
How Capitalism Changed American Literature - samclemens
https://www.publicbooks.org/how-capitalism-changed-american-literature/
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jedberg
This is fascinating. For those that want to save time reading, the author used
a text classifier and had a 70% accuracy rate predicting if a book was
published by a conglomerate or an independent publisher.

Which means there is a distinct difference between the type of content that
indies will publish vs conglomerates.

Whether this has an effect on literature is what the rest of the article is
about.

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saghm
> the author used a text classifier and had a 70% accuracy rate predicting if
> a book was published by a conglomerate or an independent publisher

Genuine question: is 70% actually a very successful rate? It's hard for me to
tell without more information; if 70% (or 30%) of books are published by
independent publishers, then 70% would be the same rate as just guessing the
more common one every time.

~~~
sterkekoffie
It depends on your definition of success but 70% accuracy for classification
problems with 50/50 odds is at least useful. In this case, "guessing the more
common one" would not be a problem as the data were evenly split between indie
and RH.

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nickik
Or we could just say that any system of economic relations in order to
finanace books and produce will cause distortion in litrature. Its a
comparison to a nirvana that never existed and will never exists. And the
difference he explains can be argued about in many different ways, and how it
differs from the 60s can also be explained in a number of different ways.

Seems to me the authors was trying to find something that confirmed his priors
and he did and then used that as confirmation for a whole larger theory about
how he sees the world.

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everybodyknows
Article cities this essay by the brilliant Zadie Smith -- though sadly behind
a pay wall:

[https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-
th...](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/)

Smith has read aloud several of her short stories in free podcast form at The
New Yorker. All are cunning social satire, wielded against on a wide range of
deserving targets.

[https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction](https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction)

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stephenSinniah
Interesting read, I have a hunch we'll get similar results if these models
were applied to contemporary music as well.

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alfndkjsafm
The author is basically taking a situation open to interpretation and using it
to slam capitalism as producing mechanical literature?

His conglomerate/nonprofit dichotomy is more accurately free-market vs. state-
sponsored. The "conglomerates" which come off as evil in the story have to
prove their value to their customers who voluntarily fund them. The "non-
profits" are free from the constraint of needing people to actually want to
read their books because the population is forced by the government to fund
them via taxes.

There are very interesting questions of how economic forces affect art and
culture but this author isn't asking them.

If anything the machine learning model showed that when people _voluntarily
and intentionally_ fund the publication of books they prefer a certain type of
language, but how this author sees this language as "mechanical" is beyond me.

~~~
Nasrudith
Yeah - sadly it seemed "experiment tailored towards conclusions" as opposed to
analyzing the reasons behind it. Especially if they had ones published by one
author in one framework and one in another to compare.

The supply side and logistics could make it "mechanical" because it is known
to sell well but much of it seems to be anti-popular rhetoric that anything
widely liked must be flawed.

While there is a lowest common denominator drive from sheer weight of numbers
(most money per person, targetting mean and below average getting good money
per effort - frankly the higher brow crowd demand more effort) that doesn't
mean they are automatically inferior nor those outside of its framework
neccessarily advantaged. The converse doesn't mean "unpopular" are
automatically better. Really popularity isn't that great of a heuristic either
way.

To get to a larger point qbout writing everyone produces to some sort of
motivation or incentive. Even "pure" writers doing it not for making money
have at least an emotional connection - let alone attempts at gaining status
or promoting ideas.

