Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there really is such a thing as a person with a lot of book-learning but less common sense than a sea slug I don't even think SBF had the book-learning, just intellectual arrogance. "I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."
I had to search to check that the quote was real, that is some spectacular hubris!
"I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare ... but I really 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 than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few 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." [Going Infinite, p29]
Now I get that Shakespeare doesn't appeal to everyone and is definitely an acquired taste, but to judge his work on probability when the work itself is right there to judge on its own merits is like the joke about an economist who sees a hundred dollar bill on the street and says, "If that were a real bill, someone would already have picked it up."
He also dismisses the "plot twist" in Much Ado About Nothing (when Beatrice asks Benedick to kill Claudio) as "illogical" and the province of characters who are "one-dimensional and unrealistic" because "I mean, come on—kill someone because ... his fiancée is cheating on him?" As if no actual human being had ever killed out of jealousy, when it's usually one of the main motives for murder. It's like he's visiting from another planet or something.