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A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

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Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#31

Post by jessaustin »

A recent survey of American values indicates that patriotism, belief in God and having children all rate much lower than they did 20 years ago.

Gosh, one wonders what could have happened? Maybe two decades of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars, all supported by the most patriotic and pious among us? That has certainly sapped this correspondent's patriotism. (His piety, though, something else sapped that...) Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common, and we'll think of all the wedding parties, funerals, open markets, etc. we've incinerated in the Middle East. It's as if chickens... come home to roost!

TFA is definitely the most pedestrian, limp, effort-free deposit one has ever read from Cowen.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#32

Post by Nition »

jetru wrote: post #7

So true. So many people I know and myself included are tired of the "rat race". We don't want to keep working for nothing, we don't want to keep hoping for that next raise, we don't want to pretend to be smarter or cooler or better than we are. What a horrible way to live in the age of plenty. Maybe, we like cold pizza. Bougey is a dirty word. We want to chill. We want fairness. Simplicity is where Happiness lies. Th…

Do you know Epicureanism?[1] Basically what you're describing.

> Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" (ἡδονή) was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one's desires. This would lead one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from fear as well as an absence of bodily pain (aponia).

It's a good way to live.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#33

Post by chongli »

patternmaster wrote: post #3

Very odd article.. When looked to see the name of the author, I was very surprised to see economist Tyler Cowen

If you had read the book The Case Against Education by his George Mason University colleague, Bryan Caplan, then you might not be as surprised. That economics department seems to be a haven for libertarian thought, opera, classical music, and Renaissance paintings.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#34

Post by deogeo »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #28
baud147258 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".

Why and how can contradict. Easiest example is “god made people this way” vs “people are the result of random processes that came about due to happenstance”.

An omniscient god can guide random processes as it wishes. Or it can create a system where the desired outcome will come to pass, without controlling every detail. Like how each molecule of water moves randomly and unpredictably, but the river flows downhill and to the ocean.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#35

Post by adrianN »

baud147258 wrote: post #10
SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #5

Culture evolves, and people increasingly question tradition for tradition's sake. Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world, the decision to have children or not has many contributing factors (economic, for one), and it's hard to be patriotic when every country has so many skeletons in the closet you'd think it's perpetually Halloween.

> Belief in God is at odds with a scientific view of the world I'd say both are orthogonal to each other. The religious view of the world explain the "why do we exist?" and the scientific view the "how do we exist?".

You can credibly be a theist and believe in science, but it's a lot harder to really believe in one of the big religions and also believe in science.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#36

Post by interfixus »

nindalf wrote: post #8

Not sure how the author decides what is ordinary and what is transcendent. According to him, there is nothing special about folks creating podcasts, but there is something special about a singer-songwriter. He does not say why. Take https://www.patreon.com/sonicether who earns $50k a month creating shaders for Minecraft. That sounds mundane until you realise that he's probably enabling tens of thousands of people to…

It is my honest, non-facetious opinion that Randall Munroe ought to be in the very serious running for the Nobel Literature Prize. His oeuvre is wide-ranching, deep, consistent, informative, relevant, thought-provoking, stylistically groundbreaking, and extensively quoted by all sorts of highly influential people the world over.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#37

Post by bakuninsbart »

He mentions Kurzgesagt as a positive example - but ignores other educational channels like CGP Grey, CrashCourse and ContraPoints. - There's also many more highly educational podcasts and youtube channels that are very popular.

Entertainment has shifted from TV to the internet in recent years, and as it grew more popular it also grew more mundane. - But looking at TV entertainment of previous decades, I think it is hard to claim there has been a reduction in quality.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#38

Post by patternmaster »

chongli wrote: post #33
patternmaster wrote: post #3

Very odd article.. When looked to see the name of the author, I was very surprised to see economist Tyler Cowen

If you had read the book The Case Against Education by his George Mason University colleague, Bryan Caplan, then you might not be as surprised. That economics department seems to be a haven for libertarian thought, opera, classical music, and Renaissance paintings.

I did happen to read that book.

Still I don't see what beef a libertarian economist should have with voluntary donations to "ordinary" causes.

Re: A list of the top recipients on Patreon shows an obsession with the ordinary

#39

Post by PavlovsCat »

new2628 wrote: post #9
PavlovsCat wrote: post #4

> But now let us follow the subsequent development of photography. What do we see? It has become more and more subtle, more and more modern, and the result is that it is now incapable of photographing a tenement or a rubbish heap without transfiguring it. Not to mention a river dam or an electric cable factory: in front of these, photography can now only say, 'How beautiful.' The World is Beautiful - that is the titl…

Nice finds, and both quotes strike me as quite insightful and prescient.

The article made me think of the first one, then I thought of the second one and added it to explain what might be wrong with turning everything into an object of consumption. To be honest, I don't know a lot about the work of Walter Benjamin, maybe he also had more to say on this. But I do know that Hannah Arendt was on to a lot, and is as timely as ever. I love and recommend her more than I can say.

> When books or pictures in reproduction are thrown on the market cheaply and attain huge sales, this does not affect the nature of the objects in question. But their nature is affected when these objects themselves are changed rewritten, condensed, digested, reduced to kitsch in reproduction, or in preparation for the movies. This does not mean that culture spreads to the masses, but that culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment.

> The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who actively promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectuals, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that Hamlet can be as entertaining as My Fair Lady, and perhaps educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Crisis in Culture - Its Social and Its Political Significance", http://www.celinecondorelli.eu/files/arendtcrisisinculture_v...

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