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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

#51

Post by mieseratte »

jessaustin wrote: post #31

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'…

> Maybe twenty years of pointless soul-rotting stupid wars

> Next you'll be telling us that trigger-happy crowd-murders are more common

> It's as if chickens... come home to roost!

I'm a bit confused, are you of the mind that there is some relation between mass-shooters and the wars in the Middle East? Or just those wars are why people feel less positive about patriotism?

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

#52

Post by hos234 »

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…

This kind of confusion is constantly created when the underlying unstated assumption is we all share the same needs.

We don't.

We spend huge amounts of energy and time trying to convince each other that our needs are whats best for everyone else.

In reality, people and their needs are on as wide a spectrum, as the needs of a cactus and a banyan tree. And it doesn't end there, those needs change with time and context.

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

#53

Post by austincheney »

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…

How are you defining simplicity? Are differentiating from easiness or convenience? I get the impression you are using the word simplicity differently than I would.

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

#54

Post by rubidium »

qazpot wrote: post #48
interfixus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Although I don't agree with Randall Munroe being in Nobel Prize for Literature league, even if he was he would win it in his sixties.

To finish off why this is the case....

Because you need to wait for the generation who enjoyed his work during collage to be the political / social elite.

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

#55

Post by colechristensen »

itemGrey wrote: post #15

> As today’s young become wealthier and more philanthropic Is this correct? My understanding was today's youth in the U.S are taking on more debt than ever.

I wouldn't interpret comparing one generation to a previous generation but against itself as it grows older. (as in, most people earn more money and become more able to donate money as they get older)

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

#56

Post by longtom »

bakuninsbart wrote: post #37

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 h…

"ContraPoints" is not an education channel.

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

#57

Post by glangdale »

It's amusing that the only sign of a "culture war" here is the author's tendentious carping about, of all things, the Patreon Top 50 list. Why?

Very possibly, if you are doing things that random economics professors consider "transcendent", you are probably extremely well served by the far more lucrative network of grants and funding that exists outside Patreon. He nods briefly to this idea before rejecting it and just plain making some shit up:

"Maybe, but there is another possibility: that Patreon is the tip of an ever-growing iceberg."

Awful.

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

#58

Post by Gatsky »

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…

I think you have this the wrong way around. The article is undoubtedly correct to my mind. The most popular content creators are basically doing nothing. Looking at the truly huge Youtubers, people on Patreon, Instagrammers, streamers etc it is clear that mundanity with high production values is what people want. This is non-art served up with the orchestra and vino that you are criticising as bourgeois. Reality TV gets it wrong with exotic locales, tattooed narcissists and manufactured drama, that's too much actually. People seemingly just want a nicer, sanitised version of their own lives served up to them. They will swallow this all day every day.

The saving grace I think are podcasts. There is some authentic intellectual stuff going on there, it's a renaissance medium that humanises debate and invites nuance and complexity.

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

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

deogeo wrote: post #34
lotsofpulp wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then if Occam's razor tells you the random process[0] will manage just fine, you have to push God's guidance further away still. At some point you might ask yourself, if increasingly sophisticated phenomena keep turning out to be explainable without any reference to God, if anything science touches turns out to be devoid of God, then why should we expect to find Him?

--

[0] - an important realization is that evolution isn't a completely random process - it has state in form of environment and path dependence, both of which concentrate the probability mass.

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

#60

Post by skissane »

deogeo wrote: post #30
krapp wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion lays claim to both the why and the how. The belief that "religion explains why and science explains how" is entirely modern. For most of human history (until secular science arose as a concept,) every aspect of the material world was seen as having been created and controlled by divine powers. Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitraril…

Sure, if you define religion as literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century, while allowing science the full benefit of modern understanding. For example, you probably didn't have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinozism in mind when you said religion. > Even when "natural laws" were discovered, those laws were divine in origin, and thus could conceivably be arbitrarily suspended or changed under div…

> literal interpretation of the Bible, stuck in the 9th century

I have to speak up in defence of people who lived in the 9th century. In the Middle Ages, allegorical approaches to Bible interpretation were popular, and they weren't wedded to literal readings of it – e.g. Augustine of Hippo (4th/5th century) argued that the six days in Genesis 1 were not meant to be understood as six literal days – and Augustine's views on this were very influential in the centuries that followed. People sometimes seem to back-project 19th/20th/21st century American fundamentalism on to the Middle Ages, when that sort of wooden literalism was very alien to the mediaeval spirit.

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