All this doesn’t address my key observation, which is that the prior against one of the first one-hundred professional English writers turning out to be the best is simply incredible. Your list of other top-rated artists in other fields only reinforces this point. What are the odds that the best artist or practitioner in every field happened, by chance, to be one of the first 0.1% in that field? Either there is a strong bias to overrate the early practitioners, or the human race has been devolving rapidly for hundreds of years.
If the claims people made were along the lines of “X was the most influential in his field”, we could expect this. But I often hear it stated as absolute ability.
All this doesn’t address my key observation, which is that the prior against one of the first one-hundred professional English writers turning out to be the best is simply incredible.
I did address that, but obviously in a way you didn’t understand. Let me try again: that is not an observation, that’s a result of an unmotivated and unjustified model you postulated which leads to a result which you already had as a bottom-line. Your reference classes are post hoc cherrypicked to reach your desired conclusion, your data is minimal (see my point about your bizarre interpretation of the Paris interview criticisms and the comparison to other fields), and if your strategy was applied to any other field, give equally absurd results that noone before the 18th century should have been the greatest in anything because the human population has grown so much since then.
if your strategy was applied to any other field, give equally absurd results that noone before the 18th century should have been the greatest in anything because the human population has grown so much since then.
If you apply my strategy to any other field, the numbers give the result that noone before the 18th century should have been the greatest in anything because the human population has grown so much since then, yes. When you do the numbers and they give you a definitive answer, you don’t dismiss it as “absurd” because you don’t like it (or because you have a bug up your ass about the person who ran the numbers).
My separation of classes chronologically is, like all good models, inspired by observation. In this case, the observation that a statistically-impossible number of the people considered “best in field” came very early in those fields, even in fields like literature where coming early is a disadvantage rather than an advantage as regards the quality or contemporary opinion of your work.
When you do the numbers and they give you an answer, you don’t dismiss it as “absurd”.
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. You have amply explained why you reached the conclusion you did based on idiosyncratic personal preferences and constructed an unconvincing model to try to justify it; there are no ‘numbers’ here, there is only absurd reference class tennis. (‘Stratford-on-Avon had 0.0001% of the medieval English population; the odds against the greatest English writer coming from Stratford-on-Avon is astronomically unlikely!’) I am perfectly happy saying that the result refute the pseudo-premises—not that you gave a precise model in the first place: I will ask you again, what is the right amount of criticism for Shakespeare that would satisfy you that he really was the greatest writer ever?
My separation of classes chronologically is, like all good models, inspired by observation. In this case, the observation that a statistically-impossible number of the people considered “best in field” came very early in those fields, even in fields like literature where coming early is a disadvantage rather than an advantage as regards the quality or contemporary opinion of your work.
The damning point here is that you are willing to bite the bullet and say it applies to sciences as well, where we would, contrariwise, naturally expect the earlier a scientist to live, the easier it is to make incredible discoveries and pick up low-hanging fruit. Only an early scientists has a hope of discovering, say, gravity. Or an early mathematician something like calculus. You have to live as early as Parmenides if you want to discover something basic and extremely important like ‘the moon is illuminated by the sun’.
In the cases where we have objective measures (like memorization contests) we see records being broken all the time (which is as we’d expect). A lot of this can be attributed to improved general intelligence, but we’d expect that to be correlated with creative skill too. Are there any measurable world records from the Elizabethan era that still stand?
The damning point here is that you are willing to bite the bullet and say it applies to sciences as well, where we would, contrariwise, naturally expect the earlier a scientist to live, the easier it is to make incredible discoveries and pick up low-hanging fruit. Only an early scientists has a hope of discovering, say, gravity. Or an early mathematician something like calculus. You have to live as early as Parmenides if you want to discover something basic and extremely important like ‘the moon is illuminated by the sun’.
You’re measuring something here, but I don’t think it’s likeability. Newton may have been more historically important than Einstein, but no-one would prefer the former’s theory of gravity to the latter’s. If Shakespeare got pretty close to the perfect tragedy, but there was a slight refinement of the form from the 19th century that’s better (if less significant), surely people would prefer to watch that, and count themselves fans of that author.
Are there any measurable world records from the Elizabethan era that still stand?
I’m not sure what sort of world record you would have in mind, and given the parlous state of science at the time, what world records would you trust? If, for example, I exhibited a Chinaman from the Ming who lived for 231 years, which is surely a world record, you would rightly reject this by saying ‘it is much more likely that this world record is inaccurate than he really did live to 231, given how notoriously bad records were at the time, the cultural value set on being the oldest man in the world, etc’.
If Shakespeare got pretty close to the perfect tragedy, but there was a slight refinement of the form from the 19th century that’s better (if less significant), surely people would prefer to watch that, and count themselves fans of that author.
If Shakespeare helped define what the perfect tragedy was, and all later tragedies felt the ‘anxiety of influence’, this isn’t so clearcut. See my other comment.
the earlier a scientist [lives], the easier it is to make incredible discoveries and pick up low-hanging fruit.
You are ignoring the distinction PhilGoetz made in the grandparent comment:
If the claims people made were along the lines of “X was the most influential in his field”, we could expect this. But I often hear it stated as absolute ability.
Is that a real distinction? When Shakespeare is the ‘most influential’, then in some respects, he is setting what it means to be ‘able’. He is setting our norms and expectations, laying down the language we think and write in. John Keats: “He has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: “His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see.”
When a writer is so influencing (should I say, ‘distorting’?), is it really meaningful to draw a distinction between ‘influential’ and ‘able’? Like Phil’s implicit claim that every writer has an equal chance of being Shakespeare, this is not something I am willing to instantly grant without inspection.
The fact is that across most fields, a statistically-impossible number of those regarded as the greatest practitioners were among the very first practitioners. There are numbers; I have provided some in the case of Shakespeare, and you yourself have provided more. If you bothered to compute the odds you would find them astronomical. You acquire dozens of bits of information about who are regarded as the greatest X from dividing all people from all arts into two classes, early and not early. That’s amazing discriminatory power, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a testable hypothesis, and you tested it: You listed the top-regarded practitioners in fields I didn’t mention, and they followed the same pattern.
The fact is that across most fields, a statistically-impossible number of those regarded as the greatest practitioners were among the very first practitioners.
Statistically impossible… based on what?
There are numbers; I have provided some in the case of Shakespeare, and you yourself have provided more. If you bothered to compute the odds you would find them astronomical.
Based on what am I computing these odds? What sort of absurd model assigns equal possibility to being Newton in Newton’s lifetime and right now?
That’s amazing discriminatory power, and it doesn’t happen by accident.
I agree that it doesn’t happen by accident. And I think there’s many alternate explanations besides the one you seem to hew to.
Have you considered that greatness may simply come and go with periods of particular ferment? Look at the plots over time in Human Accomplishment: clumpiness is common, but other than that, there’s no particular rhyme or reason. Arab literature clumps at a different time from Chinese painting which clumps at different times than Western Philosophy, and so on. All of this massively violates a naive model ‘everyone has an equal chance to be Newton, therefore isn’t it really suspicious that Newton was so early on’; am I supposed to believe that 1000 years later, Arab poetry is still biased by random canonizations? And the same bias hit Japanese literature for a different clump of writers? And hit a later still clump of English writers?
(This is reminding me of anthropic reasoning. ‘We get these absurd consequences from SSA/SIA! Clearly the Great Filter is near and we are doomed to die in the next 50 years!’ ‘Or maybe your theories of anthropics are filled with holes and problems, and you’ve nicely demonstrated their absurdities.’)
You listed the top-regarded practitioners in fields I didn’t mention, and they followed the same pattern.
Yes… So what’s simpler, that in all fields there are conspiracies to canonize random early participants, or that early participants really are not identical to later participants?
I’m not sure if this is the same as periods of particular ferment, but I’ve wondered if what makes great eras is that there happen to be enough highly capable people in proximity so that they can play off each other.
Proximity is surely important (why else do we have universities rather than, say, professors distributed across the country being mailed checks every month?) and may be part of the reason that cities are so important and have superlinear returns to population and explain why Murray does indeed find that major figures all tend heavily to live in or work near cities, but cities have high populations through time, not just space. Paris for centuries has had large populations, but there are still clusters of major French figures. So I don’t see how cities explain the temporal clustering of major figures.
I’m not just talking about ordinary city proximity, I’m talking about getting a handful of very sparkly people (and possibly a larger number of moderately sparkly people) with the right combination of talents and personalities to inspire each other. And possibly the ability to generate enough interesting stuff to get the attention of gatekeepers.
It may be worth noting that there’s a fair bit of evidence that over the long-term, only some literary wors get a lot of attention, and this does not seem to be closely correlated with what at a specific time is widely read or considered great literature. Much of what we consider great works of literature from the 19th century were not as widely regarded as they are today, while other works have fallen by the wayside. Similar examples show up elsewhere and elsewhen. For example, The Tale of Genji was written in the middle of the Heian era when a lot of different literary experimentation was going on, and it took time for it to be recognized.
It may make sense therefore to use a test of time as a way of determining literary merit. This isn’t ideal: it is possible that once a work is sufficiently well-done, the actual level of acclaim more closely resembles a random walk. I’m not sure how to test that hypothesis.
For example, The Tale of Genji was written in the middle of the Heian era when a lot of different literary experimentation was going on, and it took time for it to be recognized.
Really? My impression had been that Genji was recognized almost immediately as one of the great works of Heian literature, based on the profusion of manuscripts prepared in Shikibu’s time, the countless imitators, the testimony of the Sarashina Nikki, the commentaries prepared not too long afterwards, and in particular, the very high regard of Fujiwara no Teika, one of the most important literary figures for centuries (I may be biased, since I wrote the Wikipedia entry on Teika), who worked on the manuscript.
I don’t think Teika’s work is great evidence since that’s about 150 years after Genji is written. The rest of your arguments though I think are strong: there’s way too much contemporaneous recognition of Genji to use it as an example of what I wanted it to do.
I was hoping I’d have some example from non-Western literature, I may now need to update to this sort of thing being a Western phenomenon.
How much movement of literary judgement would you consider unsurprising? Do you have a source quantifying the movement of judgement of 19th century work?
Regarding, the first question:I’m not sure. Regarding the second, I don’t unfortunately have a good source for this. I My impression on this is from talking to multiple lit professors and teachers who have mentioned this phenomenon.
All this doesn’t address my key observation, which is that the prior against one of the first one-hundred professional English writers turning out to be the best is simply incredible. Your list of other top-rated artists in other fields only reinforces this point. What are the odds that the best artist or practitioner in every field happened, by chance, to be one of the first 0.1% in that field? Either there is a strong bias to overrate the early practitioners, or the human race has been devolving rapidly for hundreds of years.
If the claims people made were along the lines of “X was the most influential in his field”, we could expect this. But I often hear it stated as absolute ability.
I did address that, but obviously in a way you didn’t understand. Let me try again: that is not an observation, that’s a result of an unmotivated and unjustified model you postulated which leads to a result which you already had as a bottom-line. Your reference classes are post hoc cherrypicked to reach your desired conclusion, your data is minimal (see my point about your bizarre interpretation of the Paris interview criticisms and the comparison to other fields), and if your strategy was applied to any other field, give equally absurd results that noone before the 18th century should have been the greatest in anything because the human population has grown so much since then.
If you apply my strategy to any other field, the numbers give the result that noone before the 18th century should have been the greatest in anything because the human population has grown so much since then, yes. When you do the numbers and they give you a definitive answer, you don’t dismiss it as “absurd” because you don’t like it (or because you have a bug up your ass about the person who ran the numbers).
My separation of classes chronologically is, like all good models, inspired by observation. In this case, the observation that a statistically-impossible number of the people considered “best in field” came very early in those fields, even in fields like literature where coming early is a disadvantage rather than an advantage as regards the quality or contemporary opinion of your work.
Why are you always especially rude to me?
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens. You have amply explained why you reached the conclusion you did based on idiosyncratic personal preferences and constructed an unconvincing model to try to justify it; there are no ‘numbers’ here, there is only absurd reference class tennis. (‘Stratford-on-Avon had 0.0001% of the medieval English population; the odds against the greatest English writer coming from Stratford-on-Avon is astronomically unlikely!’) I am perfectly happy saying that the result refute the pseudo-premises—not that you gave a precise model in the first place: I will ask you again, what is the right amount of criticism for Shakespeare that would satisfy you that he really was the greatest writer ever?
The damning point here is that you are willing to bite the bullet and say it applies to sciences as well, where we would, contrariwise, naturally expect the earlier a scientist to live, the easier it is to make incredible discoveries and pick up low-hanging fruit. Only an early scientists has a hope of discovering, say, gravity. Or an early mathematician something like calculus. You have to live as early as Parmenides if you want to discover something basic and extremely important like ‘the moon is illuminated by the sun’.
In the cases where we have objective measures (like memorization contests) we see records being broken all the time (which is as we’d expect). A lot of this can be attributed to improved general intelligence, but we’d expect that to be correlated with creative skill too. Are there any measurable world records from the Elizabethan era that still stand?
You’re measuring something here, but I don’t think it’s likeability. Newton may have been more historically important than Einstein, but no-one would prefer the former’s theory of gravity to the latter’s. If Shakespeare got pretty close to the perfect tragedy, but there was a slight refinement of the form from the 19th century that’s better (if less significant), surely people would prefer to watch that, and count themselves fans of that author.
I’m not sure what sort of world record you would have in mind, and given the parlous state of science at the time, what world records would you trust? If, for example, I exhibited a Chinaman from the Ming who lived for 231 years, which is surely a world record, you would rightly reject this by saying ‘it is much more likely that this world record is inaccurate than he really did live to 231, given how notoriously bad records were at the time, the cultural value set on being the oldest man in the world, etc’.
If Shakespeare helped define what the perfect tragedy was, and all later tragedies felt the ‘anxiety of influence’, this isn’t so clearcut. See my other comment.
You are ignoring the distinction PhilGoetz made in the grandparent comment:
Is that a real distinction? When Shakespeare is the ‘most influential’, then in some respects, he is setting what it means to be ‘able’. He is setting our norms and expectations, laying down the language we think and write in. John Keats: “He has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing.” Ralph Waldo Emerson: “His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see.”
When a writer is so influencing (should I say, ‘distorting’?), is it really meaningful to draw a distinction between ‘influential’ and ‘able’? Like Phil’s implicit claim that every writer has an equal chance of being Shakespeare, this is not something I am willing to instantly grant without inspection.
The fact is that across most fields, a statistically-impossible number of those regarded as the greatest practitioners were among the very first practitioners. There are numbers; I have provided some in the case of Shakespeare, and you yourself have provided more. If you bothered to compute the odds you would find them astronomical. You acquire dozens of bits of information about who are regarded as the greatest X from dividing all people from all arts into two classes, early and not early. That’s amazing discriminatory power, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It’s a testable hypothesis, and you tested it: You listed the top-regarded practitioners in fields I didn’t mention, and they followed the same pattern.
Statistically impossible… based on what?
Based on what am I computing these odds? What sort of absurd model assigns equal possibility to being Newton in Newton’s lifetime and right now?
I agree that it doesn’t happen by accident. And I think there’s many alternate explanations besides the one you seem to hew to.
Have you considered that greatness may simply come and go with periods of particular ferment? Look at the plots over time in Human Accomplishment: clumpiness is common, but other than that, there’s no particular rhyme or reason. Arab literature clumps at a different time from Chinese painting which clumps at different times than Western Philosophy, and so on. All of this massively violates a naive model ‘everyone has an equal chance to be Newton, therefore isn’t it really suspicious that Newton was so early on’; am I supposed to believe that 1000 years later, Arab poetry is still biased by random canonizations? And the same bias hit Japanese literature for a different clump of writers? And hit a later still clump of English writers?
(This is reminding me of anthropic reasoning. ‘We get these absurd consequences from SSA/SIA! Clearly the Great Filter is near and we are doomed to die in the next 50 years!’ ‘Or maybe your theories of anthropics are filled with holes and problems, and you’ve nicely demonstrated their absurdities.’)
Yes… So what’s simpler, that in all fields there are conspiracies to canonize random early participants, or that early participants really are not identical to later participants?
I’m not sure if this is the same as periods of particular ferment, but I’ve wondered if what makes great eras is that there happen to be enough highly capable people in proximity so that they can play off each other.
Proximity is surely important (why else do we have universities rather than, say, professors distributed across the country being mailed checks every month?) and may be part of the reason that cities are so important and have superlinear returns to population and explain why Murray does indeed find that major figures all tend heavily to live in or work near cities, but cities have high populations through time, not just space. Paris for centuries has had large populations, but there are still clusters of major French figures. So I don’t see how cities explain the temporal clustering of major figures.
I’m not just talking about ordinary city proximity, I’m talking about getting a handful of very sparkly people (and possibly a larger number of moderately sparkly people) with the right combination of talents and personalities to inspire each other. And possibly the ability to generate enough interesting stuff to get the attention of gatekeepers.
It may be worth noting that there’s a fair bit of evidence that over the long-term, only some literary wors get a lot of attention, and this does not seem to be closely correlated with what at a specific time is widely read or considered great literature. Much of what we consider great works of literature from the 19th century were not as widely regarded as they are today, while other works have fallen by the wayside. Similar examples show up elsewhere and elsewhen. For example, The Tale of Genji was written in the middle of the Heian era when a lot of different literary experimentation was going on, and it took time for it to be recognized.
It may make sense therefore to use a test of time as a way of determining literary merit. This isn’t ideal: it is possible that once a work is sufficiently well-done, the actual level of acclaim more closely resembles a random walk. I’m not sure how to test that hypothesis.
Really? My impression had been that Genji was recognized almost immediately as one of the great works of Heian literature, based on the profusion of manuscripts prepared in Shikibu’s time, the countless imitators, the testimony of the Sarashina Nikki, the commentaries prepared not too long afterwards, and in particular, the very high regard of Fujiwara no Teika, one of the most important literary figures for centuries (I may be biased, since I wrote the Wikipedia entry on Teika), who worked on the manuscript.
I don’t think Teika’s work is great evidence since that’s about 150 years after Genji is written. The rest of your arguments though I think are strong: there’s way too much contemporaneous recognition of Genji to use it as an example of what I wanted it to do.
I was hoping I’d have some example from non-Western literature, I may now need to update to this sort of thing being a Western phenomenon.
How much movement of literary judgement would you consider unsurprising? Do you have a source quantifying the movement of judgement of 19th century work?
Regarding, the first question:I’m not sure. Regarding the second, I don’t unfortunately have a good source for this. I My impression on this is from talking to multiple lit professors and teachers who have mentioned this phenomenon.
See here (follow-up here)