S. Eliot thought about Swinburne, in case anyone wants to bring that up.)
I _always_ miss some film, tv and music when it's current, but I easily catch up on it years later. Theater is the only cultural genre where you 'use it or lose it', and I accept that bargain.
I have learned that expounding on what you don't know makes you sound like an idiot and/or a snob. Boy, it can be very tempting though when people are talking about reality TV empires.
The world today lets us see cultures from across time and space much more than the past. Despite the large media companies and global platforms we aren't (or atleast the curious aren't) being fed what curators, journalists or advertisers feel are important.
While having too many options isn't a massive issue for relatively small purchases, if I have a meh lunch or get a car wash that felt lacking, it's no biggie, but for larger purchases it's a bit paralyzing.
My headphones broke recently, and it took me a good week and a half to figure out what I wanted to buy. Search filters help, narrowing it a price range, a type (earbuds were what I ended up deciding on), then gaining access to further filters for things like battery life, but even after all of that, I'm still left with 100s of options, and many of the things I care about are qualitative and can't be filtered for, things like sound quality or ear comfort.
I've been wanting a new laptop for a while and reaching a decision on that seems like an absolutely daunting task. I agree with the article, there really is too much stuff. We have reviewers and aggregators to help alleviate that, we hope that they can curate the best stuff and we don't have to do the work ourselves. But then, there's too many reviewers and aggregators, so now I feel we need an aggregator for aggregators, a reviewer for reviewers, just to figure out who's being paid off by marketing teams, who's churning out surface level reviews for clicks, and who's actually worth listening to.
I think ultimately it says something good about the tremendous wealth of our society that we can afford to support huge industries employing millions to do nothing but create trivial content. Before mass production people would make textiles at home as piecework, but it was grueling, boring work that paid a pittance. In the current age people can make quite a comfortable living creating online content at home, all while themselves consuming podcasts or peeking at TikTok clips.
All things are wearisome, more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
- Ecclesiastes 1,8-11
I blacklist websites that I feel are bad for me using /etc/hosts, but I still consume too much news. I was thinking about this today and how to alleviate it without hiding my head in the sand. Honestly a weekly news magazine like The Economist would probably be enough.
Ideally I'd have a tool that lets me react once to a given news item and then track it over time, filtering out repetitive or meta news (especially news about other people's reactions to the news), show me only substantive changes over time, and ideally with a weight that (geometrically) increases with proximity. What is humbling is to realize how easily led we are, how things that seem so important, so vital, end up just...forgotten when the news dies down. It's actually quite scary when you think about it, almost as if your reactions to things aren't quite your own! This tool would help recover that control.
We just live in an era where culture is more widely and easily available than ever before.
What's more, since there are many more folks who are able to access more stuff, there's more stuff being produced to capitalize on that as well.
And yes, crappy reality TV is culture. As is any creative or interactive endeavor.
But, as has been the case pretty much forever, Sturgeon's Law[0] applies to all that culture too.
For those of you who don't know (welcome to today's 10,000[1]!) and are too lazy to copy paste the link below, Sturgeon's Law states that:
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law[1] https://xkcd.com/1053/
For those people I'm sure it does feel like an enormous struggle.
If you watch for enjoyment rather than as an attempt at gaining social cachet then it's fine.
If you do not enjoy sharing experiences with others, whatever you see is good if you like it.
> rather than as an attempt at gaining social cachet then it's fine.
At least for me, I do not think that watching iZombie, Dune or Cowboy Bebop makes me look better, but it allows to share good moments with friends. To explain the complete plot of a movie or several episodes from a TV show just for a pun or a quick observations is not what we like.
I am ok with you watching just for yourself, but it seems that you do not approve that I or others like to share opinions and talk about media. Why is that?
UK class system stuff vs. being in a subculture on a forum. "The" culture, vs some shared interest.
Then, as agency is attained, you get increasing exposure to the great unfiltered, and you find hidden treasure and trash and you learn what you actually like and dislike - in preparation for the filter you apply to your own children - which helps to define you, to yourself.
Then you get a job, partner, mortgage / rent, kids, and, just the requirements to being able to afford all that goes with that, removes the time required for 'agency' and so you're locked in a fairly tight decade-era of culture for the rest of your life unless you actively choose otherwise; seeking out the alternative, following rabbit holes, opening yourself to the full spectrum of colour that is within surprisingly easy reach, following threads that your natural tendency for the easy path would be to drop.
Most of my favourite music that I listen to now is recent. My old favourites are from when I hadn't heard my new favourites. Some of my new favourites are contextual around life stages and activities I hadn't reached or participated in earlier.
I missed Mad Men, tried to start it a couple of years ago, realised it's 92 hour-long episodes, and worked out that I didn't have the enthusiasm for it after getting through a few episodes because the combination of my friend-base and entertainment value I was getting from it didn't add up to being worth 92 hours of my time.
Recently watched Berserk upon the recommendation of a work colleague. Worth it.
Squid game, worth it. For me anyway.
Live action Cowboy Bebop, enjoying it a couple of episodes in, will continue.
Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. But first, you gotta know yourself.
Listen to music you don't like to better calibrate what you do like. Watch the occasional blockbuster movie to help your appreciation for real film.
Can't see, hear, taste, or do it all, find your own channel but make sure to rub up against the edges regularly enough to determine if you need to change channels but didn't realise it yet.
Culture is about stories from which life lessons are learnt, and there are a lot more TV shows, movies, and songs than there are life lessons, so as long as you check those edges occasionally, you'll be pretty well covered.
The Wire destroyed and rebuilt my view of the world, and work, and government, and leadership and morality. The song King Kong as covered by Tom Waits recalibrated my musical brain (which was already uniquely calibrated by Mr. Bungle in the late 90's), The Mighty Boosh and Rick and Morty have been journeys into imagination like I never dreamed.
No. There's not too much culture.
In another time and place these would be the insane ramblings of a mad person.
[quote]
Be careful, though, about your reading in many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it. You must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably with you. One who is everywhere is nowhere. Those who travel all the time find that they have many places to stay, but no friendships. The same thing necessarily happens to those who do not become intimate with any one author, but let everything rush right through them. [...]
'But I want to read different books at different times,' you say. The person of delicate digestion nibbles at this and that; when the diet is too varied, though, food does not nourish but only upsets the stomach. So read always from authors of proven worth; and if ever you are inclined to turn aside to others, return afterward to the previous ones. Obtain each day some aid against poverty, something against death, and likewise against other calamities. And when you have moved rapidly through many topics, select one to ponder that day and digest. This is what I do as well [...]
[/quote]
Now, I've swung the other direction, and begun really dedicating my attention to a narrow set of things in just about every facet of my life.
It's... an interesting difference.
Fear of missing out has been a struggle, but not as much of one as it used to be. Learning to accept that I won't have context for things others are talking about has been difficult, and sometimes I still feel left out when some friends are gushing about a show I have no interest in watching. On the other hand, being able to have really deep conversations about the specific shows/movies I devote time to is, in my opinion, worth the trade off. It just feels better.
Outside of pop culture it gets more nuanced, but a few things seem universal. I get more satisfaction out of the things I devote time to. I feel less rushed. I feel more confident talking about the subjects I'm familiar with.
In general, I suggest to embrace "JOMO" (joy of missing out) — a killer feature that helps keep our resting heart-rate remarkably consistent and healthy.
Most, obviously, wont. Some, however, will. Seneca himself was one of them.
But this remains an interesting problem and question:
- How do we assess quality?
- How do we cope with a superfluity of new information?
- What are the costs of failed assessments and promotion (and there will be failures).
- How many 2nd chances should be afforded to those who've betrayed trust, and worse, attention?
- How do we cultivate new and good interpreters and fabricators of the universe we find ourselves in?
I often call this the vetting problem. There's an essay by Arthur C. Clarke in which he discussed "the servant problem, Sri Lankan style", of how to offer (and interpret) letters of recommendation for household help. (The post-script to the essay is both amusing and insightful.) This appeared in one of his essay collections, though I don't recall which one.
It's also a problem in any activity in which agents and agency exist: the principle-agent problem, regulatory capture, corruption, infidelity, betrayal, and the like. Initial assessments are useful but not definitive; ground truths may change and mistaken assessments may prove durable and even potentially valid. Some truths are self-generating ("if you want to have trust, give it", and rather similarly for distrust), some are self-defeating.
I don't have answers to all the nuanced questions you ask, but on evaluating quality: my approach is to research how involved and "invested" the author is on the topic they're talking about. Also, I'll simply read some articles and chunks of paragraphs from their book to get a sense of tone and competency. I realize these are all value judgments of some kind; but it is inescapable.
A journalist writing about "the benefits of neuroscience"? I'll skip it. I'd rather put the likes of Antonio Damasio, Robert Sapolsky, or Michael Gazzaniga—all of whom have spent decades studying cognitive science—under the rubric of "proven worth". Also, their writing is accessible for the non-specialist and specialist reader alike. Note though, this doesn't mean that the journalist's writing doesn't have any value. It simply doesn't meet my bar of quality (again, value judgement).
Another rough rule of thumb is, usually, books from academic presses have better value-to-noise ratio than popular presses. Even this is slowly degrading, with universities having heavy-duty marketing departments to drum up their books.
I'm somewhat hesitant to invest too deeply in a now-stale HN discussion (a site dynamic I ... dislike), but another element I use, and one that addresses TFA's focus, is what I've been calling "BOTI": Best of the interval.
That borrows from a 43 Folders / Ticker File model (or more generally, a round-robin database). The idea is that after a given interval (hour, day, week, month, year, decade ...), you review a list of possible candidates and select which you think are best. Ideally, there's some opportunity to revisit earlier potential candidates, and there should be an option for hidden gems to enter the pile as well --- items originally passed over but on consideration found deserving attention.
That's the basic idea.
In practice, review itself turns out to be difficult, though there are shortcuts. On HN (using Algolia), you can enter a blank time-limited search to return the top submissions of the previous day, week, month, or year. Or specific earlier periods can be constructed (I've posted a shell script that will generate the URLs for this using Algolia's seconds-since-the-epoch timestamps). HN's choices aren't always optimal, but they're OK, and are cheaply accessible.
I'd like to have a number of filters and systems I could tap similarly.
The other element I'd like to include is reputation-grading sources. That is, which consistently turn out high-quality content, and which either don't, are variable, or straight up contribute noise?[1] So sources (authors, editors, translators, other contributors, publishers) accrue a reputation over time, and can see that admusted.
What happens with repeated selection, filtering, and assessment tends to be quite high quality.
That said, there's still far more published in a year (or posted online in a day) than could be read in a lifetime. Roughly 1 million books/year, and 5 billion Facebook items/day.[2] A well-read person likely reads on the order of 10 books per year over the course of their life (some read more, many less).[3]
An interesting question in an age of abundant ... culture / entertainment / literature / drama / documentary ... becomes what constitutes a common cultural heritage or touchstone? Is it ... the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Star Wars? Shakespeare? The Bible, Koran, Torah, Tao Te Ching, or Upanishads? And how criticial is it that there is, or is not one? (I suspect that this was the bigger question that TFA was leaning at but never quite got 'round to.)
My own awareness of my limited capacity to assimilate culture occurred as I walked into my univerity library the first time. Its local phyisical collection then numbered about 5 million volumes (with 15--20 million or so across multiple affiliated campuses), and ... I was never going to access more than a small set of those. What I realised and discovered was that a mix of intentional seach and serendipitous sampling could prove quite rewarding. Some sections of that collection I came to know fairly well, most I utterly ignored.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Some noise is tolerable, and none probably means a source isn't trying. But an indifference or insensitivity to error also indicates a source is highly inconsistent, if not outright deceptive. I'm inclined to the view that intentional noise and deception are quite probably worse than no information (especially if the source is aware of how to mask that deception). Dante put liars in the penultimate circle of Hell for a reason.
2. Just for grins: if a typical FB post contains 120 characters of text (I'd found similar results on Google+ a couple of years ago, and Twitter-length posts seem ... frequent), and we have 6 characters per word, then 5 billion items -> 100 billion words. At 500 words/page, that's 200 million pages, and at 250 pages/book, about 800,000 books&...
Someone else quoted something from Seneca against reading too many book: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29317420. I feel like the deeper I go into something, the more I get from it. Going deeper could be seeing/reading the thing multiple times, talking about it with friends, researching it. It transforms what can be a passive consumption into an active one. I see a lot of videos, explanations or memes that are based on taking way too seriously something. While this is often used as a joke, I feel like there is value in that. I think everything can be used as a lens through which you can perceive the world, if you spend enough time with it.
Maybe the problem isn't that there is too much shit to stare at, but that we spend too much time staring at shit.