Great moments in trend-setting

It's rare that I'm ahead of the curve in very much. But the latest Steve Sailer column had the following puzzling claim:

Nobody can deny Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose one historic accomplishment: They’ve permanently affixed the name Grievance Studies to their targets.

Before last fall, there were a variety of self-designations that only their smartest critics could keep track of. For example, Steven Pinker tweeted,

Is there any idea so outlandish that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?

But if you aren’t quite up to Pinker’s level of brainpower, it’s hard to remember that “Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’” are all more or less the same moonshine.

But now we don’t need to. They are all just Grievance Studies.

Google searches show that the term “grievance studies” appeared only 85 times in the history of the internet before they announced their hoax last October, but 89,700 times since then.

To which my first thought was: huh? Hasn't everyone been using this term for ages?

No, it just turns out, I've been using it for ages. I couldn't get Sailer's "85 results" number easily. But this post of mine from May 2013 features the phrase. Though, hilariously, it doesn't seem to show up on my google search, and since I'm John Q. Nobody, read by nobody, I contributed almost zero to the currency of the phrase.

I have no idea if I just picked it up from someone else, or it independently seemed like a good description. To slightly paraphrase Moldbug, the great thing about the truth is that, being true, anybody is free to notice it at any time.

Come to Chateau Holmes for fresh social commentary, or be one of the herd reading about it at Sailer's blog six years later!

(I kid - Steve Sailer is a national treasure, and the best journalist of his generation. The fact that he writes for donations at the Unz Review, instead of having major newspapers fight to hire him, tells you everything you need to know about the clown world we live in).

Belatedly...

I'm back in Oz, hence the drop in recent postings. With punctuality like this in notifying my loyal readers, apparently I shouldn't be in charge of managing a business. Neither fact (skyvving off in Australia and lack of organisation) should be a surprise to those who know me in real life. I should be back to full posting strength (which, as Hector Lopez told me today, has been a bit weak recently) some time around January 8th.

My defense, as always, is that you guys are getting what you paid for. Suckers.

Truancy, etc.

I have been rather tardy with this particular web diary of late. As usual, a lack of posts either means that my life has gotten a lot less fun or a lot more fun.

Thankfully, in this case it's the latter, as part of an extended holiday/general goofing off. So as between my two readers and myself, there's been a conservation of total utility, rather than a pareto loss.

Why don't people read through the archives and old entries of blogs?

This is something I'm guilty of myself, and it's a strange behaviour.

We can rule out some of the obvious cases. Blogs that discuss mainly current events tend to date in much the same way as newspapers. I think there's a tendency for a lot of writers who don't have a particular dedicated subject to drift towards either 'discuss current events' or 'link to cool stuff someone else has posted', if for no other reason than that these provide a fairly reliable source of new subject matter.

But if the subject matter is more broad, old entries are probably just as interesting as new ones. Perhaps even more so, if you think that people use up their most interesting insights early on in a blog's life. If you switched the dates, it's not always clear that people would even know. This post, for instance, would have read the same if I wrote it last year or next year.

Some people like to comment, and take part in a discussion. That's a good reason, but those people are usually a small minority.

So what about the rest?

My guess, for what it's worth, is that people get used to a very particular process of reading. Clicking on a website is like pressing a button that says 'entertain me'. Sometimes it works, sometimes there's nothing there and you move on. RSS readers are even more extreme - there's the bold 'new' entries, and then there's 'everything else'.

Now, in theory you could just click on the archives and hunt around for other stuff, trying to filter out the bits that aren't relevant any more.

Then again, in theory you could also go read a book, or talk to your co-worker down the hall, or go for a run, or any other number of more useful activities when the Internet has ceased to entertain you.

But instead, like a gambler at a slot machine having another spin, you'll click refresh again, waiting to see if the magic 'entertain me' button has started working again. Even when the archives are a pretty darn similar type of button, you still stick with the one you're used to.

It looks pathological when you see old people at the pokies in Vegas at 3am doing it. But they're on the same hedonic treadmill as the rest of us - mine, for instance, just take place in private.

Part of the impetus for all this, dear reader, is that posting is going to be light for the next month or so, until late August. I have the distinct pleasure of roaming around Europe, in a kind of 'working holiday' type arrangement. Pessimists would forecast that the amount of 'work' in the 'working holiday' will be analogous to the function of 'massages' at a 3am massage parlour - it's the fig leaf that gets you in the door, but nobody takes it too seriously. Still, the only obstacle is my self-control, so we'll see how it goes. Pessimists might further note that describing a lack of self-control as the "only" thing stopping me working is like saying that the only obstacle to me winning the 100m freestyle at the olympics is that I can't swim fast enough. I fear that the pessimists may be right on both counts, but hope springs eternal.

But the moral of the story is that if you're a new reader, I encourage you to dig around the archives on the right in the mean time. At a minimum, I guarantee you that it's no worse than the crap that gets dished up here normally!

Yours truly,

Shylock.

Merry Christmas!

To all my loyal readers, wishing you a most merry Christmas and a happy new year. Thank you for joining me this past year, you all make the blogging experiment worthwhile. A year and a half, and still going strong!

As for me, I shall be holidaying around Costa Rica for a couple of weeks. Theodore Dalrymple recently described it thus:

In the late stage of British colonialism, for example, the British fondly imagined that they were bequeathing to various African countries institutions that would function in the same way without them as with them. In retrospect, this now seems an almost laughable belief. No better example of this could be had than Uganda, that land that Churchill called ‘the pearl of Africa.’ (Beware of pearls of continents, and above all Switzerlands of continents: for them, special horrors are usually reserved. The only exception to this rule known to me is Costa Rica, the Switzerland of Central America.)

I shall let you know how apt that description seems.

In the mean time, expect posting to be lighter than normal until about January 10 or so, when things will be back to full strength.

Oh, and one final request for you all over the future 12 months - if you think of something funny or interesting about a post, write a comment! I know I have lots of hilarious and awesome readers - the wit and wisdom that you would share with me if we were discussing these matters in a conversation would surely be appreciated by the other readers in blogland.  I imagine that few readers ever appreciate how valuable their comments are until they start a blog themselves. Until their blog hits the big time, at which point the sentiment reverses as the ratio of trolls and spam to real insight becomes unmanageable. But until such time, your comments are like Christmas presents to me, but every day of the year. :)

Yours faithfully,

Shylock

Questions I Occasionally Wonder About

Out of the people who arrive at this site by searching for 'Shylock Holmes', how many of them are looking for me, and how many just don't know how to spell 'Sherlock'?

Whatever the ratio, I'm sure it would produce a humourously bi-modal distribution of IQs. I leave it to the reader to decide which hump lies to the left of which.

Holidays!

In the spirit of disclosure, I will be wandering abroad for most of July, going wherever the four winds shall take me. As a result, I will have scant access to blog-related chicanery. The spirit will be willing, dear reader, but the technology will be weak. So expect only periodic posting until the start of August, when the full dose of Holmes will be back.