“Good” is an underspecified term, and normal usage varies from person
to person. On the other hand, popularity is a real, objectively
trackable metric, and if a particular story fares extremely well on this
metric, that is much more likely due to optimization than to luck.
>if a particular story fares extremely well on this metric, that is much more likely due to optimization than to luck.
This is so incredibly naïve, damn, he should know that there is such an extreme volume of books of that sort that one or another is deemed to get some fame, and then marketing and advertising make the thing snowball.
What's optimised isn't the work but how many people get to know of the book.
I bet whatever that there are several series of way better quality than 50 shades that just aren't know because not nearly the same amount of resources were put into getting them known.
Where is this sub’s quality control? Over at /r/programmingcirclejerk
we at least try to correctly represent the content we discuss. Or, at
least, a bunch of us do, and our parody is fairly explicitly parody. But
nobody here seems to care that the title isn’t what EY said. Does this
not bother people?
seems more like paraphrasing than libel to me
>**So E. L. James solved a literary problem that I lack the understanding to perceive.** Even if you are yourself a successful author, you can't understand novel-receptions well enough to declare that a hugely successful move was irrational. **Nobody understands that domain that well!**
The key phrase is "you can't understand novel-receptions well enough to declare that a hugely successful move was **irrational**". He's not saying nobody understands why 50 Shades was successful (I'm fairly confident he would disagree with that), he's saying that nobody who *doesn't* see why it's successful can be legitimately confident that there is no reason and it's just luck.
Put aside whether he's right about the claim that he is making. My issue is simply that the title is attributing something to him that he never said and most probably does not believe.
and I'm saying that I don't see a huge difference in the title and what he said. He said that he doesn't understand the book's reception, and that no one understands the book's reception well enough to say it was based on luck and chance. I don't think it's too far of a reach to connect those two dots.
> no one understands the book's reception well enough to say it was based on luck and chance
EY's point is specifically that this isn't the right way to look at it. Knowing what about a book made it successful is about understanding *that book's success*; knowing that a book was successful based on luck is about understanding *the space of all possible ways of succeeding*.
It's perfectly plausible for someone to have competence in a particular domain and market of books, such that they are able to determine whether a book will succeed in that market or build a book to succeed in that market. What is much harder is exhaustively knowing all ways to be successful, such that a book's success is not strong evidence for unknown merits.
EY thinks 50 Shades is successful for a reason, so it *isn't* the case that he is claiming that "no one understands the book's reception well enough to say **why it succeeded**", and he believes that "no one understands the book's reception well enough to say it was based on luck and chance" principally because he doesn't believe that it was based on luck or chance. Thus the claim in the title (that EY thinks nobody can understand what made 50 Shades successful) is false, and contradicts the most straightforward reading of EY's explicit professed beliefs.
Right, I understand you, and I guess something like "EY doesn't understand *50 Shades*' success, and says that no one understands it well enough to justifiably claim it was down to luck and chance" would be more accurate, tho also more wordy and awkward. I just don't think it's some egregious mischaracterization.
either way it's a shitpost on a circlejerk sub; it has a low vote total even for this sub.
Maybe not egregious, but I would think it uncontroversial that if someone never claimed and does not believe a thing, they should not be criticized for claiming or believing that thing.
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Fucking lol
Fly-by rationalist here.
Where is this sub’s quality control? Over at /r/programmingcirclejerk we at least try to correctly represent the content we discuss. Or, at least, a bunch of us do, and our parody is fairly explicitly parody. But nobody here seems to care that the title isn’t what EY said. Does this not bother people?