I mean no matter how you do it, you’re still in some measure trading lives, and I’m not sure exactly where professionals would draw the line, but it would depend on how many lives could be lost by challenge trials (which even with consent is an ethically squicky thing) compared to the risk of deaths from the virus.

I have a deep cut here from a comment posted in 2019, in which Scott *basically* argues that the existence of the FDA is inherently bad: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/30/buspirone-shortage-in-healthcaristan-ssr/#comment-748032 >I agree one can imagine solving all of the other problems individually, and then making sure no new problems pop up, but at some point it becomes the same kind of argument as “a dictator would be good as long as they made only good decisions”. Probably true, but a dictator won’t make only good decisions, so we might as well sum this state of affairs up as “dictatorships are bad”. Likewise, a regulatory agency would be good if it didn’t distort things or make it easier for big companies to push little companies around, but in real life regulatory agencies are at pretty high risk of promoting those things. Although admittedly he hedges this position in later comments downthread.

tyty I swear to god I usually just think of him as "technically smart but pseudointellectual" but goddamn when I actually read what he says he's dumb as hell.

This needs to put in the sidebar or something, I couldn't find it earlier.

This is starting to get confusing: my contention is that there is fairly direct evidence that the point of the piece is a sort of *cri de coeur* against the mishandling of The Plague by authorities entrusted with handling it on our behalf, and the significant personal trauma that a lot of people have suffered as a partial result of that mishandling. You, on the other hand, seem to think that performing such a *cri de coeur* repeats right-wing talking points against lockdowns etc., and I contend further that searching through Siskind’s own comments below the line at least implies that he is actually *in favour* of harsh measures to mitigate the crisis, in contra-distinction to the talking points of e.g. anti-maskers with whom you seem to be accusing him of associating. I’m uncomfortable with your link between the decrial of the state that we’re in and anti-maskers (et al.) because I agree with Siskind on both points: this has been a disaster, people should be held to account for it, and harsher measures should continue to be imposed as they should have been before. I agree with Siskind very rarely, as should be pretty well demonstrated by the fact that I continue to be probably the most active mod on this subreddit. I don’t like the idea that my raging in line with Scott against the stupidity of how things have gone should further align me with anti-maskers due to a subtextual interpretation you’ve given of this piece I don’t see.

Imagine thinking you’re a good enough writer to hand out advice like that and *also* being Scott Siskind. The man opens - with I must say an impressive lack of self-awareness - by touting the virtues of *concision*. His bit about splitting things up is admittedly good advice, but in his case he always uses that device to dust off an idea without addressing it properly before moving on to the next bit.

There’s a very specific, and quite - but not exclusively - American attitude to story-telling pedagogy which has its roots in the 40s-50s, a celebration of the realism (not naturalism) of the foregoing decades, and metaphor-as-symbol, which really hammers on the idea that you have to hit certain beats and tell the story of a dramatic journey from innocence to realisation to maturity (or similar). This works at the technical level if you think of your writing as a trade, because audiences are already conditioned to respond to this particular mode and a craftsman’s job is to create something to which people respond - so far so good. But when you elevate the tools of that trade to a putatively objective account of what does or doesn’t work *simpliciter* in story-telling is where things start to come apart, and that’s where I get annoyed. There’s a reason that stories which often *don’t* follow this model, such as *Tristram Shandy*, the *1001 Nights*, Shakespeare’s “Problem Plays” etc. were successful in their own time not just in spite of but because they appealed to an audience which wasn’t interested in that particular normative model. Hitting the right beats is all well and good, and many great writers do so very effectively (think: *12 Angry Men* or *The Godfather II*), but other works hit all the right beats and fail - even if they do well financially - because that’s **all that they do** (think *The Trial of The Chicago Seven* or roughly half of Spielberg’s output) which isn’t to say they aren’t appealing, but that’s all that they are; by contrast if we’re stlll talking movies many of my favourites (*Fitzcarraldo*, *Funeral in Berlin*, *The Conversation*) work precisely because they quite deliberately avoid hitting those beats and structure the metaphor and pacing according to a *background* story and world that is peculiar to the movie itself. As with The New Criticism movement in post-war America, which in part motivates some of the metaphorical devices you got annoyed with the FoldingIdeas guy for hammering on, the attempt to make a particular narrative and symbolic structure the *sine qua non* of story telling does down the virtues of great works that don’t adhere to it. Again, methodologically and on a technical level it’s certainly *good advice* to try to structure a work with these sorts of things in mind, but there’s a point at which you’re lecturing people that their good ideas are bad ideas because they don’t fit a very limiting programme which only exists in the first place due to historical circumstance and convention. To put it in other words: using FoldingIdeas’s criticisms works when you want to stop bad writers from writing badly, but it goes the opposite way if you use it to make *good* writers write boringly. Personally I’d rather have a few fuck-ups along the way, than have a consistent model that doesn’t allow the writer to fuck-up now and again in the service of something that’s otherwise interesting.