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.

  • Sailor Sega Saturn@awful.systems
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    1 year ago

    “Western sphere”? Hey buster what if the best writer to ever live is currently writing Naruto fan-fiction in Malayalam right about now?!