Note on Cymbeline

Quick note on a speech of Iachimo to Imogen (Innogen), which I think most editors have got wrong. Iachimo is trying to imply that Imogen's beloved Posthumus has been unfaithful to her.

What! are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes
To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop
Of sea and land, which can distinguish 'twixt
The fiery orbs above, and the twinn'd stones
Upon the numbered beach, and can we not
Partition make with spectacles so precious
'Twixt foul, and fair?

"Twinn'd" might not mean what you think it is (more on that in a moment). There is also a textual crux to note: "th'unnumbered beach" or "the number'd" beach? (See Note 1).

A plausible enough reading would be something like, "Wow, how is it that certain men (not naming any names or anything) can distinguish really fine details, e.g. distinguish which star is which, or distinguish between two grains of sands that look identical from a distance ... and yet can fail to tell the difference between a foul woman and a fair one?"

Nosworthy's Arden Cymbeline seems a bit confused in this scene overall. Like most editors, Nosworth interprets "distinguish" as "distinguish orb from orb, and stone from stone." (See Note 2). The more recent Wayne Arden edition is way better and hugely useful, but it also goes with "the countless stones that the human eye can differentiate from one another." 

But there's another strong reading here. It's not altogether different: the two readings are as different as two grains of sand, maybe?

Marta-Led Demons

Didja miss me don't even answer that shut up you're not even that funny okay you are. There is a snippet below about labour theories of value in the era of Quantified Self.

Here's the context (or skip to the snippet): I've been finishing up a Creative Writing PhD, which is a funny sort of thing. Actually, it's several funny sorts of things, because there's a fair bit of formal variation from university to university, and from PhD to PhD. Which is a good thing. I understand in Coventry, evaluation of the practice component focuses quite heavily on your performance, with respect to the other PGRs in your intake, within a vast verdant combat arena tucked full of traps, weaponry, intrigue and heartbreak. But in every practice-led PhD, there's always a 'practice' component -- for me, that means some fiction, including "Froggy" and Marta -- and then a critical/reflective component.

I initially found that critical/reflective bit quite difficult, since it wasn't a mode of writing I was familiar with / fruitfully unfamiliar with when I got started. But I think I more or less have got it now, which is pretty cool because I'm supposed to hand it in next week.

One aspiration for afterwards, BTW, is to spin off my two cents on practice-led research (also known as practice-as-research or practice-based research, although each phrase has its own connotations) and especially on how it formally relates to speculative fiction.

• Speculative fiction may sometimes aspire to 'lead' research, offering to shift our technoscientific imaginary, and opening spaces which stricter R&D methodologies may explore (shout out DARPA you avant-garde murderous fucks). 
• 'Hard' speculative fiction may also be implicated with expert discourses (whether that's physics or sociology), in a way which resembles the dialectic between the creative and the critical/reflective components of practice-led research. 
• Both speculative fiction and practice-led research are prone to adopting a slightly tricksterish attitude toward external evaluation, eluding or deferring judgment by a kind of bait-and-switch which insists that you've usually evaluated the wrong thing, and that they know more than they're letting on. Speculative fiction's version of this is, of course: "oh no, of course I don't claim to predict the future, ha ha ha" (zooms meaningfully away on hoverboard with fixed wide-eyed stare). 

In a nutshell, I feel like practice-led research and speculative fiction have stuff in common, which means things can actually get quite awkward (but interesting) when you try to do both of them at once.

All of this serves as a kind of apology for various aspects of the following snippet (which probably bug only me anyway), which is a fragment of reflective commentary, about a very brief passage in the mini-novel Marta and the Demons. 

(So it's me talking about some fiction I wrote. But in this bit, the themes of money, labour, and Quantified Self predominate. The yys are because I haven't done the page numbering yet and/or because I generously "allow readers to decide for themselves". Also, I've shouted it out before, but Tim Maughan's sf-ish vignette "Zero Hours" is great and still really relevant here).

Work as Money

[...] This scene [a drunken conversation between Myeong and Carly, about trying to invent a labor-based currency,] was partly inspired by schemes such as Local Exchange Trading Systems and time‑based currencies.[1] Under such systems, a member might earn one credit by working for one hour, which can be spent to hire an hour’s labor from another member. It was easy to imagine Carly thinking along these lines; at this moment in Carly and Myeong’s relationship, it felt right that Carly might have recently re-calibrated her speculative faculties, and be eager to support inchoate wishes, while still ready to feel like the grounded pragmatist of the pair.

Carly comes up with the name “WorkCoin,” and envisions WorkCoin’s value deriving from “the number of hours [worked]” (M: yy). But for Myeong, whose entrepreneurial obliviousness is reaching its peak, the word ‘hours’ is already enough to cut Carly short. 

One objection to time‑based currencies is that every hour of work is qualitatively different to every other hour. Of course, flattening such heterogeneity according to egalitarian principles, rather than market mechanisms, may be part of the appeal of time-based currencies. But I wanted Myeong to focus on something different. Myeong wants to preserve the qualitative heterogeneity of work, conceived primarily as a phenomenological heterogeneity, but with gestures toward the importance of third-person perspectives.

My second inspiration for this scene was Viviana Zelizer’s account of money’s own heterogeneity. Zelizer contests money’s reputation as a uniform, impersonal, and fungible social relation. For Zelizer, “people are constantly creating new monies, and they do so by segregating different streams of legal tender into funds for distinct activities and relations” (Zelizer 2011: 89). Money “may well ‘corrupt’ values into numbers, but values and sentiment reciprocally corrupt money by investing it with moral, social, and religious meaning” (Zelizer 2011: 97). Myeong, Zelizer, and I conspired to flesh out Myeong's aspiration, barely acknowledging Carly's contributions. Instead, Myeong would aspire to use technology to accentuate, extend, and rationalize money’s existing heterogeneity, in order to reflect the heterogeneity of work. Every hour of work is different from every other. Every penny is different from every other. Why shouldn’t we map one set of differences onto the other?

Myeong’s vision is probably ultimately incoherent. Formulating it coherently certainly offers a challenge. First, how should work be demarcated from non-work (cf. §2.5.2)? We certainly cannot get by, in this context, with the approximation that paid work is ‘real’ work (not without begging the question). Nor should we really want to. Nancy Hartsock tersely invokes the theme of what counts as ‘real’ work by describing “a third person, not specifically present in Marx’s account of transactions between capitalist and worker (both of whom are male),” who “follows timidly behind, carrying groceries, baby, and diapers” (Hartsock 1983: 234). Second, since any sum of WorkCoin will have passed through many hands, whose work should count as “what real people [have] really done, to make that money exist” (M: yy)? Third, even if work could somehow be legitimately demarcated and documented, how can WorkCoin legibly represent such data for human subjects? Who could experience something like WorkCoin, and what would they experience? How could WorkCoin’s quantifications be visualized, aestheticized, and perhaps – given Myeong’s desire for a WorkCoin in which “you could see the workers” (M: yy) – embodied and personified? Fourth, even if a legible WorkCoin were possible, why should that materially alter labor’s subjugation within some interlocking “matrix of domination” (Collins 2000: yy)? In other words, a fine-grained mapping of labor to value may sometimes lead to fairer compensation. But it can also – as the example of Amazon shortly shows – lead to something else entirely. On a larger historical timescale, the questions multiply. How would Myeong’s WorkCoin reflect the particularity of work, when that work is implicated with events – such as the production of the means of production – which have taken place long before WorkCoin came into being? Or when some properties of today’s work may take months or centuries to surface? How would something like WorkCoin function as a transferable IOU (cf. §3.4.2, §4.1), connected not only with past labor, but also with promises of future labor? Whenever I tried to extend the quantification of labor deep into the past and future, I felt it lost its particularity again. It became more nebulous and colorable, more manipulable by existing power hierarchies. Beyond these questions lay further concerns about access and exclusion, about privacy, and about energy and sustainability.

While I tried to position WorkCoin as a wild and impractical fancy, it is also “essential that estrangement leads to the realization that things do not have to be the way they are” (Spiegel 2008: 370). I expected WorkCoin could create a space for speculation about more practical implementations of a labor-based currency, both in terms of its enticements and its dangers.

One precedent is the Quantified Self phenomenon – loosely what Myeong has in mind when she refers to “fuddy-duddy, gamified, making-flossing-fun, improve-the-way-you-sit bullcrap” (M: yy). Quantified Selves are people who aim to improve their self-knowledge and autonomy through “novel ways of self-tracking with the help of digital technologies” (Lupton 2016: 9).[2] Gary Wolf, one popularizer of the term, describes his fine-grained self-tracking in a work context:

Taking advantage of the explosion of self-tracking services available on the Web, I started analyzing my workday at a finer level. Every time I moved to a new activity – picked up the phone, opened a Web browser, answered e-mail – I made a couple of clicks with my mouse, which recorded the change. After a few weeks I looked at the data and marveled.

(Wolf 2010: n.p.)

Similar tracking technology is also used in factories, warehouses, and other workplaces; a high-profile example is Amazon’s avant‑garde brutalizing of its workforce, “in the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees” (Head 2014: n.p.):

With this twenty-first-century Taylorism, management experts, scientific managers, take the basic workplace tasks at Amazon, such as the movement, shelving, and packaging of goods, and break down these tasks into their subtasks, usually measured in seconds; then rely on time and motion studies to find the fastest way to perform each subtask; and then reassemble the subtasks and make this “one best way” the process that employees must follow.

(ibid. n.p.)

While such monitoring technologies come nowhere near to disentangling “real people” or “[o]ur own true selves” (M: yy) from the abstract figure of the worker, they do enrich that figure with fine‑grained data. They suggest how Myeong’s first bold vision of WorkCoin, as a marvellous money inscribed with all the heterogeneity of work, might yield to something more practicable. Instead of expressing “[o]ur true selves,” a WorkCoin analogue might simply express some salient data about the work which underlies it.[3]

Some time later, after attending a workshop involving time-based currencies, and speculatively exploring hybrid forms of monetary value – with price determined by interactions of supply, demand, and labor time – I did consider fleshing out WorkCoin further, perhaps in a later story. At the same time, I was wary that, merely seeking to estrange money, I might inadvertently glamorize, celebrate, normalize or naturalize the use of such intimately oppressive tracking technologies; or I might point to unlikely ways of appeasing, containing, or mitigating technologies that are hungrily bent on coercing workers “to squeeze every last drop of labour-power from their bodies” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 7). For the time being at least, I decided to let WorkCoin, like the incomes perceived by Li Shu (M: yy), and like Encarl’s Smartgularity (M: yy), remain a faintly implied shape, only partly jutting into story cycle’s representational field. 

The difficulty of theoretically demarcating work from non-work, and the brutal and exploitative history of such demarcation as it has practically occurred, could be no security against the possibility that technologically accomplished quantifications of work might in principle gain legal backing or widespread social acceptance. Stock prices already make a resounding claim to quantify the future flourishing of firms; the reputation metrics of digital matching platforms such as Uber and Airbnb make a fairly resounding claim to render precise and legible the trustworthiness of taxi drivers or holidaymakers. It seemed important to confront the possibility of some specific socio‑technological ecology of data collection, extraction, warehousing, analysis, and visualization and gamification, making a resounding claim to render ‘work’ – or perhaps ‘smart work,’ ‘hard work,’ or even ‘happy work’ – as precise and legible data.

The stories Moneykins, and perhaps especially ‘Alice,’ often feature imagery of bodies surfacing and stretching free from the media in which they have been obscured and imprisoned, and even in which they have been constituted. For instance, the Weaver breaks free from her cloud and its enigmatic Chesses, and the leprecoins from their magic metal (M: yy, yy). These images arrived in my writing of their own accord, but I started to think of them as small, scattered allegories about humans disentangling themselves from money, whether partly or fully, temporarily or for good.

At the same time, as explored in §2.1-§2.5, money can be tenacious, adaptable, and stealthy. It can linger in the places it has explicitly been banished from. Bewitchingly detailed representational regimes – such as Quantified Self technologies, the reputation metrics of the sharing economy, Doctorow’s Whuffie, or Myeong’s WorkCoin – may promise to extricate humans from money’s power, to create alternative ways of organizing collective action, and to in effect “render gold and silver of no esteem” (More 1997 [1516]: 44). Yet they may actually end up extending the power of money, in new forms, deeper into human lives. [...]

---

[1] See e.g. The Economy of Hours (www.economyofhours.com) and TimeRepublik (www.timerepublik.com); for historical background cf. Warren (1852).

[2] I prefer to say ‘Quantified Selves’ because I am a little reluctant to call Quantified Self a ‘movement’ with ‘members.’ There is an awkwardness around the term, perhaps because it tends to emphasize the agency and knowledge of the quantified individual, and downplays the way in which, even in the most sanguine circumstances, the Quantified Self is inevitably also a Quantified Other. But the term has widespread recognition, and I find even the awkwardness itself sometimes useful, a constant reminder of the unwieldiness and counterintuitivity of the subject matter.

[3] For instance, a few important dimensions of distinction might include tedium, discomfort, and other affective states; freedom and constraint; the ‘embedded labor’ of prior training and experience; the ‘quality’ of the work as measured by innumerable metrics; the danger and luck involved; and of course the work’s financial productivity. These evade tracking technologies to different degrees and in different ways. “WSTT [Wearables and other Self-Tracking Technologies] measure only users, creating an illusion that the precarian worker – constructed by a particular affective and social field of which these technologies are a part – is identical with humanity,” and the illusion that this worker figure is also “the defining point of human bodily capabilities and the point from which we should start – an outer limit of ‘human nature’ which restricts political and social possibility” (Moore and Robinson 2015: 5; cf. also Maughan 2013).

Elsewhere: passive control rights

I came across the intriguing notion of the "passive control rights" of bondholders, which strikes me as one way in which the strict distinction between debt and equity need not always be as strict as we tend to think.

I'm gathering evidence to support the unpopular opinion that money, which is sometimes seen as a form of debt, might also be fruitfully approached as a special form of equity. This aspiration belongs to my broad sense that more needs to be done before money comes properly into focus as, in Geoffrey Ingham's words, a social relation. Ingham writes in The Nature of Money:

by a ‘sociology of money’ I intend more than the self-evident assertion that money is produced socially, is accepted by convention, is underpinned by trust, has definite social and cultural consequences and so on. Rather, I shall argue that money is itself a social relation; that is to say, money is a ‘claim’ or ‘credit’ that is constituted by social relations that exist independently of the production and exchange of commodities

Anyway, the rather dry excerpt about passive control rights is over at the Economic Humanities blog.

Another case where debt and equity may become blurred, by the way, is in the case of very short term money market securities, especially where issuers are continually rolling over their commercial paper-type debt. Such relationships can be short-term in one sense and long-term in another: that is, a company borrows money, pays it back, borrows it again, pays it back again, perhaps even on a daily basis, perhaps for years. So the lenders may not have any voting rights or collateral, but they may still be respected and even feared stakeholders with influence over the company's dealings. One thing I don't really understand yet is the extent to which a group of lenders in an arrangement like this really can be thought of as an agent or actor or even a continuous (albeit evolving) entity over long spans of time.

It's also interesting that whereas "debt" always implies "credit" -- to the extent that in certain contexts the terms become interchangeable, although always with distinct nuance -- there doesn't seem to be any equivalent language that differentiates equity as either owning or being owned by. Or perhaps there is but I just don't know about it?

Star Star Star Star Star

Interesting post by Natalie Luhrs: Conflation of Review and Critique, or How to Annoy Me.

There's a lot in that post that I agree with, and a few things I'd probably want to respond to by embroidering them with qualifications in my own baffling idiolect, each of which would then be followed by an "or you could say" or an "or to put it another way, more-or-less," and then some more readily-recognizable and not-unreasonable and perhaps slightly-equivocal sentiment, albeit one which actually would not very well capture whatever weird hair-splitting involution I originally registered in my own baffling idiolect, but rather comprise a tacit bottom-lip-trembling invitation to forget I said anything, okay? Waaaaaah!

Or in other words, there are a few things in that post that I might disagree with!

But instead of attempting anything mildly and/or misleadingly coherent today, let me offer twelve quick sets of semi-rhetorical questions, mostly about stars:

(1) Look at this four-and-a-half star consensus on a scraped PoD "book" of Wikipedia etc. content about Neal Stephenson. "Tough read, but rewarding," says one reviewer who, like almost all the other reviewers, thinks they're reviewing something else. It's not even clear what: the entire Baroque Cycle collected in one volume? A particular Baroque Cycle novel? Cryptonomicon? Damn, maybe I'm wrong and they really mean those Wikipedia or whatever articles. Question. What's up with that?

(2) Would you ever rate something you hadn't read?

(3) If you do a lot of star-type rating, do you implicitly create certain sub-categories within the materials that you're rating? Or is everything compared to everything else? Do you imagine a reader going through all your ratings, or just encountering each rating in the context of that book? That is, do you ever try to communicate things with your ratings as a whole gestalt, or do you think of each encounter in isolation? Or something in-between?

For instance, do you tacitly judge all the books by a particular author against each other, and try to put them in the right order as carefully discriminated as possible as your priority? In other words, in what ways are your evaluations transitive? If you are confronted with the decision between either (1) signalling that Book A is better than Book B by Author X, or (2) signalling that Author X is better than Author Y, which do you tend to go for? And/or do you tend to do genre groupings together, or historical periods? If you have answered that you compare everything to everything, does that even count across different sites and platforms?

Do you ever sort of defer to local norms, clustered around a platform, or an author, or even a particular work? Or do you sort of create your own clusters of norms, perhaps according to genre or micro-genre, or perhaps according to something that is a bit harder to describe?

E.g. here's a test: how would you rate these ten works out of five stars, to best communicate what you think and feel about them: Hamlet by Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin, Dune by Frank Herbert, Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. You have to do the whole list. Can you rate them all so that no matter what pair you pick, the better work out of the two has the more stars?

(If there are some on the list you haven't read, you can swap them for another work by the same author, or use one or more of these spares: The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, Carter & Lovecraft by Jonathan L. Howard, Planetfall by Emma Newman, Auora by Kim Stanley Robinson, Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R. Delany, Stone by Adam Roberts, Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskill, Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe).

UPDATE:

Suddenly every issue of @clarkesworld @NightmareMag and @LightspeedMag are getting multiple 1-star ratings...

— Charles Payseur (@ClowderofTwo) January 26, 2016

Consider this Goodreads user as a specimen. It does seem strange that somebody who was so consistently disappointed by Lightspeed or Clarkesworld or Nightmare would keep coming back, issue after issue. Also he is very valiant to keep struggling through the works of so many writers of color, and so many works by those he probably considers libtards, cucks and feminazis, when he simply can't find any that he likes. Which is to say, I don't think he has actually read most of the works he has given one-star ratings to.

It should go without saying that this dude hails from the Puppies realm of fandom, and he and I probably disagree about pretty much everything. He probably thinks there shouldn't be gun control, I don't mind if there is or not.

But in the context of this post, it should also go without saying that I'm interested in his self-perception. How does this reviewer see what he is doing? Does this reviewer actually think of himself as doing something underhand, as trolling, cheating, gaming the system, meddling with the data? Is there a moment where he thinks, "the ends justify the means!"? Or does he consider his practice legitimate, an expression of the same norms that govern rating all over GoodReads, only given different opinions and information? Does he in fact believe it is enough to "know" with confidence that something is badly written, since he has sampled similar stuff in the past and finds it unreadable, and ascribes its publication to political correctness and nepotism? He probably sees himself -- in roughly Puppies lingo -- as a non-political lover of freedom and democracy standing up to the  hegemony of the Social Justice Warriors. If he were called out over it, would he disappear and try to do it again more subtly, or would he be a little confused about the substance of the challenge? Would he try to defend his practice? If so, how?

(As it happens, I think he probably does see himself as a saboteur, doing something underhand, and the reason for that are that Barack Obama gets five stars, whereas Mitt Romney and Rand Paul get just one; this really looks a lot like an attempt at muddying the waters and achieving deniability. I can maybe see him feeling that Mitt and Rand just aren't alt right enough for him, but all that love for Barack is a real tough sell. If that's the case, it's interesting that this politically motivated rater only has the courage of his convictions when it comes to cultural politics: he's very willing to betray his instincts in rating political memoirs and actual books about politics and cultural affairs, if it will slightly smooth the way for his opinions within the sphere of speculative fiction. Of course I'm speculating. Maybe he just loves those Obama books. I'm also interested, by the way, in his treatment of Stephen King, who gets the occasional two- or three-star ratings peeping out from a long gleam of one-star ratings. Mamatas also musters the occasional two- or three-star rating. Is this more muddying of the waters, a performance of even-handedness? Or is it possible that he has read, for instance, all those Stephen King books, in fact loves Stephen King, apart from King's implicit and explicit political stance? Are we seeing a grudging trade-off, where an author is punished as a public figure, but the punishment is mitigating in the case of a few books the rater found totally outstanding? Is this GoodReaders user vacillating between rating those two entangled things, the author and the author's works?).

(4) What if you know that a book is worth, for instance, four stars. Let's say you are very sure of it. And let's say that this book is currently sitting at an average of about two stars, after about twenty reviews have come in. Conventional wisdom is that you should now rate it four stars, its true worth to you. Right?

So what would it take for you to rate it five stars, to bring its public valuation closer to its true worth? Its just price, you could say? Would you ever be tempted?

Or perhaps this is already your practice? Archers take the prevailing winds into account, shouldn't reviewers? Doth not the responsibility of truth-telling partly imply paying attention to the context in which you speak, and ensuring that you set your meaning on a course such that, as far as you can tell from the currents and forces before you, it will eventually hit its true target as closely as possible? Does it feel slightly like I'm Lucifer? The Morning-Star Tempts the Star-Giver, etc.? What if you were absolutely resolute that it was worth two stars, but it was sitting on an average of one star, after a hundred reviews have come in? Would you give it two, three, four or five stars?

(5) To what extent when you are rating a book (or for instance a hotel or a service or a person) do you feel you are following commonly accepted norms for the generating of ratings? To what extent are the norms you are following describable? Do you think it matters if there are different norms simultaneously in operation? If there are different norms in operation, what are the ways they overlap, and what are the ways that they don't? To put that another way, what sorts of books are more likely to reveal, and what sorts of books are more likely to conceal, the difference between the norms in operation? To what extent do you think the norms you conform to are visible to others when you exemplify them? Do you ever virtue-signal with your ratings?

(6) Do the ethics of rating (OK that's probably too grand a term) actually change as more ratings are accumulated? Do you incline toward temperance / perhaps mild positivity if there are very few ratings, and then go for more extreme and potentially unforgiving ratings if there are lots of other ratings to absorb your contribution? Do you consider how many ratings a work is likely to gather over its lifetime? I.e. if you are likely to be one of only two or three people who ever rate it, or maybe the only person who ever rates it, does that change how you marshal your stars?

(7) What do you think of those people who bestow a book with only one star because it isn't about what they thought it was about?

Or those people who give it one star because it arrived late in the post, or because they thought it was too expensive and so they didn't buy it (for example, as in the sole Amazon review of this academic book, which is modestly priced for an academic book, although of course academic books are far more expensive than they ought to be), or in some other way found the book unsatisfying not in itself, but because it wasn't something they wanted it to be?

Or what do you think of those people who rate the book, rather than the marketplace seller, when they find that the quality of the copy does not match the description? I mean, how many stars would you give those people? No, that's not what I mean at all. I really mean, what's up with that? Can these practices be defended, or can parts of them be defended?

Similarly, what about people who go ahead and give a rating based on a single hated or loved feature? -- e.g. "I hate present third person tense novels. I go around giving them all one star." What about the people who give their ratings based on the same handful of somewhat flexible, extremely broadly applicable criteria, criteria that are brought to book after book, for instance, transparency of style, relatability of character, plausibility of motivation? What about the person, quoted below, who gave a book one star because their friend deeply disliked it? Is that practice defensible? (Compare liquid democracy, perhaps?) Less drastically, how much of a book do you think you need to have read before you are competent to rate it? Or alternatively, how many times do you think you have to read a book before you are really competent to rate it? Say, "in an ideal world"?

Similarly, when you buy Amazon reviews, how does that actually work? -- what parts of the process are automated? Or are there sweatshop workers writing those reviews, or what? Does anyone know?

"I'm always suspicious when most of the reviews are from other writers." #1StarReview

— Hal Duncan (@Hal_Duncan) November 30, 2015

(8) What are the truth conditions for the attribution of a certain level of stars? If the answer is "it's subjective" or "it depends how you feel," how do you know what you feel? What does a number feel like? How do you feel a number? Do a number of stars feel different from a number of hearts? How do you know you are really feeling the number, and not just mistaking some different feeling for the feeling of that number?

How is it possible for people to disagree on how many stars a book should have?

What would be necessary to make it impossible for people to disagree on how many stars a book should have? Is it possible to give a book the wrong number of stars? Is that is what implied by sites like Love Reading, Hate Books, or by authors sharing their #1starreviews on Twitter? (Answer: sometimes). Is the ascription of stars an aesthetic judgment (e.g. in a Kantian sense), and/or should it be? Would you ever go back and adjust all your star ratings to accommodate the sudden magnificent appearance of something that is greater than anything you have ever encountered, or is literally, by an order of magnitude, just the worst.

"Only the total deportation of Muslims will save western countries and civilization from collapse." #1StarReview

— Qaim Rashid, Esq. (@MuslimIQ) November 30, 2015

(9) Are stars scattered because books are scattered? In other words, do different star ratings tend to reflect sharply different styles of reading, and/or sharply different phenomenologies of reading, and/or the reading of different books? How real are these multiple different books ("book" in roughly the sense of "what is read") that supervene on the common book ("book" in roughly the sense of "the codex filled with words")? Are they at least real enough that we could for instance write literary scholarship about them -- that we could talk about "the one-star Aftermath" and "the four-star Aftermath" in the same way we talk about the First Quarto Hamlet and the Folio Hamlet? How do such different phenomenologies relate to the identity characteristics of intersectionalism and/or diversity discourse?

"The author was trying to write something lofty and artistic." #1StarReview

— Hal Duncan (@Hal_Duncan) November 30, 2015

(10) There could be an algorithm which adjusts the average star rating to a targeted, weighted "average." Would you want such functionality? Would you want a targeted, weighted "average"? Obviously not. What if you could adjust the algorithm yourself, and there was an easy filter switch, to toggle between the weighted average and the unweighted average? Are you absolutely certain such an algorithm is not already in place? If it were, how would it first come to your attention? And what about if we weren't talking about books? What if we were talking about, say, Uber drivers? Would you want such functionality then?

"Ugh! If I'd wanted to know about the plight of slaves, I would read a history book." #1StarReview

— Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette) November 30, 2015

(11) Imagine that reviews were not for authors in any sense, and also not for readers, in the sense that they were not primarily a filter for readers to decide where to focus money, attention, faith, and/or mental and emotional labor. Who or what else might reviews be for?

"A friend read it and really did not like it, so I'm not even bothering!" #1StarReview

— Mary Robinette Kowal (@MaryRobinette) November 30, 2015

(12) What recipe would you use to create a useful weighted average? I.e. if you could see all the individual reviews, and could see the average star rating, but could also see another rating, "star tally tailored for me," or something?

The obvious recipe is to gradually slightly bump up the weight of reviews which people find "helpful." And vice-versa: if lots of people find a review unhelpful, perhaps it shouldn't carry so much weight. (But do you think there is something a bit seedy about that suggestion? After all, people weren't asked whether they think the star rating should have greater or lesser weight. They were asked whether they found the review -- the text in particular, you gotta imagine -- helpful).

What about a slight extra weighting according to word length -- a decent tracking variable for indicating that a reviewer might have put some consideration into their review?

How about an innocuous scan for phrases like "couldn't decide between three and four stars and eventually went for three" which will re-weight that rating as, say, 3.25 stars?

What about weighting somebody's star-giving according to how prolific they are with their stars: if I only ever give one-star or two-star reviews, perhaps my two-star reviews should be weighted as a curmudgeon's highest praise?

Are there any ways of building in tests that reduce the impact of reviewers who really have not read the book in question? Would you want them?

And what about increasing the weight of reviews by reviewers whose reviews you personally have "found helpful" in the past? Or even increase the weight of reviews by reviewers whose reviews reviewers whose reviews you have found helpful in the past have found helpful in the past?

What about going for a fully blown k-NN classification to determine how close a particular reviewer's "tastes" are to your "tastes," with taste being modeled by extracting features from a data-set including reviews you have written and reviews you have found helpful or not helpful? How would you set up the parameters in detail? What are the second-order possibilities and risks, in terms of a new incentive structure for reviewers, and for cultural production more generally?

Elsewhere:
RevRank.

Hypothesis Thursdays: Reasons not to Publish

If you are straight, cis, white, male, financially comfortable, middle or upper class, and you are a cornucopia of physical and mental abilities for coping with what life throws at you, and if you support diversity in fiction, you should, all other things being equal, publish no fiction of your own.

Bonus hypothesis: if you match aspects of this description, but not others, then to the extent that you support diversity in fiction within the categories which you do match, you should, all other things being equal, publish no fiction of your own.

From Schiller's letters on aesthetics

"But we know that the condition of the human will always remains contingent, and that only in the Absolute Being physical coexists with moral necessity. Accordingly, if it is wished to depend on the moral conduct of man as on natural results, this conduct must become nature, and he must be led by natural impulse to such a course of action as can only and invariably have moral results. But the will of man is perfectly free between inclination and duty, and no physical necessity ought to enter as a sharer in this magisterial personality. If, therefore, he is to retain this power of solution, and yet become a reliable link in the causal concatenation of forces, this can only be effected when the operations of both these impulses are presented quite equally in the world of appearances. It is only possible when, with every difference of form, the matter of man's volition remains the same, when all his impulses agreeing with his reason are sufficient to have the value of a universal legislation."