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DARK_BALZAC
April 6, 2008
BLACK_SWAN
One of Taleb's points is that you can't
just look at the group of winners to
determine winning strategies -- you also
need to check the much larger population WIDE_FIELD
of losers, who might, after all, have been
doing exactly the same thing the winners do.
"...if there are indeed many perished
manuscripts with similar attributes,
then, I regret to say, your idol
Balzac was just the beneficiary of
disproportionate luck compared to his
peers. Furthermore, you may be
committing an injustice to others by
favoring him. "
"My point, I will repeat, is not that
Balzac is untalented, but that he is
less uniquely talented than we think. I don't think
Just consider the thousands of writers Taleb said this
now completely vanished from before he claimed
consciousness: their record does not to have "repeated" it.
enter into analyses. We do not see the
tons of rejected manuscripts because This sort of low-grade
these writers have never been published. sloppy writing permeates
_The New Yorker_ alone rejects close to the "Black Swan":
a hundred manuscripts a day, so imagine
the number of geniuses that we will TALEB
never hear about."
p.103-104
By what stretch of imagination
would we want to assume that Though actually, the New
these rejections are of genius Yorker is an odd example to
level quality? use, because rather famously
their editors rely on
cronyism to pre-screen the
manuscripts.
Almost any small,
struggling
publication works
harder at evaluating
That there is some component of Balzac's submissions than
success that was due to luck rather than the New Yorker does.
mere talent is likely, that it is hard to
estimate the amount of luck involved is a One would not expect
given, for many reasons, and yes, one of the New Yorker to
the great unknowns is the possibility publish any
that the equal of Balzac remained break-through
unpublished by the caprices of the artists. They key
publishing industry... talent required is
to get invited to
But Taleb's continual implication that the right parties.
the sheer numbers of rejections tell
the whole story, or even most of the The editors that actually
story is an absurdity. do make an effort to read
all submissions would
The idea that there are vast quickly disabuse you of the
hordes of unpublished geniuses notion that there are
is-- I suspect-- promulgated by massive numbers of ignored
famous stories of successful geniuses out there...
manuscripts that were originally
widely rejected (e.g. Kerouac's SLUSH
"On the Road", which took
something like seven years to
get published).
Needless to say, these are unusual
cases, though the tales are beloved
by any writer that's ever received
a rejection slip (i.e. all of them).
But you know, Taleb claims that he's
smart enough to not get taken in by "the NARRATIVE_DRIVE
narrative fallacy".
While not everything that's publishable
is published, Taleb exaggerates the number
of these hidden diamonds.
If you just make an effort to randomly
sample what has been published you
know that there's a lot of weak material
that's made it into print over the years.
Many a worthy nightingale may languish up
near the ceiling, but the number of
clunkers deserving of their obscurity is LESLIE_FORD
far larger.
THE_CASE_OF_HOLMES
I don't know a huge amount
about Balzac's immediate
predecessors and
contemporaries (many of whom
are no doubt screened out by
the translation barrier,
since I don't read French),
but there are many works
from his fellow stars that
are easily available, and I
think it's not too difficult
to see a difference in
stature between Balzac,
and say, Alexander Dumas. And I would claim this
Both may be great writers of holds for the other
a sort, but Balzac really obvious comparisons:
and truly was a writer of a George Sand, or Eugenie
different order... Sue, or Victor Hugo.
I have no doubt that
Balzac's reputation as
a key proto-realist
is secure against any
amount of literary
research...
BALZAC
A further oddity here is that Taleb
seems to be insisting that it's
a crazy delusion to even attempt to
write fiction in this day and age.
Taleb sometimes states that it's
better to live in Mediocre-stan
if you can get away with it, but The very names
there are many signs he doesn't "mediocre" and
really believe it. "extreme" stack (If you will
the deck. forgive a
ludic cliche.)
He seems to think it's synonyms
crazy to write a novel with different WILD_CARD
because the odds of it connotations:
becoming a best seller
are so low. normal
average
He doesn't seem to get modest
that at least some artists mediocre
are just trying to find
ways to live while doing
their art: the main goal
is not necessarily to get
rich. See Chadbourne's book,
subtitled "A Survival Guide
He continually makes for Real Musicians"
the point that not
everyone can pull off HATE_THE_MAN
a Harry Potter -- but
is that the only
thing worth doing?
E.g. in his talk at the
Long Now series, he
insisted that there just
wasn't enough room in
human consciousness for
more than a few artworks --
so what's the point of
creating another? NARRATIVE_DRIVE
But at the very least, the "day job" life would seem
to be another variation of the "barbell strategy":
You get some steady, if unexciting employment, and
in your spare time plug away at your Art, which most
likely will not be terribly lucrative, but at least
has a distant chance of being of near-infinite
financial value.
Despite his talk about exposing yourself to the
possibility of positive "Black Swans", he takes the
"sensible" view that anyone who wants to be a writer is
crazy. You're "blinded by the narrative fallacy", if you
believe that your narratives may some day have value.
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