281 Comments

No, you could not create a fake Shakespeare by just taking any average writer and teaching him or her to ape Shakespeare’s style.

Shakespeare’s work isn’t enduring for its style--if anything the style only makes it harder to propagate his work into the future. Shakespeare’s work is enduring for his ability to portray themes through plot and character that capture what it is to be human.

You aren’t going to recreate that by teaching someone to write in impenetrable prose.

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“Shakespeare’s work is enduring for his ability to portray themes through plot and character that capture what it is to be human.” This sort of vague, schmaltzy argument is not going to help

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If you think using technical terms like “theme”, “plot”, and “character” is vague, you probably have no right to be in this argument. You don’t even recognize when words with commonly understood meanings are being used.

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Also, “what it is to be human” or ‘captures the human condition’ is a commonly understood phrase that means the work captures the experience of what it is like to be a human, living in the unique circumstances that humans find themselves in, in a way that resonates broadly.

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What do you mean by "unique"?

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Different from the circumstances of other types of entities, like trees or rocks or bugs or fish or birds or cars. For example, self-awareness, mortality, living in advanced societies with specific cultures, etc...

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I really don't think that one who wrote narcissists like Hamlet and Romeo or gullible criminals like MacBeth can be credited with capturing self-awareness. Mortality is an awfully common topic. And the third example is so vague I literally fail to remember a piece of fiction that wouldn't do that.

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If you think that Shakespeare meant for either of those men to be seen as uquestioned moral exemplars, you know so little about his work as to be unworthy of comment on it. You might as well be commenting on your knowledge of Quechua.

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Lol. Those were examples of conditions that are unique to humans. You know--the examples you asked for.

I did not say those were themes of Shakespeare's work. Those are the conditions he takes into account when creating his themes, which makes his work relatable to people.

I gotta say man. For someone who knows so many surface-level facts about literature, you really don't seem to understand the point of it.

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This argument is in fact correct, though. The value placed on Shakespeare's work is not primarily for his poetry. OP is entirely correct that, while it is beautiful, the antiquity of the style is mostly an impediment to understanding the themes nowadays.

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But as language changes, the particular aesthetic beauty he crafted could no longer even be attempted without extensive study, which the vast majority of modern writers wouldn't bother with even if quality aesthetic composition was still a nurtured skill in the WEIRDosphere, which it hasn't been in at least fifty years.

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This is also, of course, correct

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Oct 9, 2023·edited Oct 9, 2023

>Shakespeare’s work is enduring for his ability to portray themes through plot and character that capture what it is to be human.

People always say this, and I don’t really get it. Isn’t this what *all* literature does? Is Shakespeare supposed to be uniquely talented at portraying these themes? I never got that impression from reading his works.

I get the same feeling as Richard. Surely people don’t actually think Hamlet is the greatest work of fiction ever written in the English language. It’s all performative. Hamlet isn’t even better than Avengers Infinity War, much less a Christopher Nolan masterpiece.

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Surely people don't actually think that any lower-mid shitty Marvel movie is better than the enduring canon of western literature. It's all performative.

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Of course any MCU movie pre-Endgame, except perhaps Iron Man 2 and Incredible Hulk, is better than any play by Shakespeare.

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Iron Man 2 is still better than Age of Ultron

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Huh? I mean, of course Ultron was dumbed down somewhat to be beatable, but otherwise?

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Richard actually believes it. His TV and movie reviews show as much.

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There's no moral conflict in Infinity War, or near any of the other Disney/Marvel movies. It's just obvious good guys fighting obvious bad guys. That has it's merits, but none of those merits are literary. Fuck, it's less likely, given the political-correctness concerns of today castarating the fuck out of narratives with ever greater fury.

And I love Christopher Nolan, but he's made a third as many movies as Shakespeare's made plays, and aside from The Prestige, Memento, Interstellar, and Oppenheimer, I wouldn't dream of comparing him to The Bard. Even then, none of those films has near Shakespeare's sense of humor, which is present even in his most gruesome work. They would definitely rank below.

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If you'd seen the amount of people who wrote to the tune of "Thanos did nothing wrong", you'd think twice before writing that the good and bad guys in that movie are obvious.

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Environmentalists are the scum of the Earth. There being people cruel and evil enough to get behind Thanos doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't mean there's any actual moral conflict. Even internally, none of the characters have any doubt about undoing The Snap as the right thing to do, and seldom any doubts about how to do it.

The only morally ambiguous bit I can think of in the Avengers films is the bit where Black Widow and Hawkeye fight eachother to the death over who has to be the sacrifice for the Infinity Stone. But that's a few minutes across ten-and-a-half hours of movie. Shakespeare would've made an entire play about a conflict that juicy. Disney/Marvel didn't, and that was entirely purposeful. They'd be afraid making anything centered around an actual conflict would be too much for the broadest possible audience to bare.

Martin Scorsese didn't say these films were "not cinema" out of pretentiousness. It was factual. Art and character are axiomatically perhipheral concerns for the House of Mouse.

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I hold little love for Disney (look at what happened to Star Wars, for instance), but it is clear that the empire is so big that different subparts of it are managed by vastly different people and produce media of vastly different quality. And Martin Scorcese was simply wrong, blinded by his own perceptions of what cinema supposedly should be.

I can also remember at least the following:

*The whole deal with Zokovian accords is extremely conflicting - to the extent that (spoilers ahead!) after supposedly fighting for the accords, Tony Stark effectively breaks them by flying after Captain without warning the government (and this is not portrayed as an undoubtedly good thing, either, as it brings him into a trap).

*Everything around Wanda Maximoff and her brother before Doctor Strange 2 non-inclusively (and this "non-inclusively" is a huge part of the reasons that film sucks) is subject to huge moral controversy.

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There should be a lot more that's remembered, and they should be the heart of the story. That used to be why people made plays. Everyone already knew the twist coming in Sophocles Oedipus on account of it being a popular myth, but the play compels all the same, because the protagonist is a man whose compelled to learn something he'd be better off not knowing, but that he can only understand why he would've been better off not knowing what he's not supposed to know after knowing it.

This play's older than Christ, and it has a central conflict that's still compelling even to this day. And it's not as though such things are beneath Disney. They had good central conflicts in their films on many an occasion, but outside of certain special periods, that's clearly not their priority. It's never been the priority of any of the non-Spiderman Marvel movies, to the point where absurd political correctness decisions were present even as early as the first film, like when the Taliban -- whom Disney didn't even have the guts to call by name, despite that obviously being who they are -- just stop being the villains around the film's fourth quarter so an old white American businessman in a suit can take that role for them instead. We were deprived of a climactic superhero fight with villains it made sense for him to fight purely because Disney is so utterly cucked that they were more worried about getting heat for depicting some of the worst people on Earth in a negative light than they were about their own plot and characters. Presumably because said awful people are not white American males, and this was part of that brief, contemptible period where we were also feeling like not being too hard on the Ruskies.

It's reasons like this why numbers and statistics aren't enough to say the best writers today are better than the best writers of the past. Good writing is actively discouraged, and even punished, by the very people most likely to actually pay writers for their work. And it's also reasons like this why Scorsese says the MCU/DCU films aren't cinema.

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No, all literature does not manage to capture the human condition. In fact, most literature does not.

Literature, like all other things, comes in varying degrees of quality. That quality must be measured subjectively, hence it is a fool’s errand to try and solve the debate with a purely objective analysis, as SBF did.

I don’t think Hamlet is “the greatest work of fiction ever written in the English language” but I also don’t think it’s “all performative” or that Infinity War is better.

Can you elaborate on why you think Hamlet is too performative and Infinity War is a better work of fiction?

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I believe part of the confusion stems from your assumption of "the" human condition — something that is both common enough to resonate in everyone and difficult enough to portray that few manage. People's conditions are mostly different, and the common parts are mostly dull and uninteresting things like hunger.

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Haha, okay. If that's really what you think then... okay. That's certainly a view.

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Many of Shakespeare's plays are adaptations of stories that were popular in his day. There was no copyright!

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Wasn't Shakespeare mostly just scavenging older stories for plots?

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Anyone who can write (ETA:fiction) at all can do that, by virtue of their being human and thus capturing what it is to be human by virtue of capturing themselves.

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Can is not the same as does. Lot's of people, theoretically, can do something, but never do because they don't develop the skill needed to turn potential into reality.

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Also, no. Not "anyone who can write at all" can write like Shakespeare. In Hanania's own thought experiment, you have to teach the people who can write how to write in the same style as Shakespeare, to say nothing of teaching them to capture themes that resonate with our common humanity through plot and character the way Shakespeare did.

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Style will need some teaching, but that's not the part you care about. And the part you care about, "capturing themes", is literally done by anyone who can write fiction at all, and commonality depends on what people live through. (And you overestimate "common humanity": how many people read Romeo and Juliet as an example of a good romance rather than as a cautionary tale of young foolishness it was originally meant as? To the extent these texts resonate, they often resonate differently.)

Not to mention that many of his plots are, qua plots, plagiarism plain and simple: "Romeo and Juliet" is found as a cautionary tale in a number of Italian sources slightly older, "Hamlet" is a Scandinavian legend, and don't get me started on the historical ones.

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So now you’ve switched from “anyone who can write” to “anyone who can write fiction”?

Why do I get the feeling, if we keep going long enough, pretty soon your position will become “Anyone who is Shakespeare can write as good as Shakespeare.”

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I omitted "fiction" by mistake the first time — surely I didn't mean literal literacy as in "knows how to reflect sounds with letters".

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“Surely” nothing. It’s not my job to read your mind. I can only respond to the argument you make, so say what you mean and mean what you say.

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not sure if I'm disagreeing with anything you're saying here, but the intense richness, playfulness, and density of Shakespeare's language (his "style") is a key to his greatness. Not just themes in a Cliffs Notes sense.

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It's ridiculous to say Jesus was a good religion founder. We can see by statistics that there are bound to be much better prophets around today.

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You could mash up the Gospels, feed it to an AI, and have it generate a founding document for a new world religion which would be at least as good.

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That is surely not the case. The AI would generate narrative and platitudes, but it could not give, to pick only one of many examples, the recapitulation of John 1:14 in the subtle change from ara agapais to ara phileis in John 21:15-19, the very end of the gospel. An AI is not capable of anything even approaching such interpretive depth, and you don't have to think the gospels are inspired scripture to see that.

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Any mistakes made by the AI could become intriguing mysteries for the followers of your new religion :)

Muslims believe that the Quran is a work of superhuman perfection, and even the Book of Mormon has been revered by millions. Why bet against newer works?

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Collecting inconsistencies in Gospels is a task so popular I won't even indulge in it directly (as they say, "just Google it").

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Well, Ibram X Kendi ...

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Fascinating how stupid smart people can be. There was a thread on Twitter with people quoting their favourite lines and it was an absolute joy. My own favourite:

If thou art rich, thou'rt poor; For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows, Thou bear's thy heavy riches but a journey, And death unloads thee.

Just a throwaway in Measure for Measure.

Anyway, let’s hear Richard’s nomination. I expect he has loads given his argument.

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It couldn’t be clearer that he has zero appreciation or enjoyment of Shakespeare and is arguing based on pure abstractions about genes and populations, so I’d be surprised if he had any lines he really liked.

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Or rephrased in modern English: "rich people aren't really rich, because being rich is like being a donkey carrying gold bars and you'll lose it all to inheritance tax anyway".

It sounds rather less profound when stripped of its archaic language.

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Amazingly, if you take away what made Shakespeare Shakespeare, there isn't much Shakespeare left.

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So, you suggest that what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is use of language which sounds archaic to modern English speakers but rather obviously did not sound so to the audiences the plays were originally intended for? Try again.

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No, what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare is his use of language, full stop. It didn't sound archaic to people then, and lines like the one quoted are not obscure or difficult to reasonably well-read people now. But that particular line is striking and beautiful now, and presumably people found it striking and beautiful then.

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Well, as a non-native speaker, I may show different reactions, but I certainly find the line as non-beautiful as its translation.

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Well, you have no aesthetic taste then. It's like a deaf man trying to say all music is the same.

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Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day. No. (I see what you mean - stupid poets!)

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That’s quite a profound message when we live in a culture where everyone is obsessed with riches.

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The issue here isn't that one can't make a valid argument that Shakespeare isn't the best author of all time; it's that the particular statistical argument is wrong. By that logic, you can 'prove' that anyone in any field is unlikely to be the best in that field - what are the odds that the best tennis player in the world is from the tiny country of Switzerland?

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You’re misunderstanding bayesianism. You CAN use that argument to conclude that, absent further info about tennis, the best player is unlikely to come from Switzerland. Then you gather info and update. The info we have about tennis could be sufficient to update away from the low prior. The question is whether the same holds in the Shakespeare case. SBF says no. Mainstream says yes.

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SBF is a narcissistic, artless, degenerate criminal. Who gives a fuck what he thinks?

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Yes duh. But we do have further info, including the fact that Shakespeare is being read and taught and performed centuries after he wrote his plays and sonets.

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But founder effects are important in such things. Something that was read and taught for a long time is likely to prolong that due to purely institutional pressures, regardless of whether something better comes along.

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The odds of *any* specific person occupying the top slot in a field is statistically unlikely. For instance: what are the odds that a man of Kenyan descent, born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961, would have won the 2008 presidential election? Who could have predicted such a thing in 1961, when Obama was born? Statistically, a White Anglo Saxon Protestant named "John Smith" from California would have been a more likely winner. The prior probability was exceedingly low, and yet it actually happened. Reality often doesn't conform to a priori statistical arguments.

Every human being is a constellation of traits, and some of those traits are only shared by a minority of people. You can classify someone by birth year, nationality, height, gender, religion, eye color, or whatever . . . . the list is endless. You can always find some after-the-fact rationalization to explain why the success of any one person is improbable.

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Exactly. The quote doesn’t even use the idea of a “prior” correctly.

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The odds are very high? Skill at tennis requires the ability to spend all your time playing it, something associated with high levels of wealth. Switzerland is a very wealthy country. The odds are good.

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China has almost as many millionaires as Switzerland has people. Try again.

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Not the sort of inherited wealth required to spend all your time playing tennis in the 1980s, when Federer was born.

These days, sure, and I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation best tennis player in the world comes from China. The odds on that are also good.

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China had plenty of millionaires 20 years ago. Anyway, tennis is just an example. What are the odds the first man to walk on the moon should come from a tiny town of 10k people that no-one has ever heard of?

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Again pretty high given that most people move outside of cities when starting a family.

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but the odds are very low that he will come from *that* small town. I'm not sure you get the argument being made here.

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Such a ridiculous topic and argument that I canceled my subscription.

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I cancelled my paid subscription a while ago because it was becoming annoying, true.

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Oh, and SBF’s argument is stupid because he’s trying to do an objective analysis of something that is inherently subjective.

In other words, it’s stupid because he’s using the wrong tool for the job. It’s as if he’s trying to change a tire with a garden hose.

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“There’s also the Flynn Effect; we’re simply much smarter than people from the sixteenth century”

This part is what seems too confident to me. The Flynn Effect is something detected on lower-g-loaded subtests over a very short period of time and isn’t continuing now. It’s not clear to me that the effective upper bound of modern IQs are higher than that of all past societies.

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Average IQ rose 3 points per decade from 1940s to now. I think that if you go back far enough ... say, to 1600, then the average IQ was 0. Maybe even negative. I have made no mistakes in my reasoning.

So, yes, I agree that this part is too confident.

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Consider modern dysgenics. Is there any place you think the selection effect on IQ is currently as strong as that which produced outstanding Ashkenazi IQs? Seems unlikely.

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You wrote a similar question in another thread, "Again, what past sub pops could have gone through similar bottlenecks/selection as what produced Ashkenazi IQ increases?"

If intelligence differences among populations were purely a matter of genetics, then average intelligence would indeed be falling in modern times because of the dysgenic effect. I recommend a biological approach to thinking about intelligence differences, but biology means going beyond genetics, and this is kinduva vacuum in the perspective of hereditarian intelligence researchers--they get only the "genetic" part of biology. The environmental part is exactly as biological as genetics. In biology, they have what they call a "reaction norm," which is a range of trait values as a function of a range of environmental cue values, all following from a single genotype, evolved for quick adaptation to environmental change. The Flynn effect implies such a reaction norm for human intelligence, and the environmental cue seems to be mortality rate weighted by reproductive value (closely related to child mortality). I wrote a paper on the matter, which is now under review by the journal Intelligence (not that I expect you to read it, maybe just the abstract): https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23623698

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You seem to disregard tails effects. ~107, keeping σ relatively constant, means that the "plus two standard deviations" group is also higher - or, alternatively, that for higher IQs, there will be disproportionally more people of the group. And if σ is higher, the effects will be even stronger. As for "lower… makes incompetent" - that's an awfully strong statement for a fairly small difference: "lower than another group that does X" doesn't imply "too low to do X".

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One, of course peoples specialize. Just like literally 100% top male runners can trace their lineage to a specific subregion of Africa.

Two, "the leadership of Apple or Tesla" is not much of a sample, both for social bubble reasons and just due to small size, but if you think IT companies writ large don't have their reasonably big share of Ashkenazi (and Armenians), you're tripping.

Three, the σ of IQ is 15, so 5 points is a third of a σ. Go and calculate how much this moves the tail effects for people over 2σ (i.e. 132 if the point of comparison is Europeans writ large). Hint: a lot.

Four, no big society except perhaps Andamanese was "built from scratch". Modern Scandinavia owes a great deal to Napoleon's code, wars with Russia, and more. As for who prospers in diasporas, this is mostly a function of who forms them (as opposed to assimilating) in the first place, and that's full of historical incidents.

Lastly, now that we've covered the factual ground, why did you wait eight months or soto respond? Still burns?

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It is not just IQ that has increased. To borrow an excerpt from my manuscript: "not only has full-scale IQ trended across the 20th century globally but so have many individual covariates of general intelligence, both cultural and biological, in the direction predicted by increasing general intelligence, including literacy prevalence (World Bank, 2023), GDP per capita (United Nations, 2023), fertility, longevity (United Nations, 2022), educational attainment (Barro & Lee, 2021), height (NCD-RisC 2017), skull size (Jantz & Jantz, 2016), brain size (Woodley of Menie et al., 2016), and nearsightedness (Yang et al., 2021)."

Yes, the lower-g subtests rose faster than the higher-g subtests, but that doesn't mean g stayed put. The higher-g subtests also rose.

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Sure. But this *can’t* faithfully reflect the change in the upper echelon across all time and societies. Like, sure, maybe if Gauss and Archimedes were alive today they’d only be as smart as your average Fields Medal winner, but clearly their IQs were such that they were very unlikely to be drawn from a much dumber overall (“genotypic”) distribution than exists today.

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Gauss and Archimedes wouldn't be drawn at random, but they were among the smartest within general populations that were generally illiterate, superstitious, with juvenile mortality rates in the range of 40-50%, and the typical way to make a living was hard labor.

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Sure, but what is the likelihood they (or, say, the major architects of 20th century physics) came from a population 20-30 points dumber than the modern world? Do we have any good stats on even the change in number of 150+ people (normed to modern population) over the past century?

I’m not saying I’m definitely right here, but I’m saying OP is being way too confident in the opposite direction. Again, what past sub pops could have gone through similar bottlenecks/selection as what produced Ashkenazi IQ increases?

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OK, let's say that Gauss and Archimedes had 130 IQ by the current baseline. And lets say that, before the Industrial Revolution, Europeans were on average 30 IQ points stupider than they are today (Pietschnig & Voracek, 2015), for an IQ of 70 by the current baseline. That would mean Gauss and Archimedes had an IQ 60 IQ points greater, or four standard deviations, than the respective mean. Using a normal distribution calculator, that would mean one in 31574 people would by as smart as that or smarter. That would mean just a few people, but they would be more than enough to exist.

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I mean, maybe?

But as someone who has an IQ of 145 (according to a professional, full-scale IQ test) and a math degree where I studied many of his contributions, I feel pretty confident in saying there is just no way in heck Gauss’s IQ was that low. You could rerun reality 1000x over and give me the best environment possible, and I’d never get close to sniffing his discoveries or abilities. 95% confidence he’d score 160+ on a modern IQ test.

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Oct 9, 2023·edited Oct 9, 2023

This is a bad take. There is of course a great deal of subjectivity inherent to aesthetic judgement, but there is also an objective component. After-all, we have an evolved aesthetic sense - beauty is a signal as is the creation of art too. For instance, I'm sure Richard believes some humans are objectively more attractive than others. The same judgement can be extended to art.

Shakespeare is quite obviously head-and-shoulders above most others in belles-lettres. We can demonstrate this in any number of ways: scholarly interest, the complexity and innovative nature of his verse, the number of new archetypes (or psychological profiles), the number of new words (1700 new words), and the impact on culture and art, etc. It's not just the picking of low hanging fruit either. Who has since rivaled the creation of characters like Hamlet or Falstaff?

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Who has since rivaled? Lots of characters in lots of fiction, I barely even remember who Falstaff is, which is not a good result for someone with such a funny name. "New words" is bogus, artifact of less texts of similar genre having been documented before. "Innovativeness", furthermore, would at best be the argument for Babe Ruth-style "best of his time", not of "still best today". Scholarly interest is an obvious artifact of the same kind as certain kinds of scholars still reading goddamn Aristotle. Shakespeare is mediocre literature by today's standards, which is a huge part of the reputation of American high school theater shows for being mediocre: they take his plays too often.

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Shakespeare is read by the world not just shown in American high school productions. Not to mention how many times people are incidentally quoting him because of idioms and metaphors that are now embedded in lexical imaginations.

Not even sure how we compare today's literary production to Shakespeare's because he was compelled to write in verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) and compactly (five act structure). These constraints don't exist for modern writers yet few if any are read widely and the one who are write smut and escapism. Nor do modern writer have to operate within the bounds of a Classist & Christian mythos like Shakespeare. He managed to be original when originality was eschewed.

The fact we have many original archetypes from works constrained this way from a guy without aristocratic education like this alone is a wild accomplishment.

You certainly recognize Falstaff just not by his name. There are many derivations today: Tony Soprano, Jack Sparrow, Tyrion Lannister, etc.

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You clearly failed to appreciate Hanania's original distinction of the three senses of GOAT and go full "generative" sense. GRRM, Tim Burton, and whoever did Tony Soprano can all quote ERB's version of Stephen Hawking at this comparison to Falstaff: "And yes, it's true that my work is based on you, but I'm a supercomputer, you're like a TI-82!" Are the concepts related? Certainly. Is Falstaff, if viewed from strictly synchronic point of view, a weaker character than Tyrion or John Sparrow? Also certainly.

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Oct 9, 2023·edited Oct 10, 2023

How is Falstaff a weaker character than Tyrion, Sparrow, or Soprano when the creation and our comprehension of these characters is predicated on a culture built on Shakespearean constructs/literature?

Why do I have to accept Hanania's definitions either? The formulation is clearly missing something because it doesn't account for aestheticism being a mix of both objective, inter-subjective, and utterly subjective proprieties. And given this, how we should evaluate and rank art? (this is what the Canon debate is)

Science and culture are cumulative. We depend on the contributions of the past. It is difficult then, if not subjective in a similar sense, to try and compare anyone one figure to those of today. Is any random physicist of today superior to von Neumann or Einstein? I don't know. How should we compare them?

I do know the contributions of those in the past were valuable as we depend on them, built on them. So for literary production, there are accomplishments that exceed Shakespeare's (characterization, complex plots, psychological depth), but they wouldn't be possible without Shakespeare. For example, we wouldn't have Infinite Jest if not for Hamlet (the title quite obviously being a reference).

You have to believe in teleology or hard determinism and dismiss all contingency to ignore these contributions and not see these past figures as genius.

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...When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Cumulativeness is argument in favor of derived notions of today being better than their sources of old, not against it.

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Not sure this is productive because you're fairly eagerly committed to this position,.

But yes, in some way the fact that value accumulates over-time because of cultural evolution could be leveraged to say things are better now than the past. This would apply for things that can be directly compared. When we compare the production of verse (dramatic or otherwise) today versus Shakespeare that direct comparison does not flatter the present. The verses of Amanda Gorman or Rupi Kaur are obviously inferior to the poet of Stratford-upon-Avon.

Moreover, the contributions of Shakespeare's plays/verse appear to be orthogonal from the work (my points about language and psychology). Few would allege today the Anglosphere's literary and dramatic arts are at their zenith (my Kaur/Gorman point). Art forms have of course evolved (prestige TV sort of the pre-eminent form now) and old forms have lost their audiences for largely technological reasons that have reshaped how cultural artifacts are consumed (McLuhanesque). Few today invest in a way that is required to appreciate verse. Given any random Shakespeare passage to a U.S. college grad and let's let's test their reading comprehension of it... Clearly, not everything is linear.

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Have a like just for quoting ERB, the true masters of beautiful and elegant poetry.

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Paul Graham on Florence is worth reading. Key point is that cities make a difference.

http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

"There are roughly a thousand times as many people alive in the US right now as lived in Florence during the fifteenth century. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us. If DNA ruled, we should be greeted daily by artistic marvels. We aren't, and the reason is that to make Leonardo you need more than his innate ability. You also need Florence in 1450."

"Nothing is more powerful than a community of talented people working on related problems. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence. Today we move around more, but great work still comes disproportionately from a few hotspots: the Bauhaus, the Manhattan Project, the New Yorker, Lockheed's Skunk Works, Xerox Parc."

"At any given time there are a few hot topics and a few groups doing great work on them, and it's nearly impossible to do good work yourself if you're too far removed from one of these centers. You can push or pull these trends to some extent, but you can't break away from them. (Maybe you can, but the Milanese Leonardo couldn't.)"

http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

"You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?"

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Exactly! Creativity is collective. Individuals without a cooperative cultural environment and tradition to scaffold their skills on are just mute raw material, not even aware of their own potential capacities

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Oct 9, 2023·edited Oct 9, 2023

No, Richard could not outwrite the greatest English language playwright of all time, but he is rapidly staking his claim as the greatest troll of all time. First he posts through being revealed as a former neo-Nazi, then has a best seller calling for tearing down the entire structure of civil rights law, and now he claims with a perfectly straight face and at length that he’s a better writer than Shakespeare. One can only applaud.

I hesitate to engage with it but of course Richards argument is based on a deep misunderstanding or perhaps just fundamental lack of appreciation of high culture, which is a collective and not an individual product. Mozart is a greater composer than anyone alive today but that’s not because of genetics it’s because we’re collectively no longer trying to do what 18th century European musicians were trying to do. We’ve moved on, to our detriment. Great cultural moments are the intersection of history and deep visions of the world and they often occur among relatively small populations (Athens, Florence, etc.)

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Mozart's music is mostly not that good — even in genre of instrumentals, he cannot hold a candle to John Williams or Nicholas Hooper, precisely because they were able to benefit from what he and others did and move forward.

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Good god, please. The Star Wars theme is not better than Mozart.

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Good god please. One, of course it is, if only because it conveys its mood in three and a half minutes rather than two hours, two, it's far from the only thing or the only good thing John Williams has written.

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Just say “I’m too lazy to listen to anything longer than three and a half minutes”, we’ll understand.

Of course Mozart also wrote any number of three to four minute arias in his operas that are better tunes than any of John Williams bombastic themes but you’ve never heard them. Still, I enjoy Star Wars, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark themes over the credits, I get it.

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I am not. There are things that are worth listening for longer. Mozart's music is not among them.

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One effect of this somewhat surreal exchange is that I now have all these Mozart melodic earworms running through my head that I can't dislodge. Mozart isn't just profound, he writes unbelievably fucking catchy tunes.

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When Spielberg went to John Williams to do the score for Schindler's List, Williams said the topic really called for Bach or Mozart. Spielberg said he agreed, but those gentlemen weren't around, so Williams would have to do.

Maybe you can set Williams straight?

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Williams achieved his (eventually higher) masterhood by learning what masters of old did and grew to have a certain admiration for them. I really don't think this requires any further explanation than the usual reverence practice.

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Unfortunately your trolling is at a far lower level than your master Hanania’s. Keep practicing!

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Trolling would require stating something I do not believe, which I did not do (except if you count mistypes).

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Why do we all assert this? Is music composition really something like engineering? Oh, here's a new material that can be used to make i-beams, but it's lighter and stronger than what we used in the past. Or here's a new technique we learned to make high-rises better able to withstand earthquakes. Composers aren't trying to do that sort of task when composing.

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Composing music is a craft that can be learned. Famous composers studied subjects such as harmony and counterpoint thoroughly, Mozart being no exception. In Russia, the Five tried to achieve an authentic national style by eschewing Western music theory, but their most famous member Rimsky-Korsakov came to regard this as a youthful folly and studied hard to overcome his ignorance. Following the example of Beethoven, composers also put greater effort into individual works than their predecessors, Brahms and Wagner being the most famous examples. It seems to me that classical music got both more sophisticated and more popular until the early 20th century, when newer developments like atonal music were rejected by audiences who, to this day, prefer Rachmaninoff over anything composed in the last 100 years.

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Yes, I agree with you. I should have developed and explained my thought more. My point is more that it is much easier for us to say with confidence that modern engineering practices and technologies are better than those of the 16th century than it is for us to say that modern polyphony is, overall, better than what was composed in the 16th century.

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We know painters do exactly that (e.g. "here's the point where perspective was invented in Europe, here's everyone showing off their use of perspective like crazy for the next fifty years"). It is vastly unlikely that painters and composers are different in that aspect.

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This is certainly true. You can see some technical progression is painting and drawing. Not so sure composition is comparable. Beyond the most primitive days of music, there wasn't so much a progression in terms of technicality as much as there were changes in style. The chromatic scale was never really invented -- the ancients knew what semitones were.

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Tempering was a new invention (cf. Well-Tempered Clavier), for one. I am sure there are others.

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A few thoughts in response.

I will say this for Richard, he finds new and interesting ways to piss people off.

The art of today is shit. Mostly. OK, almost totally. That's an opinion, but if I lived for a few more centuries I suspect this era would be correctly considered a low point. People may not be willing to put up with garbage forever, so it will hopefully improve.

The idea that you can replicate an artist by putting a bunch of stuff into a computer and having it puke out a bunch of stuff as good as Shakespeare is absurd. Why bother even having that conversation? But, sure, try it and see what happens. Maybe I will be surprised.

The world of today is better than the past in terms of some technology, though even that has tradeoffs. But the idea that the world of today is comprehensively better than the past is laughable. There were good and bad things about the past, and if you are old enough to remember it, that is obvious. You lose things and gain things.

And the idea that people are smarter now than in the past is not universally true. Even the 1980s were better than the vicious idiocy of today. The quality of political conversation is nowhere near what it was. Social media is poison for civil discourse. New technology doing more harm than good in that category. It happens.

To pick one other obvious fact, the levels of literacy of ordinary people as far back as the mid-19th century makes us look like Austrolopithecus by comparison. The letters home from ordinary Civil War soldiers are much better than most people could write today. We have become visual beings, and we are now are post-literate. This started with movies, accelerated with television, and went into hyperspace with the current computer technology.

People can read street signs and tweets, but their level of sophistication in reading is pathetic. The literary and literate world of the past is over, and that will have costs and possibly benefits, but I am not seeing any upsides yet.

History is not linear, progress does not always happen, today can be worse than yesterday, and tomorrow could be even worse.

When Richard says that Wokeness is cancer which is destroying us and we need to resist it, he is right. And the success of Wokeness is just one example showing that just because time is passing does not necessarily mean progress is occurring.

In many important ways we are regressing.

On the specific point of Shakespeare, having a shared canon is a form of literacy allowing people to express complex ideas in compact form by reference to shared knowledge, and shared esthetic experience, of works which are agreed on as valuable. Having a canon is helpful, even though the content of it is always evolving. But having no common cultural foundation dissolves social cohesion and reduces the capacity to communicate effectively. At one time everyone knew the Bible, and this similarly facilitated communication. Now even educated people don't know even the most rudimentary things about the cultural foundations of their own civilization, language, legal system, all of which are founded on a small group of books.

We have largely thrown all that out, to our detriment.

A provocative article. It provoked me, anyway.

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"Even the 1980s were better than the vicious idiocy of today. The quality of political conversation is nowhere near what it was. Social media is poison for civil discourse." It's not about smartness, it's about idiots getting a figurative loudspeaker.

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Everybody thinks the people they disagree with are idiots. And you’re right it’s not about smartness, it’s about decency, courtesy, humor, sanity, shared citizenship, recognizing the humanity of the person you disagreed with. I’ve been involved in political conversation since the 1970s. It’s a different world now and it’s worse. The technology had a negative affect, and I’m not seeing any positives in this regard.

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Indeed. To formulate it slightly less negatively, vastly more people with vastly more opinions were allowed on the stage because now all it takes to publish your thoughts is to open a site and press Enter. One could hope that the best works would pop up from that, but that hope was surely wrong, instead drowning in tribalistic cries which are simpler and thus propagate better happens (and this is as true for cries whose core I agree with as for cries whose core I disagree with - what propagates is always a dumbed-down, simplified version).

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One of the many regrettable things about the current information environment is that people who I generally agree with on policies and goals are nonetheless (usually) as bitter, joyless, tribal, harsh, uncharitable, and superficial as the people I disagree with. I mostly avoid political conversations these days.

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While reading Henry VI Part 1 a while back, I came onto Act 2, Scene 4, where the leaders of the York and Lancaster factions gather in a garden to choose sides by plucking white and red roses. Most critics think that he didn't write very much of Henry VI Pt. 1 — it was a kind of team-authorship effort with Marlowe and some others. For the first act, I didn't notice much difference compared with Shakespeare's solo-authored stuff. If I'd stopped reading there, I might be open to your argument. I like the histories, so I was having a good time reading the merely competent writing.

But then I started reading the garden scene, and suddenly the poetry transitioned for a few pages to an entirely different level. My senses became engaged; the pictures came alive in my mind in a way they hadn't in previous scenes. The turns of phrase were more original, more creative, more surprising than anything I'd read thus far in previous scenes. The writing was suddenly *virtuosic* rather than merely competent.

Then I looked it up, and I discovered that Act 2 Scene 4 is the single part of the play that most critics agree is actually Shakespeare's own.

I'm not a Shakespeare expert by a long shot, and I'd had no idea that this scene was widely agreed to be Shakespeare's when I started reading it. But within a few stanzas, I could tell there was something different about it, something truly remarkable. Then I found that others much more knowledgable than myself had noticed the same thing and more. Whether or not the critics are completely right about who co-authored Henry VI Part 2, Shakespeare's writing excels in a way that draws attention. The language *moves.* It dances. The best indication that you're dealing with reality is that it bites back, and Shakespeare's writing does that. No normal or even very intelligent person could hope to replicate it, now or 400 years ago. Only a genius could.

As for your logic about genius and the past, the idea that we ought to be able to field proportionally more artistic geniuses because of our expanded population and (supposedly) higher intelligences doesn't square with the fact that our educational strategies are no longer designed to produce genius, but merely competence and conformity (https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/why-we-stopped-making-einsteins), nor with changes to our lifestyles that might be conducive to comfort and longevity, but not artistic inspiration. Good poetry entails evoking rich sensory representations in the reader's mind. Someone who's spent his life among cow manure, incense, and hayfields is almost certainly going to be able to do that much, much better than someone who's spent his life in front of screens in climate-controlled buildings, even if he only lives to 55.

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Unfortunately I have used science and reason to prove that this didn't happen. Your move pal

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"Good poetry entails evoking rich sensory representations in the reader's mind." - says who? Why sensory?

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Autism isn't infectious.

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Better writers today…on average…might be plausible based on the arguments presented. But GOAT discussions are necessarily about unlikely and tail distribution events. I don’t see a mandatory correlation of “better era” coinciding with also producing “best ever”.

This is also not a discussion that can be mapped onto sports, for instance, where better nutrition, training, equipment, methods, “moneyball metrics” among others, do make it much more likely that the GOAT would come from, if not the most “current”, at least a fairly “modern” era. The same does not apply to writers, IMO.

And this also differs from STEM. The latest greatest discovery or innovation necessarily stands on the shoulders of all that came before it. But “great writer” and great works can occur at any time, and isn’t predicated on any forebears.

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"It’s a curious pattern that whenever we have objective measures of something, the best performers are always from the recent past. This holds for running, darts, field goal kicking, weightlifting, memorizing the digits of pi, and chess. It’s only in subjective fields that require aesthetic appreciation that we see the supposedly “best” performers being from long ago, in areas like theology, philosophy, and literature."

This could be an illusion - we have a better ability to record events and share records with others across space now, and we have better systemized categories of performance. We can only guess at the actual times for ancient long distance runners, sprinters, weightlifters, etc. And I may be selling pi-memorizers short but the bards who could recite The Illiad had something going on too.

I think there's a little bit of hubris baked into this argument.

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I don't think we should doubt that ancient runners were slower. Today we have the benefit of evolution, time, resources, training knowledge, nutrition, etc. Maybe someone hundreds of years ago could run a marathon in less than 2 hours or the 100 meters in less than 9.58 seconds, but you provide no good reason to believe this. That said, it is not clear to me that our modern advantages would confer the same benefits to artists, necessarily. Whatever mix of culture, history, experience, knowledge, etc. one needs to write great theater and poetry may just as well have existed in Shakespeare's time as today.

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I'm glad someone is saying this. We have, what, 125-150 years at most of records for standardized athletic events? And a massive proportion of those records are from only the last 50 years or so. The fact that someone in 2023 can lift heavier than any of the tiny sliver of people who were recorded lifting in a formal, standardized setting in 1923 demonstrates little to nothing except that standardization and recordkeeping of athletic events is a recent innovation.

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Well, that and PEDs. We're not nearly as good with PEDs for enhancing artistic success as we are with athletic success, for all the merits of intoxicants, stimulants, and psychedelics. We can't even meaningfully increase most people's IQs in the First World.

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The Iliad was designed specifically to be memorized and is a story of the form our brains are naturally evolved to remember, pi isn't. In fact people who can memorize large numbers do it by transforming the digits into a mental story for exactly that reason.

Not saying memorization of the Iliad is unimpressive mind you, it is, I'm just saying that memorizing pi takes more mental effort and is more impressive (in some bad ways too, at least memorizing the Iliad was useful).

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Yes, memorizing an infinite number of digits is certainly more impressive than memorizing the Iliad.

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Exactly. Homeric epos also uses a lot of formulaic expressions for that very purpose.

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Look, I can admire someone who puts a lot of effort for annoying contrarianism for the sake of annoying contrarianism, but this is too lazy to even be entertaining as trolling. You can't just go "well, of course anyone who's looked at the most obviously relevant facts before forming an opinion would disagree -- only a dumb baby sheep would do that anyway, an *independent* thinker would form the contrarian opinion *before* knowing what they were talking about". You need to at least commit to the pretence of being the Logical Fact-Based Thinker.

I mean, I could maybe respect it if you said "I don't trust anyone *including myself* to read the text and make an objective judgement, because conformist bias is so common." That would still be obviously disingenuous, but at least in a slightly clever way. But to respond to the question of "why don't *you* just read the damn thing and decide for yourself" with "because everyone *except* me is too dumb to think clearly about this" -- that's trolling done with all the subtlety and craftsmanship of a monkey flinging shit at his zookeeper. Be better.

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The tallest man ever recorded was Robert Wadlow, 8'11". Born in 1918-1940. How likely is this to be possible? There were only about 2.3 billion people on earth in 1940. How many people have come and gone in the last eighty-three years? And you're telling me that *none* of them was taller than 8'11"? Impossible.

Johnny von Neumann was reputed to be pretty smart, but again, he died in 1957. There must be 1,000 von Neumanns today. Heck, Hanania himself would probably leave von Neumann in the dust.

Mozart was a good composer, but he composed from 1759 to 1791 (he started at 3; I'm guessing there are now hundreds of thousands of three-year-olds who were better composers than Mozart). On his best day, he couldn't do what Max Martin does on his worst.

And just think of how many 8-year-olds today could put the 8-year-old John Stuart Mill to shame!

Of course, it's also possible that statistical unlikelihoods happen. But how likely is that? Very unlikely.

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Givent population curves, 1940 or 1957 are much more reasonable than 1600. The population hasn't grown THAT much since then.

And sure, there are probably a couple of Newman level smart people somewhere. Andrew wiles? Terry Tao?

Oh, and for height, Wadlow had a medical condition that is now treatable.

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"Heck, Hanania himself would probably leave von Neumann in the dust" - probably, yes? Not because of raw intelligence (which is comparable to your height example) but because the science itself moved on, because he can already use von Neumann's ideas and doesn't need to reinvent them anew.

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But then what is Hanania's point? Is it that tons of people today have more raw potential than Shakespeare, or is it that given what we know today, we can write better than someone 400 years ago?

I actually don't think, even with a whole year of practice, that Hanania would be as good at all the different branches of mathematics as von Neumann was. Along similar lines, I don't think, even with a whole year of practice, that Hanania would be able to write plays as well as Shakespeare (you'll note that he restricted himself to sonnets).

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I think the latter, but for a very careful definition of "we".

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