The 50 Shades of Grey Book Club
I think it would be a useful rationality exercise to take something that millions of people love, that you have contempt for, and sincerely try to appreciate it. The purpose would be to get practice imagining a different point of view, and to see whether you’re able to do so.
50 Shades of Grey might not be the best choice for this exercise. I haven’t read it. Maybe a better choice would be The da Vinci Code, NASCAR, or professional wrestling. But a book has a definite length that you have to get through to be allowed to say that you honestly tried.
The idea is to start a thread for people to discuss 50 Shades, or something else perceived as trashy, and try—not to find what you might like in it, but to get inside someone else’s head and imagine why they might like it. (Of course it could backfire, and leave you less open-minded than before, if you always conclude that your contempt was simply right in the first place.)
I think the biggest problem is that if people succeed at finding something to appreciate in it, they would feel terribly embarrassed to say so. So this can be done with alternate accounts.
Anyone interested? What do you hold in contempt that you might be willing to take a closer look at?
This seems dangerous. Last time I did something like this, I became a huge fan of ponies.
I’m not sure this is such a good idea—it seems similar to the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis. Of all the different works of art I could spend time enjoying, why spend time on x, when x is selected for popularity, and not for factors more personally relevant?
The point isn’t that 50 Shades might turn out to be great art that you need to enjoy. The point is to practice trying to see another point of view. That’s why I didn’t propose “The Finnegan’s Wake Book Club”.
-- Screwtape
I think the idea that, if lots of people like it, there’s probably something likeable there. Even if it’s low-status. (Note there was no suggestion of hunting for obscure failures.)
I thought there was some research that knowing other people like something is a more accurate predictor of whether you’ll like it than having other specific information about what it’s like.
http://xkcd.com/915/ seems relevant.
I’m not interested in participating, but if you’d like to read a rock critic doing the work to find what’s worth appreciating in Celine Dion, I recommend Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson.
That sounds like exactly the sort of thing I’m trying to do. The reader reviews, I notice, all either rave over it or trash it.
Incidentally, I like some Celine Dion songs, but others I absolutely cannot stand to listen to.
I am reminded of The surprising valor of Barbie movies:
On a similar note: Would you believe that this is one of my favorite books of all time?
No, I would not, for the simple reason that it’s not a book.
Oops. Copy/paste error. Link fixed.
Oh, The Brothers’ War? Yes, that’s was a fine book. Generally agreed to be one of the few worthwhile Magic novels made.
This (and its first sequel) are the only MTG books I’ve read but for a while it was my favorite book of all time too. I reread it once later and still enjoyed it, though it has now been decidedly moved aside by some other works. It’s also a work you might consider rationalist-lite in the sense of encouraging thought, experimentation, and invention over brute force, bravery, or many of the standard heroic traits in stories. It’s not HPMOR and doesn’t try to teach these traits to people, but at the very least it says that they’re good things to have.
The only MTG books I really thought were worth reading were this one and the other ones Jeff Grubb wrote.
Oh, I can believe it; after all, I quite enjoyed this books, for which people should have even lower expectations than your example.
To anyone who wants to try this sort of thing, my suggestion is to not do it halfway. A lot of people do it halfway in that they watch something or read something they otherwise would have thought was lame or stupid, and then they go around saying they “actually enjoyed it”, except they add something like “it was so bad it was good”. This isn’t useful. It’s just arrogance.
The best way to do this sort of thing is choose things that passed the market test for something relevant to you. If you’re a guy in your 30s, reading something with 5,000 reviews on Amazon that’s marketed toward teenage girls is not exactly going to be the most relevant choice. What would be better would be for example trying to learn how to appreciate music you think is “shallow and superficial”, but you see a lot of people similar to you in other ways having a lot of fun with their friends listening to this music.
The goal is to change your mindset so you actually enjoy it, and actually appreciate it as useful and entertaining, rather than ‘appreciate’ it in some fake way, such as the whole ‘it’s so bad it’s good’ thing.
Yes, it seems natural that some things will be inherently polarizing. An extreme example being pornography—any given example is either your thing or it isn’t. Seems pointless to try to fight those cases, and (I agree) better to stick to those that at least seem liked by people like yourself.
The consumption of most articles of ‘culture’ is inherently motivated by signalling. There are entire industries and academic departments dedicated to people expressing opinions about which things suck. If someone finds that their desired signal in response to a given cultural article is that of familiarity with condescension rather than familiarity with approval then the same open-mindedness that leads me to tolerate the unappealing-to-me cultural work prompts me to tolerate the various ways of using work in the social dance.
(My own observation is that “it was so bad it was good” tends to be a moderate-to-low status signal except in special cases. Unless there is inherent enjoyment to the task there are likely more socially optimized tactics.)
Frequent use of declarations of the form “<people doing something I don’t like> is just arrogance” is itself rather arrogant.
Excellent point. I didn’t consider that the emotional stance I was describing could be what the actual market test was designed to optimize for.
Sounds like you’ve got an ax to grind here ;)
You choose to label some people arrogant for executing a given behavior you dislike. I choose to label a different group of behaviours that I dislike. The statement was clear and direct and in response to the actual thing that is being criticised and not in response to some other thing used as an excuse. I hold in utter contempt the attempt to insinuate that there are sinister or otherwise low status motives that should be considered invalid due to your ability to describe them vaguely and with weasel words.
Another epistemically valid response I could make to the same statement is “Not yet. But if I were to create axes to grind this is the sort of thing that would be well worth the effort to stamp out with with a vengeance. Naive moralizing is a toxic influence.”
OK OK, I admit it. My response was extremely lazy, and in no way productive. I’m going to bow out of this discussion at this point, as I no longer consider myself in an adequate position to think clearly on this topic.
How is contempt defined here? It’s confusing me and I would rather say certain things are not worth my time. Is contempt when I think something isn’t worth anyone’s time? I’m not sure if I find anything contemptible under that definition.
I see a big difference between really disliking something on the whole and appreciating one part of that larger whole.
The Transformers movie, for example, was not worth the 2 hours and $10 I spent to see it. I did like how the DP got the light to bounce around the room, and the desert explosions were cool, but overall, it was a terrible film and not worthwhile. I would have been better off not seeing it, despite the little things I did like.
How does that fit into this proposal?
It is very likely that there are already fans of all those works and activities among Less Wrong participants. It does not strike me as particularly polite to hold up these thing as contemptible.
Perhaps before engaging in this exercise it might be helpful to ask Less Wrong commenters what it is they like about these works/activities, so you could have the benefit of that perspective going in.
I really like the idea, and I would be interested depending on the subject matter.
While I have been mildly curious about the enormous success of 50 Shades, da Vinci Code, NASCAR & pro-wrestling… I’m relatively happy to conclude my disdain in the face of their otherwise widespread popularity is mostly likely based on simple preferential differences from my own non-typical mind, and the fact that lots of people like stuff about sex in general, murder mysteries/conspiracies, fast cars & muscle-y violence with soap opera-esque elements. I think I get why people like them a lot, and why I’m rather content to feel otherwise. Different strokes and all that...
I do like the proposed concept, however. I think it is a great skill to be able to “get behind another person’s eyes” and go through the exercise of piecing together what it is they see in a given interest/pursuit/belief/lifestyle/etc. You may find something new that you really enjoy. And/or you may come to develop a more keen ability to empathize generally.
...
By the way, one suggestion for this project would be Jeff Dunham. I’m mesmerized by his success-to-funniness ratio. For me, he is the Anti-Comedian… but people love him.
So, I genuinely enjoy reading romance novels, but I don’t have any reason to expect that 50 Shades would be up my alley. I also don’t seem to have the problem of not being able to enjoy something quality because of contempt for other people that like it.
I have a friend who has done this with professional sports.
-- Robert Wenzlaff (via Eliezer Yudkowsky)
-- Paul Graham
-- BadDalaiLama (via ata)
-- D_Malik
I feel like you didn’t read my post. The point is not entertainment.
It’s possible I’m experiencing selective blindness. What does your post say the point is, other than that it would be “useful”?
Well, what do you know. I didn’t really say. Post revised.
Thanks.
I’m still not seeing it, personally. While it’s important to understand other points of view, you don’t have to make yourself literally feel what another person feels about something to understand it. Even more importantly, you also don’t have to understand a point of view to respect it. I feel like your proposal doesn’t adequately distinguish the three.
Furthermore, regardless of the “point”, consuming popular entertainment is still the actual activity you’re suggesting.
(I’m not trying to say the people who like the idea are wrong, although I don’t think it’d be worthwhile for me.)
The idea is to start a thread for people to discuss 50 Shades, or something else perceived as trashy, and try to find what’s likable in it.
The links in this MetaFilter post will make it harder:
http://www.metafilter.com/130778/Im-pretty-sure-Ive-read-this-book-before-but-with-vampires-in-it
Or maybe it won’t.
But, seriously, I genuinely enjoy trashy, extremely problematic stuff like 50 Shades. I am curious to see a poll, too, to get a sampling of things that provoke, “I DO NOT GET WHY SO MANY PEOPLE LIKE THIS THE CONTEMPTIBLE FOOLS.”
I cannot participate, but things that give me hives off the top of my head are Sex In The City and professional sports.
But, it’s usually not the what but the why that makes me insane and contemptuous. Like, I don’t mind if you watch hours of reality TV, but you better have a damn good reason, even if it’s not easy to articulate. I have to trust you see something I don’t, the metabolizing of which is gratifying to you in a me-approved way. /channeling-my-most-pathologically-judgmental-aspects-of-self
This made me hate Sex In The City less, though I’m still suspicious:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/television/2013/07/29/130729crte_television_nussbaum?currentPage=1
Off the top of my head, the “Transformers” cartoon series. I know a bunch of adults who actually like it, and it’s won many of the major awards for writing for animated series. I have tried to watch it. To me it seems much worse than I’d imagined, not even sophisticated enough for kids younger than its target audience, with characters I might’ve been able to stomach at age three but not at six. Nice graphics, if you like hyper-realistic overly-dramatic CGI more than style, character, or integration of visual presentation with story.
Wil Eisner’s comics. He’s known as the grand old man at whose altar all comic artists and writers kneel. I’ve read many of his comics, old (The Spirit) and new (A Contract With God), and they all had bad stories with bad characters, badly told. “The Spirit” had bad artwork besides, and made superhero comics look like great literature by comparison—and it came out around the same time as EC Comics, which were not great literature, but still a hell of a lot better.
There are several different Transformers series. Are you referring to the recent “Transformers Animated”?
I’m referring to whichever one had new episodes in 2012.
Hmmm… I haven’t really been following the franchise, so...
::does some research::
According to TV Tropes, Transformers Animated was in 2007. The current ones are “Transformers Prime” (which has CGI) and “Transformers Rescue Bots” (aimed at slightly younger children, with an animation style similar to MLP:FIM).
Speaking of Transformers, the Transformer movie series is widely held as a touchstone for brainless crap lowest-common-denominator explosions entertainment.
This incredibly long series of posts will make you look at not just Transformers but possibly at movies in a new way.
It’s really, really long, and it kind of hooks you once you start, so don’t click unless you can afford to spend several hours reading about Michael Bay.
OK, I read the posts, and then rewatched one of the movies. I’m unconvinced. A heroic effort, though, and quite interesting!
I tend to agree that almost none of what the reviewer pointed out was put into the movies with the intent she suggests, but that begs the equally interesting question—how did all that stuff get in there? Did the filmmakers do certain this subconsciously? Is it really all in Terry’s imagination?
Anyway, I’m much less quick to write things off as merely “bad,” especially if I notice that my brain keeps returning to them later without any immediately obvious reason.
Well, I don’t think she’s completely wrong about everything, but I think the movies probably have a lot of uncritical borrowing from a wide variety source material. Some of what is uncritically borrowed may be better stuff, and may actually have had some of the subtle intentions she attributes to Bay and crew. And other uncritically borrowed elements are so bad that she can’t imagine someone would borrow them uncritically, and so she assumes too charitably that the badness must be intentional for some subversive purpose. It may not help that she’s not American, so she may not realize that some attitudes which seem extreme to her are common among Americans. I also think she’s too quick to assume that inconsistencies between what Optimus Prime says at various points indicate dishonesty rather than simply sloppy continuity, especially as she herself admits and notes that the continuity is pretty sloppy. Widespread inconsistency certainly helps greatly when someone wants to read their own agenda into something; you can interpret the bits that support your interpretation straight, and then since the bits which don’t support your interpretation can’t be interpreted straight without inconsistency, you can argue that those inconsistent bits must involve some deception.
On this note, I found the film Get Over It reasonably enjoyable but nothing special. But deliberately or not, the plot has some wonderful strange loops, including one which I’ve come to think of as a “strange moebius loop”, and thinking about it after the fact has seriously increased the entertainmet factor.
::clicks link::
It’s paygated. :(
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwcKvxyHHsZ9V18ySTVEblRZSXc/edit?usp=sharing
That reminded me of the theory that the Highlander movie is an allegory of gay culture, can’t find the source right now so from memory:
...except the posts you linked to are much longer and less funny :-(
Now that the series of posts has been continued and completed in a different thread, you might want to update your link to point here.
There’s an eight-strip arc in The Ferrett’s old webcomic in which the characters try watching the old 1980s Transformers cartoon as adults...
There’s an eight-strip arc in The Ferrett’s old webcomic in which the characters try watching the old 1980s Transformers cartoon as adults...
My girlfriend got me to watch Don’t Trust the B__ in Apartment 23, which I insisted must be incredibly stupid based on the name and the few commercials I saw for it. It turned out to be really good, much funnier and darker than I would have expected.
Usually, though, when I think I’m not going to like something, I’m right.
I liked Da Vinci Code until people took it apart.
I actually liked 50 shades, once I got past the formulaic “a young and inexperienced but brave girl meets a sexy and powerful but troubled man” and the ever-present muggle plot, and I did not have trouble appreciating the good bits.
What I do not get is professional wrestling and its close cousin in poorly done fakery, professional porn. I have no idea how to find something worth appreciating there, even though millions of people get off on either.
Professional wrestling does a lot of interesting fourth-wall breaking/meta plots etc. Parts of the scripted tensions might be about contract negotiations or about a wrestler being frustrated with being scripted to lose a bunch of matches, so tonight you know he’s meant to lose, and the tension is about whether he’ll choose to.
I had an ex-bf who basically wrote wrestling fanfic, and it got me a bit sucked into the layers upon layers of artifice. (Still didn’t care much about the physical wrestling part).
I did a similar thing recently.
Someone scoffed at one of my hobbies and I thought “his loss”. Then I remembered that most people are mostly the same, and figured that I was probably scoffing at something that another Walter enjoyed. Maybe he was more correct than me?
I decided to examine my scoff list.
The most prominent example of my sneering at a popular thing was the Twilight books. They were not “for” me. They were what teen girls read, or something? I knew I was supposed to hate their fans.
So I bought them and read them. It was a good time. I can see why they were so successful.
I bet this book club would bring about a similar result. 50 Shades probably isn’t as successful as it is without being an enjoyable experience.
If you’re interested in understanding why 50 Shades and for that matter Twilight are so popular, I recommend looking at the PUA/game blogs as well as evolutionary psychology.
Yeah. Just reading the same book as other people does not guarantee the same impact—there may be something different in those people the book resonates with, and it wouldn’t with you.
As an analogy, a heterosexual woman could decide to spend her afternoon watching advertisements containing half-naked ladies, trying to understand why men are so influenced by them—but despite spending a lot of her time, she probably wouldn’t get the same qualia. Best case, she would notice something different, or something that contributes to the effect but is not the most important part.
Any non-gamers want an introduction to video games?
Have you actually watched either of these, or are you going by the stereotype that kind of person who watches them is low status?
How (besides acausally) would watching a thing tell you about the status of the kind of person who watches it?
I believe that is the point of the exercise.
I wound up liking Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice after I realized that Austen projected her idea of an alpha male onto the character of Mr. Darcy. The same goes for Charlotte Bronte’s characterization of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre.