“Unlike many previous studies, we are able to investigate differences between bullshitters and non-bullshitters conditional upon a range of potential confounding characteristics (including a high-quality measure of educational achievement) providing stronger evidence that bullshitting really is independently related to these important psychological traits.” IZA Institute of Labor Economics
Tag: 04.19
Ibsen Was A Hugely Influential Playwright And His Ideas Permeate Still. But…
Terry Teachout writes that the ideas – groundbreaking and shocking in their times, are now so familiar that they’re boring. “To be sure, we live with their culture-changing consequences—we know them well—but the plays themselves too often come across as static, talky exercises in bourgeois-baiting, as smug as Shaw at his worst but without his compensating wit.” Commentary
A Data Scientist Makes A Case Against Big Data Analysis Of Literature
“The basic criteria should always be to not confuse what happens mechanically with insight, to not needlessly use statistical tools for far simpler operations, to present inferences that are both statistically sound and argumentatively meaningful, and to make sure that functional operations would not be far faster and more accurate if someone just read the texts. It may be the case that computational textual analysis has a threshold of optimal utility, and literature—in particular, reading literature well—is that cut-off point.” – Critical Inquiry
On Becoming American Music: Mixing Vernacular, High Art And Language
Joseph Horowitz looks at American composers of the early 20th Century and their attempts to forge a unique language for American music. – Raritan Quarterly
In Search Of “Normal” (It’s Become A Festering Battleground)
“Normality” took a battering in the second half of the 20th century. Lots of people were angry about it and did their level best either to tear it down or render it definitively gauche. Who wanted to be normal? Normies were dull. Hammering the normies and transgression for the sake of transgression became a thing and is still a thing. Except, as Irish commentator Angela Nagle observes, it’s become an end in itself, at once “negative, nasty, and nihilistic”. Now it lives online in festering cesspools frequented by people who have no idea (and whose absence of ideas is not their fault) but who need rules and want normality. – Standpoint