I don't know if grievance studies is a cause of tuition bloat. Most of the departments I know to be labeled as grievance studies were founded well before tuition increased, so it makes not much sense to attribute them to increased tuition. The increase in tuition hews much more closely with the decrease in government funding to these institutions, which requires more tuition from students, which means students desires must be catered to... so increased lifestyle luxuries makes sense there...
It might be naive but I imagine training students to make improvements to weapons systems increases government support of universities and training students to criticize the government decreases it.
Like I said, the founding of such studies predates the increases in tuition. Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim. There are far more direct, closely related situations, like the federal and state governments decreasing funding or the inverted proportion of funds coming from govt/grants vs student-paid tuition via the loan system.
>Trying to argue that specific academic studies causes tuition increases by making students mistrustful of government, but only several decades later, needs a lot of evidence for that kind of claim.
Right-leaning politicians are citing "grievance studies" as their reason for not liking universities, so the only stretch in this hypothesis is to think it might have been happening for decades before bubbling to the surface. It's not that it makes students distrustful of the government, it's that it makes politicians ask, "why are we paying them if they're going to make our goals harder to achieve?" I would not be surprised if the protests against the Vietnam war turned the inner view that many held about university faculty, but few expressed it because of the esteem the public held them in at the time.
This is a totally different claim than what was obviously meant by the first post.
"We are wasting money on these fields" and "these fields piss off reactionaries so they cut our budgets, despite being a tiny portion of the overall budget and not hiring new lines in years" are just totally different.
Whose first post do you mean? My two posts mean the same thing, doing what legislators want would tend to increase funding and doing what they don't like would do the opposite. I guess you could read my first post as being about wasting money if you think criticizing the government is not useful... I guess there are some countries like Singapore out there where that is the case.
Were they the same size upon founding as they are now? A few activists get their foot in the door, push to hire friendly administrators, who push for more activists, who push for more administrators… Eventually everything is taken over
In what world do academics have power over which administrators can be hired? If you really think that some professor in CRT could take over a department, then you just show that you don't have a clue.
> If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely.
I disagree with this. The university system is really good for exposure, assuming that people who are attending the system actually take advantage of the exposure. e.g. I was able to take dedicated lessons in multiple languages, artistic mediums, theories in various fields, by experts in each field. Many of these experts were presenting their work for free outside of lessons, and often times provided free food and drink to boot! Also, because my institution was larger, we often had scholars travel here to present their various works and even little get-togethers where multiple scholars from multiple fields collaborated and presented work. For free! With free food and drink!
I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.
> I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.
Exactly. I'm fairly knowledgeable about my STEM specialization but in university I had access to great language learning and exchange programs, top-notch political science and philosophy departments, architecture departments, etc. I remember bumming around in philosophy seminars not because I was a philosophy student (though I did take some philosophy classes) but because I found it so interesting. As long as I didn't increase the grading burden on any of the grad students/professors, everyone was happy and the quality of instruction I received was fantastic. In the real world the closest I have is books I read or MOOCs where a lot of people are in it to get a certification or a badge of completion rather than just marinate in ideas.
You may find it worthwhile to reach out to local community colleges, because once you're "in the group" you can find people doing various things, and they're often not advertising, but will be willing to take a bit of cash on the side.
I'm sorry for derailing this thread, but am curious. Have any of you used services (e.g. classes, study groups) at the local community college? How does it work out when you're a decade beyond your graduate program? I miss a lot of aspects of the university system but have a full-time job and a life now (sadly.) I've been thinking of taking classes and networking at some of our really well-rated community colleges but I'm not sure what the experience is like.
I'm sure it heavily depends on local circumstances, but for whatever it's worth, I badly fucked up my first attempt at going to four-year right out of high school due to mental health reasons and ended up doing two years at LA City College before going back. It may have been mostly the Biology and Chemistry departments, but the quality of student there was still the highest of any school I've ever taken classes at, and that includes Georgia Tech, which is typically regarded as a top 10 engineering school. The reasons were somewhat peculiar and specific, but the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 80s left a whole lot of immigrants from former Soviet Republics fleeing the collapse and most of them ended up in LA. We had a whole lot of former engineers, scientists, and medical doctors who came to the US only to find their foreign credentials were not honored by US institutions and they had to start completely over. They utterly destroyed our curves thanks to all of the knowledge, dedication, and discipline they already had compared to an average 19 year-old.
Heck, even my Bio 101 professor was abnormally brilliant. She'd been a researcher at Harvard Medical School who worked on highly experimental treatments in a ward full of terminal patients and just finally burned out from being around so much death all the time, so there she was in Los Feliz three blocks from Scientology world headquarters teaching at a community college, probably the hardest class I've ever had to take.
It really depends upon the community college and class.
You tend to have some younger screw-up, unmotivated students, especially at entry level classes; some younger students that are there for economic or other reasons; some older students going back to school for life reasons; and then some older students who are intellectually curious and doing it for enrichment.
What the make-up of a class, and the resultant culture is, is a crapshoot. But it can be outstanding.
As the other said, it really depends on the college. The one near me is more technical oriented and has a number of programs basically designed to train people for employment at local factories.
If you avoid the standard college classes, you get a pretty wide cross-section of the people in the community. Math 101 is mostly going to be college-age kids.
I do, but I would argue that local community colleges is still most certainly in the "university system", just another tier/flavor of it. I would consider participating in community college activities to be participating in academic institution style activities that also happen at universities.
Yah- I don't think they're disagreeing with you, but just suggesting that CCs and other adult education may be a practical way to scratch the itch that you described.
Gonna be honest: if someone told me my tech job had been replaced with all its benefits (wfh! office stipend!) and now I have to retrain as a plumber, including back to the shitty apprenticeship system for low pay and low benefits (starting from the bottom again) I would also get really damn upset and resist that. There will be a lot of tooth gnashing on my end even if you pay for my apprenticeship and initial training, I'm still significantly worse off for the literal rest of my whole life.
I get why it sucks, but every day someone resists retraining from a dying or dead occupation is a day they’re not getting experience in a new job. In the case of the coal miners, those jobs were gone. No amount of bargaining would bring them back. The mines aren’t going to re-open. The affected people didn’t get to choose between retraining or keeping their current jobs. They had to choose between learning new marketable skills in a classroom or scrabbling through whatever remaining local jobs they could find.
We’re not there with truck driving yet, but to me it seems inevitable. I wouldn’t consider it as a brand new career worth starting today if my intent were to retire from it.
I'm only arguing that it makes complete sense why people are resisting if someone is telling them otherwise. I would also cling to my livelihood if my alternative was losing my home, my healthcare, my stability. And I'd further be insulted by people offering me retraining programs that don't actually train me to a lateral career. I'm trying to practice some empathy, man.
I'm empathetic. My family background is solidly working class. My dad worked in a funeral home. My mom retired from a railroad. My brother-in-law drives long-haul trucks for a living. My ancestors were farmers, miners, settlers, and little horse teamsters. I love these people and want good things for them.
But there's "is" vs "ought". It ought to be the case that these hard-working people can earn a decent living doing the jobs they spent many years in. It is the case that a lot of those jobs are disappearing as the natural result of technological and societal changes. My grandpa couldn't have delivered ice in downtown St. Louis with a horse and cart today if he wanted to. That job no longer exists. In the case of coal mining, most people don't want those jobs to exist anymore: each ton of coal pulled out of the ground is nearly 3 tons of CO2 gas into the air (purely from the burning process, not counting the effort to mine it).
I don't have the answers here. I don't know what we should be doing. I sure don't want my BIL to lose his career. But what is the kind, empathetic thing to do? We've gone from zero to having self-driving cars zipping around San Francisco in a few short years. What will they be like in 10 years? 20? I don't know when it'll happen, but it seems absolutely inevitable that at some point in the near future, autonomous vehicles will be better drivers than we are. After that, do we build a little passenger cabin onto automated vehicles so that we can pay "drivers" to pretend to operate them? Even if we did, how long can we keep that going? I don't know. I just can't see a path where that's the new state of affairs forever.
Sometimes love means having hard, uncomfortable conversations. I think that's where we're at today with jobs like mining, and where we'll be soon with other careers.
Yes, I'm just pointing out the retraining isn't actually the real alternative people think it is. It's directly lowering the quality of life and destroying the economic future of an entire industry's worth of people and all their families/dependents. This is important to deal with as it is, not with some bs "well we offered them retraining!" as if that means anything.
I would argue that any long-haul trucker or coal miner will have a much higher quality of life when those jobs go away and they re-train for something where they don't have to be away from their families doing dangerous things.
But not as much as not retraining. Given the choice between a ship and a lifeboat, I’d take the ship. Choosing between a lifeboat and treading water, scoot over and hand me an oar.
I'm arguing that retraining isn't really the lifeboat people are saying it is.
Just be upfront: removing jobs is drowning people. That's it. Don't comfort yourself with "retraining" programs like they mean anything. They don't. Acting like you're giving them an oar is just insulting them on top of taking their livelihoods, so I understand the anger.
I don't regard that as obvious. A social safety net COULD catch them when they fall out of the workforce. We don't seem to have such a safety net in America, but that's a consequence of politics, not of economics or technology. Confronting those politics admittedly is a tall order, but consider the alternative: retarding innovation, wasting human potential, and maintaining make-work jobs because politics is hard? Is that really the hill you wanna die on?
You make it sound like there are only two choices:
1. Confronting the politics of building a social saftey net in America.
2. Retarding innovation, wasting human potential, etc. etc.
Yet there is a perfectly good third solution that has worked countless times in history when technology has made certain jobs redundant, and will without a doubt continue to work long into the future.
You made it sound like there's only one choice when you wrote above:
> Eventually, you simply have to go to work for a roof over your head, food and healthcare.
I'm glad we finally agree that there are at least three choices, that building a safety net is one of them, and that going to work so that you have a roof, food, and healthcare isn't the only one.
I might be in a bubble but in my circle the writer's strike was indeed widely supported. It's only among my techy friends that the AI replacement thing was ever really considered. My artist friends and my gymbros were just "yeah fuck the man".
I think we're actually talking about different phenomena. It's not that booktok is driving sales for all books, it's that certain books sales are primarily driven by booktok and there's an attempt to figure out how to make that trigger consistently to drive traffic where publishers want it to go. Consider that Night And Its Moon is critically panned, but has a huge following on BookTok and was primarily got a book deal due to the initial pitch going viral on BookTok.
Of course one of the things to note is that the books with disproportionate BookTok audience whose sales are driven this way are often written by pretty, white, well-off women.
Pretty aside (while not denigrating its value in videos), the book market has long been dominated (reading, writing, and publishing) by well-off white women.
Not always dominated, mind you, but when they took it over, they grabbed ahold of it with both hands.
By definition - isn't the market going to be dominated by successful participants?
Do you mean independently wealthy people? Long ago, this was definitely true - as you only knew how to read & write if you were rich, and you were definitely only buying books if you were rich.
Starting shortly after the printing press - yes, poor people weren't dominating the market. But it wasn't dominated by royalty (the vast majority of actual wealthy people of the time).
I don't know where you'd consider Alexandre Dumas - but he's kind of the typical successful writer from his generation. His family was somewhat upper-class, but definitely not wealthy for most of his childhood.
Charles Dickens was much less wealthy than Dumas. Mark Twain & Thoreau grew up definitely not in the upper class. Same for Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Dostoyevsky was not from wealth
Mary Shelley was wealthy. Jane Austen & Emily Dickinson were upper class - but not wealthy. But neither were highly successful during their lifetimes. The Bronte sisters were somewhat well off - less so than Austen and Dickinson - but not from a long-line of wealth, and even they weren't very successful in their lifetime!
Tolstoy AFAIK was the only super successful independently wealthy writer from the time. Poe, Melville, Henry James, and Victor Hugo were definitely well off, but "wealthy" seems like a stretch.
If you look at today - it is definitely not true. JK Rowling is by far the most successful author of the generation, and she was arguably poor before finding success with Harry Potter.
Suzanne Collins worked her way up from the bottom and had very middle class life before success with The Hunger Games.
Maybe you mean the majority of authors have not-poor spouses? They better! The median author probably makes less than $100 in their career as a writer.
The early 1900s is a continuation - with men dominating, and the women being mostly upper class but not wealthy.
Wharton is rich (the phrase keeping up with the Joneses comes from her family), Woolf and Gertrude Stein are well-off and McCullers & Plath a bit less so. Harper Lee's father was a lawyer, and she's a one-hit wonder. Toni Morrison was not rich...
The vast majority of men - who dominate (not the women) - are not from well-off families: Steinbeck, Orwell, Sinclair, Tolkein, Fitzgerald, Lewis Carroll, Tennessee Williams, D.H Lawrence, Jack London (who claimed to be poor but wasn't), Kerouac, Vonnegut. Stephen King and Stan Lee were arguably poor.
Hemingway, Salinger, Conrad, Roald Dahl, and Joseph Heller are not from wealth, but definitely not poor.
Frank L Baum was wealthy, similar to Melville & Hugo - Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Jane Austen - but less so than Tolstoy.
> They better! The median author probably makes less than $100 in their career as a writer.
This is in agreement, not to contradict you, to be clear: The median author form whom writing is their primary income in the UK earns well below minimum wage from their writing, and the vast majority of writers do not have it as their primary income.
At the same time, as I've expanded on elsewhere in this thread, the household income of that same group is above the UK median.
This is only very recently true (and disregarding the "well off" part).
Women probably authored over 50% of books starting sometime in the 2010s. [1]
And dominate might still be too strong of a word to use, though it's likely true for some genres (ie. ~80% of books and sales in romance).
Going by the graphs on page 28 figure 2: Today, women are probably authors of around ~45% to ~60% of new books in the dataset (Goodreads/Bookstat(amazon)/US copyright) and still climbing .
> disproportionate BookTok audience whose sales are driven this way are often written by pretty, white, well-off women.
Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book? Its a pretty big time investment with basically no garuntees. I imagine its pretty rare for poor people who work all day to be successful writers.
Not to mention a probably strong correlation in higher education in an area that is not all that useful for getting a job,probably further tips the scale to well off people.
Basically what i'm wondering, is it really disporportionate relative to the industry at large.
All of this is applicable to where I'm from (global south); don't know how it is in western countries.
> Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?
No. I'm aware of plenty of critically acclaimed writers who are not particularly rich. (Although there are plenty of people who got rich because of the books).
I guess most of them have/had other jobs, like teaching at a university for example. And some — especially people who were university teachers — tend to continue on that job.
> Not to mention a probably strong correlation in higher education in an area that is not all that useful for getting a job
A college degree in things like literature, political science, economics, and general science subjects (physics, chemistry, math, biology etc) tend to be inexpensive here, as compared to a degree in engineering or medical science.
> I guess most of them have/had other jobs, like teaching at a university for example. And some — especially people who were university teachers — tend to continue on that job.
University prof might not be a wealthy job, but class wise it is usually considered pretty high class. We're not exactly talking about the people putting 9-5 in doing manual labour at a construction site.
> A college degree in things like literature, political science, economics, and general science subjects (physics, chemistry, math, biology etc) tend to be inexpensive here, as compared to a degree in engineering or medical science.
Maybe, but its still a large investment for questionable financial gain. The opportunity cost is high. The pay-off (ignoring things like love of the subject and instrinsic value) is pretty low. Its a hard thing to justify if you're not at least upper-middle class.
> University prof might not be a wealthy job, but class wise it is usually considered pretty high class. We're not exactly talking about the people putting 9-5 in doing manual labour at a construction site.
Ah, yes. Agreed.
> Maybe, but its still a large investment for questionable financial gain.
No no, I don't think you realize how cheap education can be where I'm from. Getting admitted is an entirely different matter. And don't ask me how, but here there's an inverse correlation between how good a university is and how expensive it is. Like, here the best universities seem to be run by the government and are therefore much cheaper than private universities. Which is why it is also very hard to get into those govt run universities.
Also — I think this is a cultural thing — generally people here tend to want go to college, even if ultimately there is little correlation between what they study and what they end up doing (atleast, for non-engineering non-medical courses).
And, college degree is kind of expected for any job here. I don't know if that's what's caused the cultural default of going to college, or vice versa.
So yes, lots of complex, and sometimes contradicting dynamics at play.
There are inefficiencies with such an attitude, but I guess it is what it is.
(And, I'm not an expert in any of what I said above, so take all of that with a pinch of salt.)
I think the US has a very weird relationship with education. Here in Germany, you pay a small fee to the university, then an even smaller fee for something else and then like 150€ or so for public transport through the whole state. I think I paid something like 250 or 300€ a semester (graduated in 2016 in the state of North Rhine Westphalia).
Whether or not a degree provides financial success later in life is just not something people care about. You only have to pay back 50% of your student loans but 10k max. Even if your family is dirt poor you will be able to pay for that degree. And even if you end up as a taxi driver youll be able to pay it back (if you even have too... I think there's a certain income threshold you need to hit).
And I think statistically speaking the unemployment rate amongst higher educated people is lower on average than for others even if you look at those "unemployable" degrees.
Going for a philosophy degree or a history degree because it's what you want to do is 100% something society accepts as a valid choice.
Oh and same with private universities. Some universities have a really good reputation for one degree but as a rule of thumb: if you have your degree from a private university in Germany, people will assume Daddy bought your degree.
>Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?
I can say, after 30 years in the publishing business, that the answer to that is no. Many writers are not that well off. In fact, many struggle financially. Many have 'day jobs' to pay the bills.
It's true that many struggle, and as a result most writers are not full time. But first published novels skew quite old, and as I posted elsewhere the average household income in the UK at least for full time writers is well above average, so while I don't think it's high enough to say you have to be "fairly well off", it certainly helps buy you time. Doesn't necessarily buy you success, though.
Most you know might well have started young - many do -, but in terms of getting books published, as per the subject here, the overall numbers are quite clear.
> That just means they married someone with a real job.
Yes, that was exactly the point - to a large extent writing is subsidized by other jobs, and so there is a significant element of privilege involved.
You don't have to be, but e.g. in the UK the average full time author themselves earn below minimum wage, while the average household income for a household with a full time author is far above average.
And the vast majority of writers never make it to full time.
You can also get some indication from the average age at first publication (late 30's if I remember correctly).
Too late to edit, but I wanted to add hard numbers to this from [1]:
"the survey shows a drop in real terms (accounting for inflation) of 42 percent in median earnings from an equivalent of £18,013 in 2006 to £10,497 in 2018" [for those with whose primary, but not necessarily only, occupation is writer]
" It is a striking result that, as households, writers are doing rather well. Average (mean) earnings are over £81,000 per annum, typical (median) earnings £50,000 per annum." The median was lower than I remembered. (The UK disposable (post tax) median income is around 30k, which for a single earner household means around 39k gross, but will be a lower gross income for a two income household; if the writer earns the median, they'd meet the UK median disposable household income if the other person earns only 24k, so the majority of "writer households" are well above the median despite the low writer income)
"The fact that this household ‘subsidy’ is needed to make a living may contribute to the lack of diversity among writers. It is well known from demographic data (confirmed by our survey) that writers are mostly white (94%) and live in the South East. Is writing becoming more elitist as a profession?"
> Don't you have to be fairly well off to invest the time to write a book?
Not necessarily, although I'm sure it helps. Quite a few writers started out by writing their book in between shifts of menial labour or just while they crashed on friends' couches. It's mostly about staying motivated to work on this thing that brings you no money while knowing that you could just give up and do a regular job instead. That's where most would fail while those who have a lot of money don't ever need to even consider it.
Sorta. The issue is the traffic and followings from people who are there because you're pretty aren't the correct audience for what you're selling (assuming what you're selling isn't yourself so to speak). A million views from the wrong audience is less useful than 1000 views from your perfect audience.
This seems to happen in many communities. There's a community of people using chinese emulation consoles, and some of them are decent but a lot of them are absolute crap
But there's a constant influx of "My <crap console> has broken, what do I do?" It's always the same consoles, always the same faults, but led by some tiktok advert that convinces them to buy the same aliexpress tat without any research of why they shouldn't and what modifications they have to make to make it playable
> What does being white or well off have to do with the ability to write books people wanna read?
For actual ability, nothing, though the knock-on affects of being white and thus having a higher chance of greater economic standing from birth onwards, higher chance of good education opportunities, greater likelihood of good nutrition, and all the other aspects of existent systemic racism means that ability to have time to write is greater for white people (in the USA).
Pointing out the reality of systemic racism is not racism. Institutionalized white supremacy is very real in the USA and is so inherent it can have weird effects like how children prefer to play with white dolls: https://www.history.com/news/brown-v-board-of-education-doll... (it turns out this still happens today). So it follows that white women, for the same reason, might have an advantage on social media accessed by people living in a white supremacist system, or a system that still holds echos of white supremacy.
Don't think it is virtue signaling, it is just observation on demographics. There are more well off white people, and more well off white women with spare time, and they get 'status' by being published authors, even thought writers don't make much money.
Others in the thread have posted some links to statistics.
But, this is not to say that there are not exceptions. There are some white women that have written good books, and there are non-white women that publish good books.
It was just observation on a general trend. There is a group with free time to pursue 'something' that doesn't make a lot of money because of the status they get from that 'something'. Hence they have a lot of influence in that market.
The argument, I think, is that these book sales are in big (-er than historically) part driven not by their quality, but by either physical attraction to the author or admiration for their perceived success.
I really struggle with this list, for me, the books that stayed with me aren't on BookTok. Albeit for me, it's because these books are challenging on a craft/architectural level.
The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is a time travel story, kind of, through the lens of a descendant of the protagonists of the main novel, kind of. It's a fantastical ancient story told to a descendant by an aging relative in relatively modern day, and while that story is told it is also told to the reader as if it's actually happening, and then timelines are crossed over.
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera is about a guy who starts a support group for the almost-chosen-- people who, by happenstance, weren't chosen by prophecies. Like literally it's like "yeah, so my sister was chosen to herald the apocalypse, but I still have visions of angels and I have to drink myself to sleep", "yeah, my cousin was chosen to kill my godfather, I'm just stuck with chainsaws for hands". But it's much more dissociated, and much more unattached-- and the reason for this becomes clear at the very end.
I recently finished The Archive Undying by Emma Meiko Candon. That book is full of characters with ambiguous identities, characters with ambiguous motives-- everyone is hiding who they are from everyone else, not in a murder mystery way but in a complex conspiracy format where everyone actually has their own mini-conspiracy going on. Of course this is in the context of "giant mech-god corpse is being resurrected to fight mech-god monsters", so there's a fundamental awesomeness. But, y'know, when god-AIs can jack into your brain, or connect brains to each other, or jack into each other, the story can no longer hold linearity in an easy sip read.
I would still disagree. Someone apparently drank her blood which is totally out of pocket with seeing a knife on a table, honestly, and is not justified by "well there was a knife there".
I don't know, it seems pretty in pocket with seeing "this is an art exhibit and I want wild shit to happen".
Comparing it to a normal real world interaction where you expect people to just hang out and chat is ridiculous, if people just chatted it would be a totally failed set piece.
I dunno, when I saw this, I wanted to draw flowers on her skin instead, since she provided the rose as reference, and I do a bit of art myself. If people instead painted her, put her in robes, braided her hair or something else nonviolent, wouldn't that also be a spectacle?
It absolutely would not be a spectacle to the degree of being discussed on a technology site 50 years later if people braided her hair.
It's not an accident that she put a number of violent items out and had her assistants riling people up, something like "someone drank her blood" is exactly what it takes to make it into art history.
I think art does capture a perspective of humanity in a way that science does not. In a sense, you can argue science is a kind of art, also, with its own perspective of humanity-- notions of conclusions drawn only from observable phenomena isolated from interference/the world can somehow apply to a world full of interference and knock-off unforseen consequences.
I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.
I wasn't trying to say art has no value, just that its value isn't in it being a source of conclusions. Art can raise questions that we wouldn't have had otherwise, and questions are the starting point of science (and that of further art).
> I don't know how you can scientifically glean any conclusion that the artist was trying to discover or perspect, here, as effectively as she is trying to do so.
This is what I disagree with. If there is a conclusion that you think you have drawn from this work, then you should re-frame it as a hypothesis and test it properly. Or just be content with the new questions, perspectives, and the experience of it. Just don't go saying that you learned something reliably predictive about how humans behave.
How do I test it properly in science, except through what she did here? Genuinely asking. Am I paying people 10$ amazon gift cards for the opportunity to sexually assault a woman? VR-cut-and-drink-woman-blood?
Even if you can't ethically test it scientifically, that doesn't mean the alternative is to take conclusions from it instead. You have to recognize it's limitations for what they are.
I think you're missing the point of an art, especially art where the audience participates. Art is meant to invoke societal concepts, like gender. It makes sense to bring gender into a context such as an art piece where the audience are active participants.
Who said anything about a war between genders? Can't we talk about real issues raised by art without it being framed as a culture war? I'm a man and I don't feel in any way attacked by this discussion existing.
If the artist was a black man and the audience was 50/50 black and white but all of the violence committed against him was by white people, often was explicitly race based overtones, would you not find that notable?
I think you misunderstand the joy and pride that is an animator, which is in the nuances of the actual creation process which Stable Diffusion removes. We can also compare this to western shows like Arcane, where despite 3d modeling the shading and lighting was done by hand, to immense pride of the animators.
The problem with AI has been always that it removes from the artist the act the artist finds joy in, the work to create a beautiful final product, and leaves only the most boring and meh parts: contract negotiation, right fights, pay and attribution concerns, etc.
