Statistics, Shakespeare and Sam Bankman-Fried

Sam Bankman-Fried, cultural critic and public intellectual better known for other work wrote:

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare and the constitution and Stradivarius violins, and at the bottom of this post I do*, but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half of 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 of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate--probably as low as about 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.

Now, as one might imagine, Twitter is in an uproar about this. The consensus is it’s a stupid application of Bayesianism.

I think SBF has a point, it’s weird that Shakespeare should be seen as the greatest despite the yada yada odds. However, I do think it is quite possible that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language, perhaps even in any language. So do I think it’s a coincidence? No. Nor do I think that it is a coincidence that Homer if they were an individual, is both the first author of the Greek tradition and one of its greatest. Nor Confucius and Lao Tzu are among the oldest Chinese books and the best. Even if Shakespeare isn’t the best, I suspect the best is some other dead fellow.

Let’s start with the case of Western philosophy. Aristotle and Plato are the first philosophers for whom we have extensive records. They are also among the greatest philosophers. Bertrand Russell made tremendous contributions to philosophy, as did Descartes and Kant. They all swooped in at the start of a moment where something new was opening up, culturally and intellectually. They were geniuses, yes, but they seized the opportunity to grab a bunch of fruit that had become low-hanging. The odds that anyone I know will make similar contributions to philosophy barring some kind of transhuman augmentation are minimal, and yet, I know people who, if you took them and their talents and plonked them down in, say 1600, with a secure fortune and whatnot could have changed the course of philosophy as surely as any Hume or Spinoza. I know quite a few people who could have been high and rare geniuses. This is unsurprising- it’s very competitive being a philosopher in 2023.

What was the low-hanging fruit that Shakespeare was seizing? It wasn’t exactly ideas, it was license. What would happen if someone with Shakespeare’s talent- of whom I suspect there are at least a few- tried to write like Shakespeare today, with the same scope of words and creative ambitions? They’d get sneered at. I’m a vanilla dude, so let’s consider WS’s most famous passage. Read it, then imagine prose that is just as flowery, just as charged with a sense of its own greatness, but written in contemporary English by, let’s say, a young woman with a theatre degree living in New York:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor's wrong, the proud man's Contumely, [F: poore]
The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay, [F: dispriz’d]
The insolence of Office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear, [F: these Fardels]
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment, [F: pith]
With this regard their Currents turn awry, [F: away]
And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

People would laugh at it! Worse, our heroine would never even get to the point where she could write something like that, because such ambitions would have been beaten out of her before she’d developed the talent for such words. Our time is perhaps particularly down on creativity in this regard, but it is far from unique. Even in Shakespeare’s time, I bet there were some dudes sneering “Who does this guy think he is, Virgil?”

Shakespeare got away with being Shakespeare because he was writing at a time when there was a big gap in the sneer-wall during the English Renaissance, a flowering of creativity where, for whatever reason, you could overween. Homer got away with it because there was no one around, while they engaged in their early experiments, to sneer “What, do you think you’re Homer”. I could be wrong about any of this, but it’s my best theory.

In philosophy, the restrictions I’ve pointed to are largely unavoidable. The low-hanging fruit has been plucked. I’ve argued that we should tolerate and even encourage a kind of self-conscious overweening arrogance in philosophy where people try to act and think like geniuses even though they’re probably no such thing, so we can try to squeeze as much genius out of the present circumstances as possible. There are things we can do, for example, treat publishing trash as a much better outcome than failing to publish something really good. For the most part, though, Philosophy is a hard case.

For literature though, maybe the drought of Shakespeares could be broken if we’d just stop exercising our contempt and being so afraid of cringe. There’s no time to delay! lose not the name of action! Open a word document now!

Edit: bibliographies for blog posts are a chancy thing, but after I wrote this, someone brought to my attention this article that makes similar points on philosophy, and it’s close enough that I feel remiss not citing it.