>You can't evaluate how good of a writer someone is unless you already know what they are trying to explain.
I object to this premise.
Trivial counterexample: Is it impossible to evaluate the quality of a novelist because we don't have a common understanding of the plot of a novel until after I've read it? Clearly not.
Even in a post-modernist literary paper you can still judge the writer's cohesiveness of thought and clarity of argument.
Edit:
>The correctness of the content is subjective. If the correctness of the content is objective, and mutually understood, then any confusion added during the writing is bad writing.
I also don't understand how post-modernism comes into it. Is talking about the theme of insanity in Hamlet any more objective/correct than writing about the influence of race in Moby-Dick? If so, how?
We mean different things when we say "good writer", and you get at it by using "novelist" vs "writer".
When professors or employers complain that their students or employees can't write well, and lament the quality of public education that caused the ineptitude, they are talking about writing as a means of communication. They aren't talking about any of the mentioned parties' inability to produce good novels.
A novel is good if you enjoyed reading it, even better if it has re-read value. A good novelist produces good novels. Whether or not you enjoyed reading the novel actually has nothing to do with whether your understanding of the plot is the same as the author's. In order to confirm that the novelist was effective at using writing to communicate information, that information would have to be known as ground truth on both sides of the channel. As an imperfect example: if you had a chat with the novelist, and it was revealed you had a different understanding of the plot, then they couldn't be that clear of a writer, even if you enjoyed the novel.
Tehanu is my favorite in the series; I'm sorry you feel that way!
> And Ged kills a guy (which he didn't in the first three books) and gets to have sex right after, pretty explicitly as a reward - that was a bit of a "what the hell, author?" moment.
Two people with a long-standing attraction having sex after a life-or-death experience seems completely natural to me. Your framing of them having sex BECAUSE Ged killed a man is a misrepresentation of what happens in the book.
Yes but the only way repeated cooperation can be maintained is if players can “punish” defectors by also defecting for a certain # of turns (thus making the PV of breaking ranks and defecting < keeping cooperating for every player).
SBF’s situation is different in that the game ends as soon as someone defects.
However, in Montaigne's essays he often doesn't have a clear thesis at the beginning of the essay. You are reading his (magisterial) thinking transcribed onto the page.
The OP gestures towards a thesis ('here's why society's championing of cleverness is bad') and then spends paragraphs meandering around it.
Charitably, I think what OP was getting at is that there was no pressure to arrest / prosecute Shkreli quickly because his actions hadn’t in actuality physically or monetarily harmed people, unlike, e.g., Theranos.
"standard normal distribution" is a normal distribution with mean 0 and s.d. 1.
To talk about whether intelligence follows a (one-dimensional) normal distribution we have to assign a number to it. That number is usually IQ, but by design the raw score is transformed to make IQ scores follow a normal distribution.
So it is trivially true.
If we want to go beyond that, what does it even mean to say, for example, "twice as smart"?
I object to this premise.
Trivial counterexample: Is it impossible to evaluate the quality of a novelist because we don't have a common understanding of the plot of a novel until after I've read it? Clearly not.
Even in a post-modernist literary paper you can still judge the writer's cohesiveness of thought and clarity of argument.
Edit:
>The correctness of the content is subjective. If the correctness of the content is objective, and mutually understood, then any confusion added during the writing is bad writing.
I also don't understand how post-modernism comes into it. Is talking about the theme of insanity in Hamlet any more objective/correct than writing about the influence of race in Moby-Dick? If so, how?