Rationalist literary criticism by SBF, found on the birdsite - eviltoast

original is here, but you aren’t missing any context, that’s the twit.

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespear… but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse that that. When Shakespear wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate – probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

edited to add this seems to be an excerpt from the fawning book the big short/moneyball guy wrote about him that was recently released.

  • self@awful.systemsM
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    1 year ago

    uhm according to my Bayesian priors and some very basic rational thought it’s impossible that classical music was good (the majority of its target audience didn’t even have access to the cultural enrichment provided by computers or the internet) and it therefore follows that the height of music is I Wanna Be Software by Grimes