FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
5mo ago
Freddie deBoer has a fun article about the recent vogue for hating on Infinite Jest, its author and the people who've read it.
FtttG
5mo ago
Well, maybe for pay-by-the-word magazine authors.
And publishers of serialised novels.
FtttG
5mo ago
"Thank you my fatherland, for helping me to be totally re-integrated and normalized."
This is so annoying, Jesus.
I actually think declaring myself to be a creationist would be met more warmly than declaring that biology is real and there's no such thing as a "female brain in a male body"
Absolutely. To a rationalist (a label I consider increasingly inaptonymous), gender-criticals are neargroup, creationists are fargroup.
what then is the purpose of knowing book length with exactitude?
I'm writing a novel and it would be extremely helpful to me to know the word count of some of my favourite novels, so I can see how mine compares to them from a pacing perspective. In much the same way that directors aim to have the inciting incident by the end of the first reel etc..
FtttG
5mo ago
Word count, syllable count and character count would all be equally valid objective metrics for the length of a book, in the sense of how much content it contains. I used word count because it's a standard metric used in numerous contexts (including, obviously, publishing).
FtttG
5mo ago
The page count is not an exact metric for how long a book is (i.e. how much content it contains), for the simple reason that the same book can have multiple editions with drastically varying page counts. As outlined in the original post.
FtttG
5mo ago
What you seem to want to measure is "how long will it take to read this book"
No - what I want is to know how long the book is. Knowing the word count would answer my question exactly, because the length of a book is its word count, in the same way that the duration of a film is how many minutes it takes up (not how many scenes, not how long it feels - just how many minutes). Knowing the word count wouldn't answer the question of how long I can expect it would take me to read it (in the same way that some ninety-minute films can "feel" longer than some films which are two hours long or more), but it would answer the question of how long it is, which is exactly what I want to know. The word count and the page count are both proxy metrics for "how long would the average reader take to read this book"; the page count is an imprecise proxy metric for "how long is this book", which is the word count.
But even so, extreme outliers are rare.
What are you basing this assertion on?
So if moving to a new metric will still have outliers, why bother?
It irritates me that we insist on using a proxy for the real metric when the real metric is so trivially accessible. To return to the example in the original post: the film's duration is an objective metric for how long it lasts. Some ninety-minute films are a chore to sit through, some films are three-and-a-half hours long but subjectively feel like half that; but at all events, the objective length of the film is a trivial metric to determine. But wouldn't we find it weird if cinemas, distributors, Blu-Ray manufacturers etc. refused to use this metric, and instead were fixated on referring to how many "scenes" or "cuts" a movie has? I mean, sure, either of these is a good enough metric if you assume that a typical movie has X many scenes or X many cuts, but both of these have obvious weaknesses that the metric they're proxies for doesn't have (e.g. there's at least one movie which is nearly two hours long and could be said to only have three scenes total; there are many ninety-minute movies which have far more scenes than some two-hour movies; some movies are ninety or even one hundred and forty minutes long and feature zero cuts), and in any case the objective, unambiguous metric that these are serving as proxies for isn't remotely difficult to determine, so why do you insist on using the proxy metrics anyway?
FtttG
5mo ago
I outlined at length various reasons why the physical size of a book might be misleading.
FtttG
5mo ago
My self-imposed NaNoWriMo is going far from according to plan. Since starting on February 10th I've only written ~4,300 words. Need to pick up the pace.
They don't do this because the information isn't readily available
I think I did a good job in my post outlining the fact that the information is readily available. Certainly for any novel which has been digitised, which is essentially every book which has been published this century (including reprints of older books).
few people pay much attention to these
I disagree. Netflix has a specific category called ninety minute movies. The topic of the "ideal" length for a movie recurs quite often in film discussions (e.g., e.g.).
Most people aren't doing this calculation.
Sure, but there's no reason they couldn't be. How Long to Beat? has tens of thousands of users logging how long it took them to complete a particular video game. This is helpful, because a large "wisdom of crowds" effect gives you a better idea of how long a game will take you to finish than the marketing hype which will make true-but-misleading claims like "50 hours of gameplay". Unlike books, there's no single objective answer to the question "how long is this video game?"; like books, there's enormous variability from person to person in how long it takes one to get from the start to the end. Why couldn't there be a website called How Long to Read? (or better yet, some extra fields in Goodreads) which lists the objective word count of a book (optionally excluding references, appendices etc. for non-fiction, much like How Long to Beat? segregates "main story" playthroughs from "completionist" playthroughs), along with user records of how long it took them to finish the book? I think this would be a fascinating and useful resource. Imagine if you're trying to plan for your holiday, so you pack one massive doorstopper which you expect to last you the full two weeks - and it's so absorbing you breeze through the whole thing in three days, leaving you with nothing to read for the rest of your holiday. If you knew in advance that most people breeze through the book in a few hours in spite of its intimidating length, you could have planned accordingly and brought one or more additional books.
FtttG
5mo ago
Am I going nuts, or does Ziz look like Denny from The Room?
FtttG
5mo ago
Worst song about heroin addiction? My money's on "Golden Brown". I can't remember the harpsichord ever being used in a pleasing way in either a classical or pop context, and this is no exception.
FtttG
5mo ago
FtttG
5mo ago
It did freak me out when one of my colleagues told me he uses ChatGPT extensively for drafting emails. It occurred to me that at least some of the people he's emailing are also drafting their replies using ChatGPT. What you essentially have is two instances of ChatGPT talking to each other via their respective human puppets intermediaries.
CW: an explicit condemnation of gender ideology, an assertion that trans people are deluded.
At the tail end of 2014, Scott published a pro-trans article called "The Categories were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", arguing that there's nothing intrinsic about the words "man" and "woman" that means we have to define them based on chromosomes or gamete size, any more than there's any intrinsic reason that the word "fish" excludes mammals. He argues that there's substantial evidence that affirming trans people's claimed gender identity is an effective tool for attenuating their distress, and that therefore we should be kind* to trans people and redefine the words "man" and "woman" to take these "edge cases" into account. He concluded the post with a link to the “heartwarming” story of Joshua Norton, a man in (where else, for there is nothing new under the sun?) San Francisco in the 1870s, who declared himself “Emperor of these United States” and whose delusion was “kindly" indulged by all and sundry in the city.
@zackmdavis, an admitted autogynephile who by his own account was driven to the brink of a full-blown nervous breakdown by Scott and Eliezer’s evasiveness and hypocrisy on the trans issue, wrote a response to Scott called “The Categories were Made for Man to Make Predictions”. His main argument is fairly self-explanatory per the title: it may be “kinder” to various penised individuals to include them in the category “woman” (and vice versa), but defining these words as such has strictly worse predictive power than defining them based on biological reality - and predictive power (making your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences) is supposedly the only thing rationalists really care about. Zack doesn’t think the story about “Emperor” Norton is heartwarming at all:
I want you to imagine yourself as a resident of 1870s San Francisco, someone who Norton trusts as one of his chief imperial advisors. One day, you encounter him at his favorite café looking very distressed.
"What's wrong, Your Highness?" you inquire, pulling up a chair to his table.
"Ah, my trusted—advisor. I've been noticing—things that don't seem to add up. Most of my subjects here in the city seem to treat me with proper respect. But the newspapers still talk about Congress and the President, even though I abolished those years ago. That seems like something I would expect not to see if my reign were as secure if everyone tells me it is. What if, what if—" his voice drops to a terrified whisper, "what if I've been mad? What if I'm not actually Emperor?"
"The categories were made for man, not man for the categories, Your Highness," you say. "An alternative categorization system is not an error. Category boundaries are drawn in specific ways to to capture trade-offs that we care about; they're not something that can be objectively true or false. So if we value your identification as the Emperor—"
"What?" he exclaims. He looks at you like you're crazy—and with a hint of desperation, as if to communicate that he's trusting you to be sane, and doesn't know where he could turn should that trust be betrayed.
And in that moment, caught in the old man's earnest, pleading gaze, you realize that you don't believe your own bullshit.
"No, you're right," you say. "You're not actually Emperor. People around here have just been humoring you for the last decade because we thought it was cute and it seemed to make you happy."
A beat.
"Um, sorry," you say.
He buries his head in his arms and begins to cry—long, shuddering sobs for his lost empire. Worse than lost—an empire that never existed, except in the charitable facade of people who valued him as a local in-joke, but not as a man.
For my part, I agree. If I found out that no one in my social circle really believed in the beliefs I was spouting off, but had collectively agreed to pretend to do so in order to protect my feelings, I would feel profoundly condescended to, insulted, disrespected, infantilised - perhaps I'd even go so far as to say dehumanised. If all of my friends knew my girlfriend was cheating on me behind my back but enthusiastically agreed with me when I told them about how trusting and faithful our relationship was, "kind" is just about the last word I'd use to describe their behaviour. I wouldn't think this behaviour bore even the most tenuous relationship to the "rules of human decency".
In the short-term, perhaps it is kinder to play along with trans people’s beliefs about themselves and affirm their claimed gender identities, if failing to do so makes them sad and upset. But in the long-term, you are actively encouraging them to engage in magical thinking, the fantastical idea that declaring that something is so thereby makes it so. It is not just likely but inevitable that they’ll start wondering to what other domains this magical thinking might apply: if declaring that something is so can change your gender, why couldn’t it change your species, or the behaviour of one or more of your paraselves elsewhere in the multiverse? If there's nothing intrinsic about the category "woman" that means it can't include certain penised individuals, why couldn't the category "lemur" include certain featherless bipeds with broad nails? Scott would be the first to recognise that false beliefs cannot sit in one’s model of how the world works in isolation: they are destined to spread and multiply throughout one’s network of beliefs, infecting everything in sight. Phil Platt said "Teach a man to reason and he’ll think for a lifetime". Well, teach a man that magical thinking is acceptable in one context, and he’ll quickly find that it’s acceptable in lots of contexts.
Encouraging someone to engage in magical thinking is probably not so terribly harmful if that person is an incurious dullard with no tendency towards thought of any kind. But it strikes me as uniquely dangerous if that person is an exceptionally curious and reflective person who spends a lot of time in his own head, as most first-generation "rationalists" were: the kind of person who gets "a sort of itch... when the pieces don’t fit together and [they] need to pick at them until they do". By endorsing and affirming one of that person's obviously false beliefs, you are condemning them to believe in and/or generate other false beliefs, if (as a curious person does) they want their model of the universe to be internally consistent.**
Ziz and his cohort had beliefs about themselves which were false according to the ordinary definitions of the words (“man”, “woman”) on which those beliefs were based. They were ensconced in a social milieu of people who invariably described themselves as no-bullshit facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings truth-seekers. And all of these people (with the possible exception of Zack himself), rather than trying to gently steer Ziz and co. into recognising that their beliefs were false, enthusiastically endorsed and affirmed their delusions, using all manner of tortured motivated reasoning which they would never have lowered themselves to in any other context. The lesson being imparted, the perverse incentive being set up, is "if this specific batshit insane belief can be compatible with rationalism provided it’s justified using a sufficiently high density of ten-dollar words, then any such belief can also be, provided you do the legwork of writing out massive inscrutable screeds with the appropriate nomenclature to justify it". Can anyone really say they’re surprised that Ziz and his mates ended up believing a bunch of other crazy bullshit in addition to gender ideology, when their adherence to gender ideology was so enthusiastically affirmed by all the supposedly logical, rational people in their immediate vicinity? If you believed that the act of saying “I am a woman” can overwrite biological reality, why wouldn’t you believe that you can hence manipulate reality to your every whim?
(I’m not saying Ziz wouldn’t have ended up leading a violent abusive cult if he wasn’t ensconced in a trans-affirming milieu - gender ideology is obviously not a prerequisite for leading a violent abusive cult, as evidenced by the fact that the Zizians are probably the first known violent abusive cult of the gender ideology era. But I’m definitely saying that having his declared gender identity affirmed with tortured motivated reasoning by everyone around him certainly didn’t help.)
A few years ago, the FTX scandal forced Scott to confront the fact that were components of the effective altruist worldview which could result in some very unsavoury behavior if followed to their logical conclusions. I hope the Zizian debacle triggers a comparable reckoning, in which Scott and his ilk consider the possibility that indulging the delusions of the trans people in their midst wasn’t anything like as "kind" or harmless as they might have once thought.
*There is perhaps no two-word phrase which inspires more disgust and revulsion in me than "be kind", especially when used in the context of the transgender debate (Scott didn't use it in this specific article, but Freddie DeBoer has). It is the essence of a smarmy thought-terminating cliché, in the sense of the term popularised by Gawker.
**I feel reasonably confident that it was the most curious and intellectually scrupulous young-earth creationists who came up with pseudoscientific nonsensical contortions like c-decay, not the least.
Why aren't novels' word counts common knowledge?
Go on IMDb, look up the pilot episode of an obscure American sitcom which was cancelled after one season, and you will find its duration in minutes (a single, objective measure of how long it will take to consume that piece of media). Go on Wikipedia, look up Blade Runner and it will list the various durations of all the various theatrically released cuts, directors' cuts and so on. Any album noteworthy enough to have its own Wikipedia page will have its duration listed in minutes and seconds, broken down by individual track duration (including the duration of various special/bonus editions). If it isn't notable enough to be on Wikipedia, it will be on Rate Your Music.
Meanwhile, if you want to find out how long it will take you to read a book, Wikipedia might tell you the page count, which is next to useless given how many variables contribute to it: font, font size, page size, margin width and height, formatting decisions (a novel which uses numerous paragraph breaks will take up more pages than a novel of the same word count which uses them sparingly; putting a page break before the start of a new chapter can easily add ten pages to a novel's length; because of its bizarre formatting, House of Leaves's word count is probably 25-40% shorter than its massive page count would imply). Various editions of the same unabridged novel with the exact same wording can have enormous variation in how many pages they take up (e.g. this edition of Moby-Dick is 768 pages, while this one is 608). Last night I Googled "Finnegan's Wake word count", one of the most widely discussed novels of the twentieth century, and the first result was one of these automated websites which calculates an estimate of the word count based on the page count (under the rule of thumb that 1 page = 250 words).
I'm not asking for anyone to laboriously go through the process of counting each word by hand. Finnegan's Wake can be purchased as an ebook, which means its contents have been digitised. If you want to find out the word count, all you have to do is open the text file/EPUB file/AZW file and check. Presumably somewhere in the region of 99% of all novels composed in this century were composed using a word processor, meaning the word counts were known (or at least trivially knowable) to the author, publisher, typesetter etc. well in advance of publication.
Before you book to see a film in the cinema, you'd want to know how long it is so you can plan your day accordingly, so cinemas always include this information (although not, annoyingly, the duration of ads and trailers prior to the movie - state Congress to the rescue!). No one would accept a vague ambiguous proxy for the duration of a film like "there are 1,300 cuts in this film" or "there are 30 scenes in this film" - how long is a "scene"? By the same token, before you start reading a book, you generally want to have some kind of idea of how long it will take you to read it. The publisher has access to an objective measure of the book's length (its word count) but refuses to make this information public, instead relying on a vague proxy for its length which is prone to error and can prove enormously misleading. Why is this?
FtttG
5mo ago
Occupational licensing boards are one of many reasons Richard Hanania cites as to why he believes the US is a gerontocracy.
I agree that these boards are rent-seeking institutions which at best provide no tangible benefit to consumers and may be (probably are) net-negative in the long run.
The Coolidge effect is an incredibly powerful force. As at least one commenter pointed out before me, if you're looking to get your rocks off, having an affair (thereby exposing yourself to scandal, divorce, losing half of your assets, child support payments etc.) is vastly less "convenient" than just having sex with your wife.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I'm wondering if there might be some kind of perceptual component to the Coolidge effect. That is, it's not merely that sexual novelty is an important component of the male sex drive, but that the male brain so wants us to "be fruitful and multiply" that our brains are wired in such a way that they will literally make women appear more attractive to us than they "really" are prior to us having sex with them. La petite mort/post-nut clarity seems to be such a universal male experience, there must be something to it. (Probably the timescale is longer for women, which is why the end of limerence seems to come after weeks or months rather than minutes/hours.)
I don't know how you'd get this past an IRB board, but it'd be fascinating to do a study like this. Get a bunch of men and women who don't know each other in a speed-dating event. The men are asked to rate women's attractiveness on a scale of 1-10 (we could couple this with objective data like hooking them up to a heart rate monitor, measuring how damp their palms are, penile tumescence etc.). Some of the men will have sex with some of the women. Then, at least a day after their first sexual encounter, ask the men to rate the attractiveness of the women they've had sex with on a scale of 1-10. I would predict that the average rating would shift down by about a point, corresponding with decreased physiological excitement.
It's kind of creepy to think that, if I find a woman attractive, I might be partly hallucinating that.
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