From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
October 11, 2023In Michael Lewis’ new biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, Lewis quotes the accused cryptocurrency embezzler’s rationalist case against Shakespeare:
I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare … but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.
Bankman-Fried’s assumption that talent should be proportional to population size is hardly a novel one. For example, in 1964 physicist John H. Fremlin published an influential article about the long-term consequences of unchecked population growth. Fremlin imagined a world covered in 2,000-story buildings. On the bright side, he noted:
One could expect some ten million Shakespeares and rather more Beatles to be alive at any one time, that a good range of television entertainment should be available.
Similarly, feminist novelist Virginia Woolf made a popular argument 94 years ago that the lack of a female Shakespeare proves how oppressed women were.
Read the whole thing there.
