[ericmcer]

They were dedicated to the craft though, there have been countless people who dedicated themselves to pushing the boundaries of their profession and lost their personal lives in the process. Losing yourself to achieve something new in math, art, science, etc. can be seen as a worthwhile sacrifice.

Content creators feels more perverse because they are sacrificing themselves to making metrics go up. The act of creation is in service to metrics that please an algorithm so views go up.

If the magicians didn't care about magic at all but were obsessed with optimizing the show around ticket sales it would be a shitty movie.

[patcon]

I am very skeptic of the creator economy, but to play devils advocate:

Could it be that "craft" until now has been a high dimensional and abstract conceptual navigation exercise, for which some people had both (1) the compass of intuition and (2) the drive. Replacing craft with metrics means that people without the high dimensional intuition/compass (but with the drive) can still play a part in the game.

So maybe this is just another example of unbundling and specialisation process, that is democratising access to renown (or whatever the wealth of "renown" is, in the sense of network topology)

Of course, if the compass that is replaced with metrics is miscalibrated in the system, the end point can still be a very sick society (even if access to the renown in that sick society is more equitably distributed by some measures)

[puffybunion]

I created an account after many many years on this site to tell you I have had the same thoughts about this navigation in a higher space, akin to spelunking in a cave system of concepts, this is just another way to explore viable concepts.

It's a horrid part of the cave system imo but it's obviously viable.

[patcon]

Oh wow, then I feel very honoured :) It's neat to have that feeling of one of your "weird" or "niche" thoughts being captured (even if poorly) by someone else, living a different life. I love that feeling when I encounter it here!

I often think of minds as very spatial as well, in that introducing new concepts to a mind requires it be tailored to specific characteristics of that mind, like tuning the parameters of a autonomous vehicle before sending it off on its own into the mind, hoping it makes it deeply within.

The truly impressive and powerful concepts (which I understand to have very specific and complex high dimensional symmetry), are those which I assume are the ones that we call poetic or beautiful or resonant. They are the ones whose shape is finely tuned to resonate deeply with the shared shapes of many many human minds.

Often I think of people in their minds as people in mazes, and there are certain areas of the maze people go to, that sometimes certain neurotypes can imagine well, but others can only treat as a black box (though really, they are the maze itself)

[BriggyDwiggs42]

It’s not really more equal access, just different people have access than before. There’s still only so much room at the top.