#ftx collapse

“I thought of Sam Bankman-Fried’s numbskull posturing recently when I finally read Nathan Heller’s article about the “The End of the English Major” in the New Yorker. The account of the collapse of undergraduate interest in the humanities touched off a lot of anguish, pained tweets, and op-eds this past month. For me, it clarified something about the trajectory of culture in the recent past, and made me think about the increasing widespread popularity of something I’ll call Quantitative Aesthetics—the way numbers function more and more as a proxy for artistic value.

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The most-shared tidbit from Heller’s piece were the lines from professors lamenting that her Ivy League students who are social-media natives no longer have the attention for reading literature: “The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”

We’re talking about the period since 2011, the first college class since the introduction of the iPhone, and it is logical that mass adoption of such seductive and pervasive consumer technology has changed people’s relationship to culture.

But 2011-12 is also the first full college class since the financial crisis of 2008, and the other obvious culprit is the greater ruthlessness of the economy post Great Recession, the flight away from the “softness” of the humanities in a time when studying anything not directly seen as useful is viewed more and more as an unsustainable luxury.

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As one student says in the article, “Even if I’m in the humanities, and giving my impression of something, somebody might point out to me, ‘Well, who was your sample?’ I mean, statistics is everywhere. It’s part of any good critical analysis of things.” This provokes Heller to reflect, “I knew at once what [the student] meant: on social media, and in the press that sends data visualizations skittering across it, statistics is now everywhere, our language for exchanging knowledge.”

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Nevertheless, there’s something called the McNamara Fallacy, a.k.a. the Quantitative Fallacy. It is summarized as “if it cannot be measured, it is not important.” The Heller article made me reflect on how a version of it is now very present, and growing, at the grassroots of taste.

On one level, this is seen in a rise of a kind of wonky obsession with business stats in fandoms, invoked as a way to convey the rightness of artistic opinions—what I want to call Quantitative Aesthetics. (There are actually scientists who study aesthetic preference in labs and use the term “quantitative aesthetics.” I am using it in a more diffuse way.)

It manifests in music. As the New York Times wrote in 2020 of the new age of pop fandom, “devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship, wins and shooting percentages.” Last year, another music writer talked about fans internalizing the number-as-proof-of-value mindset to extreme levels: “I see people forcing themselves to listen to certain songs or albums over and over and over just to raise those numbers, to the point they don’t even get enjoyment out of it anymore.”

The same goes for film lovers, who now seem to strangely know a lot about opening-day grosses and foreign box office, and use the stats to argue for the merits of their preferred product. There was an entire campaign by Marvel super-fans to get Avengers: Endgame to outgross Avatar, as if that would prove that comic-book movies really were the best thing in the world.

On the flip side, indie director James Gray (of Ad Astra fame) recently complained about ordinary cinema-goers using business stats as a proxy for artistic merit: “It tells you something of how indoctrinated we are with capitalism that somebody will say, like, ‘His movies haven’t made a dime!’ It’s like, well, do you own stock in Comcast? Or are you just such a lemming that you think that actually has value to anybody?”

It’s not just financial data though. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic have recently become go-to arbitrators of taste by boiling down a movie’s value to a single all-purpose statistic. They are influential enough to alarm studios, who say the practice is denying oxygen to potentially niche hits because it “quantifies the unquantifiable.” (How funny to hear Hollywood execs echo Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “If an empirically oriented aesthetics uses quantitative averages as norms, it unconsciously sides with social conformity.”)

As for art, I don’t really feel like I even need to say too much about how the confusion of price data with merit infects the conversation. It’s so well known it is the subject of documentaries from The Mona Lisa Curse (2008) to The Price of Everything (2018). “Art and money have no intrinsic hookup at all,” painter Larry Poons laments in the latter, stating the film’s thesis. “It’s not like sports, where your batting average is your batting average… They’ve tried to make it much like that, like the best artist is the most expensive artist.”

But where Quantitative Aesthetics is really newly intense across society—in art and everywhere—is in how social-media numbers (clicks, likes, shares, retweets, etc.) seep into everything as a shorthand for understanding how important something is. That’s why artist-researcher Ben Grosser created his Demetricator suite of web-browsing tools, which let you view social media stripped of all those numbers and feel, by their absence, the effect they are having on your attention and values.

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Again: Data analysis, done with care, can yield insights of great depth (Albert-László Barabási has even argued for “dataism,” a kind of sophisticated data analysis, as an artform). But as an instrument used to justify consumer preference within a landscape of complex values, a Quantitative Aesthetic often just becomes a way to deal with the problem of not wanting to spend much time thinking—the opposite of deep thought.

If you walk into a wine store, you could get descriptions of various wines, taste them, decide whether you want something more “foxy” or more “herbaceous,” match the subtleties to your palette. But most people will probably just pick the bottle that has the price point they think suggests about the level of quality they are shooting for.

The “McNamara Fallacy” is named after one-time defense secretary Robert McNamara—a Harvard grad, like the students Heller talks to. A numbers whiz, he was the architect of the U.S.’s murderous, ultimately catastrophic Vietnam policy, and known for his obsession with “body counts” as the key metric of success.

McNamara apparatchik Leslie H. Gelb later recalled in Time magazine the debacle fueled by this quantitative mindset:

McNamara didn’t know anything about Vietnam. Nor did the rest of us working with him. But Americans didn’t have to know the culture and history of a place. All we needed to do was apply our military superiority and resources in the right way. We needed to collect the right data, analyze the information properly and come up with a solution on how to win the war.

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Daniel Yankelovich, the sociologist who coined the term “McNamara Fallacy,” actually outlined it as a process, one that could be broken out into four steps of escalating intellectual danger. Here they are, as it is commonly broken down, with his commentary on each:

Measure whatever can be easily measured. (This is OK as far as it goes.)

Disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. (This is artificial and misleading.)

Presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. (This is blindness.)

Say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. (This is suicide.)

I never heard of him?

I mean, unlike the other billionaires currently imploding rn, I never hard of SBF, or FTX, until it imploded?

Like, I get that I’m not into Crypto, but I wasn’t into electric cars or space companies and god knows I still heard about Elon Musk all the time.

And apparently FTX had all these celebrity endorsements, and ads and a fucking stadium, and Fried was like, a big political donor and I