Was at a Portuguese literary festival and this (great) writer kept saying the most inane thing. And then it hit me: it's model collapse. He doesn't know things (about irl) bc he has just consumed fiction by people who have only consumed fiction by people who etc. Total reality disconnect.
What is worse: he's foolish. He thinks he knows things because he's well-read, but he's DEEPLY read, NOT broadly-read which, seemingly paradoxically!, makes him know LESS than he would otherwise! (This seems like a sort of permanent "failure mode"? Like psychology itself, given the replication crisis, is an area such that if you take a Psych 101 class you will know less [ie know more false things than true things] than before! And that's supposed to be a NON-fiction field! I suppose psychology is better understood as fiction… It explain how people relate to it.)
Discussing grind culture and the games industry on X. And unsurprisingly, 280 characters wasn’t enough, so I accidentally wrote an essay instead
It’s about why I think we’ve started confusing self-sacrifice with professionalism. I hope people still read😅
https://t.co/FYvzbQDG3z
For a generation that harps on empathy so much, it’s telling that a lot of younger readers have a hard time getting invested unless they self-insert instead of trying to actually empathize with the characters to get invested.
It’s even worse when they think everyone else does it