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https://www.gwern.net/Culture%20is%20not%20about%20Esthetics
Suppose we all have 100 apples. Our lives do not revolve around apples, though we like them well enough. But still, 100 is too many; even if we ate 5 a day, the rest would go bad before we ate them. And of course, it’s unlikely that any of us will go to the greengrocers and buy more. Our marginal utility of apples has plunged to zero.
From our perspective, the farmer bringing a truck of apples to the greengrocers has wasted his labor. Let’s hope he’ll find something to do with those surplus apples so the resources that went into making them were not wasted - maybe bake some apple pies, or compost them all.
Now suppose this wasn’t a one-time gift. We live in a magic world where everyone gets 100 apples a week. Here the farmer’s entire career is wasted. Isn’t he wasting his life? He’s a smart fellow; no reason he couldn’t go do something more useful.
We could invent ways to employ this farmer. Perhaps every week he breaks into everybody’s kitchens and steals their apples so they have to buy apples from him. Perhaps he’ll run a large marketing campaign to convince everyone that his apples are superior to the magical apples. Perhaps some people get Granny Smith but really wanted Red Delicious, and he runs an apple-trading hub, filling in deficits with his apples. Perhaps he lives on government subsidy checks & farms apples as a hobby. Or something.
But nevertheless, these apple-farmers represent a dead-weight loss. That’s bad.
Now, can we apply this analogy? I don’t have 100 apples, but perhaps I have - 100 novels.
Not any novels, but science fiction novels. Nor any 100 Sci-Fi novels, but the winners of the 2 most prestigious SF awards for the last 50 years: the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
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>>9436206
Suppose I read the 100 at the rate of 1 a week, or 52 a year. I will finish them in ~2 years.
It will take an appreciable fraction of my life to read a vanishingly small fraction of one small fiction genre, that itself has existed for less than 2 centuries and been written almost exclusively in 2 countries.
And what if I want to read the prequels and sequels? Not all winners are as prolific in sequels & prequels as Dune, but these winners include many duologies and trilogies (or more). I can probably expect to lose another 2 or 6 years to them. Certainly, I can expect it to take another 4 years to read the 2 top runner-ups for each award. And did I mention that these awards have multiple categories? Many of SF’s greatest works are short stories or novellas, which compete for different Nebula & Hugo awards.
The list is now 8 years in length; if the SF industry had imploded the day I started, I would not have noticed.
I would be better off, actually, if the industry did implode! The last SF or Fantasy I read was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy. It was good, but I know there are better. My reading time is finite, and reading Mistborn pushed out reading Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun tetralogy - which I ultimately enjoyed more. If the industry had imploded before Mistborn was published, I would have read Long Sun instead.
It wouldn’t be difficult to spend the rest of my life reading only SF published before 2009, and it would be more efficient as time is the keenest critic.
But reading only SF is impoverishing. I always wanted to get into mysteries and French literature. But those will take at least 2 decades. Now I’m in my 50s. I’d better hurry if I ever want to read English or Chinese literature, or any nonfiction!
So, why do I care what happens to the SF market? How does it concern me that the short story magazines are collapsing and will train no new writers? I have no need of them. I already have 100 apples.
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>>9436257
I didn't write this; Gwern did. Also, every rationalist is used to being called autistic, so, that won’t really work.
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>>9436307
It's a two-bit blog m8, how would I know if you wrote it or not. It's a hideous way of writing and a stultifying way of living. There is refining your pleasures, and then there is overthinking.
And as soon as anybody uses analogies and metaphors in a search for logic, they are defeating themselves. They are talking about things in terms of other things, and the meaning runs away from them.
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I'm sort of sympathetic to the idea. I started reading genre fiction recently, and I can't even imagine being the sort of person who 'keeps up with' the new releases. There's no reason for the majority of them to exist.
The problem is that changing times bring new aesthetic demands So we may benefit by allowing the wheat thresher of history to swallow the thousands of works of art no one cares about, leaving a few that might be worth preserving, which is better than none.
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>>9436257
This. Also I consider it comforting that, even if the publishing industry collapsed tomorrow, I'd still have enough to last a lifetime
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