It’s generally bad form to badmouth living authors if you’re also a writer, but I’ll give Greenfeld this much: a charitable reading of his argument against the wrong kind of optimization does explain in part why I won’t read Brandon Sanderson. The way he writes seems optimized to create a sort of fantasy literature that is the prose equivalent of easy listening or Muzak. As appealing as it is for a lot of readers, it’s intolerably bland to me.
Since I don’t see it that way, I figure either we can focus on the general premise that we agree on and keep exploring the topic from there, or we can keep talking about to what degree that premise is or isn’t really articulated in the linked post.
I agree, and I’ll add, just stop using Spotify. Everyone should just stop.
I can’t…
… because I stopped 5 years ago.
Been using blogs and Bandcamp to find new music. Be nice if Angry Metal Guy did more prog and power metal. It’s been mostly black metal and death metal lately.
It’s the one service I can’t stop using because I pay for a family account and 4 other people are on it. And I don’t like wasting money so I’m not going to subscribe to something else. But I hate it. it’s the one service I genuinely hate paying for.
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I agree with what Manuele said in here more than the rest of the crowd.
I think that when we use the term “optimization,” we don’t have to ask “optimization for what” because the very term “optimized” is one of those business/consulting terms that almost always means “optimizing for revenue,” “optimizing for efficiency,” or “optimizing for attention.” Few people will hear the term “optimize” and think that it means building a better craft.
I also do think that the terms “soul” and “inhuman” are useful here, even if the text doesn’t have a religious element to it. Optimization, in my view, is necessarily a machinic concept that assumes some sort of 100% human capacity in the same way that it is possible to use 100% of your RAM. That which is human doesn’t exactly work this way.
Strategy games like chess might have some element of “optimization” for the first few turns, as someone mentioned above, and humans are bound to quantify the game, but there has always been an art involved as well. Sport, for it to be fun, also requires that it’s an act of art as well. If I were to play, would I enjoy pursuing the techniques every game? No! You can’t even get me to walk each day along the same route, knowing for a fact that one way is “optimal” and the others are not.
Optimization flattens our experience, and we humans are necessarily creative. We like to do things differently, even if we know that there is no quantifiable “benefit” out there in the world. This is hardly an anti-intellectual or populist argument.
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@scalone I can’t actually tell if you’re responding to me or not.
Don’t worry–I wasn’t! My response was to the thread more broadly.