moneyball

I’ve struggled with this balance myself. When the audience responds to something I’ve written, it can be tempting to chase the revenue and viewership by repeating the format. Repeatability and audience fervor can build a business, but kill the artist.

You can make a thing so perfect that it’s ruined.

Overtime we’ve begun to treat this nuance and ambiguity as friction and something to program out. Computers don’t like it. Algorithms can’t categorize it. So we remove it.

Yet we so desperately need this “in between” and neither “yes” nor “no” thinking.

Are we undertaking the project of breaking down big giant ideas like ‘i feel weird and alone sometimes’ or ‘Why does life feel like its passing me by’ into smaller more manageable ideas because that’s a helpful framework to think about them or because its a helpful market framework to sell weird little solutions like fuckin headspace and better... See more

Instinctively, people love to codify things, and make them numerical, and turn them into optimization problems with a single right answer. Because the second you acknowledge ambiguity, you now have to exercise choice. If you can pretend there’s no ambiguity, then you haven’t made a decision, you can’t be blamed, you can’t be held responsible. And... See more

the quantitative revolution in culture is a living creature that consumes data and spits out homogeneity.