How do people become so confused about the odds?

Great Debates
81

It does not appear that you understand what the words “chances are” mean, which is precisely the problem. The vast majority of people who are bumming off their family and friends in hopes of making it big are not Jane Austen. Today, without the repressive social structures that denied women means to financially support themselves, and with the extreme availability of information, a good writer would have no problem pulling their weight. See, for an extreme example, JK Rowling.

I think to call van Gogh or Jane Austen genius is stretching it. They have imparted no benefit to 90%+ of the world’s population. Most of the non-Western world have artistic/entertainment traditions that are more grassroot – created and enjoyed by the masses rather than an elite few. And there is no reason to think that such a mode of artistic endeavor or entertainment is lacking.

As for sports, spectator team sports is at worse a root of social problems via reinforced us-vs-them mentality (see, for example, Chomsky), and at best a waste of valuable leisure time where people could be doing any number of more healthy things.

82

Has anyone brought up the Dunning Kruger Effect?

83

I believe you are missing my point - which is that Van Gogh and Austen both did not pull their own economic weight during their lifetimes, but have had far more economic impact than the majority of human beings will ever have through their work after their died.

84

Okay, so what percentage of the world’s population have YOU imparted benefit to? (And you think Jane Austen is elitist art? Seriously?)

I’m fascinated, again, to know where this vast array of ne’er-do-well would-be artists are.

Do you watch movies? Which ones do you like most?

85

“Chances are” means “there is a high probability”. You have listed exceptions. Even a billion dollars in a one-in-a-million chance is still only $1000. This is the expectation value of a wanna-be’s contribution.

And I don’t believe that it is fair to attribute the economic impact entirely to them. If Jane Austen’s stories don’t exist there would be others that take their place. Entertainment is fairly fungible.

86

It quite clearly is not, or else Jane Austen wouldn’t be in print anymore and people wouldn’t still be making movies out of her novels. The market clearly demonstrates that some art has more utility than others; Austen’s works have sold millions and millions of copies and been adapted into any number of critically acclaimed movies, plays, and what have you. If art was fungible people wouldn’t keep going back to the novels of some short-lived spinster. Nor would they still be remaking “A Christmas Carol” every few years, they’d pick someone other than Dickens to adapt. “Thriller” would not have sold a bazillion more albums than any other released that year. “Star Wars” would have been no more successful than “Jupiter Ascending.”

Art adds to the human experience; it makes our lives better, and I can prove it; if it didn’t people wouldn’t pay to get it. They would not buy books and movie tickets and songs and concert tickets and paintings and sculptures. They wouldn’t schlep to some dark room and pay for overpriced beer to see people on stage tell jokes. They wouldn’t pay Broadway prices to see shows on Broadway. Art is a zillion-dollar industry; artists add utility to the economy.

87

I have supported myself financially since the age of 18, and given enough financial support to my parents in excess of the cost of raising me. And even though I have a full time job (involving a fair amount of writing), I never seem to need someone to take care of my daily needs in order to do so.

For someone who claims to support literature, your grasp of words seems rather tenuous. Westerners like to call art that the masses produce “folk” art. That’s distinct from the elite-producer-mass-consumption (not “elitist”) model that you seem to worship.

The topic of this thread is people who count on themselves making it big but have a low probability of doing so.

I rarely watch or read fiction. I usually watch documentaries (especially nature) and Ted talks. There is an abundance of fascinating topics in the sciences and social sciences that are important to understand. Plus, I have never seen a painting 1% as breath-taking as nature.

88

What you’re describing is the value of marketing. There are billions of people who have never heard of Jane Austen or “Christmas Carol” and their lives are not objectively worse than a white person in the Anglo-American tradition. Try to look outside of your own narrow experience.

I don’t know what a “zillion” dollar is, but arts and entertainment comprise 4% of the US economy. Somehow I suspect we’d have been fine if Taylor Swift or van Gogh didn’t exist.

89

BrightSunshine, could you be just a tad into a Genesis 3:19 mode ? “By the sweat of your brow you will eat…”. Or maybe your a bit unhappy with your “wanna be singer” brother who may or may not be a “leech” but dear lord must you blaspheme Vincent Van Gogh? Now Taylor Swift… That I get.

90

It does not follow from that that such people do nothing the rest of their lives. Most simply take on more mundane careers. Or do you have evidence to the contrary?

We’d be fine if you didn’t exist, or any one person. The sum total of the human experience is the marginal contribution of billions of people, some of whom are artists, some welders, some truck drivers.

91

I live in L.A., I take a lot of Lyft rides, most of the drivers under 40 are here to act, sing, or screenwrite. I am constantly amazed by the willingness of people to come here and try… Sagaftra has 160,000 members. That’s people IN the damn union.

Amazing.

92

And there are billions of people who will never benefit from the work I’ve done in my life supporting myself. How does that relate to the fact that Austen and Van Gogh didn’t pull their economic weight during their lifetimes, but have added millions to the economy since their deaths?

And yes, its a one in a million shot, those are the exceptions. But you don’t know when you are supporting your son with his musical ambitions if he will wind up being Wyld Stallyns or not.

93

Ignore this, wrong thread…

94

This is only my perspective, so take it for what it’s worth. I know lots of musicians. One in particular released a number of CDs. Not generally on a major label, and they didn’t sell a bazillion copies. Occasionally one of his tunes gets used in a commercial. He has a local following, plays all the artsy venues. I would venture a guess that he knows his time to be a national sensation is gone, but he still loves what he does and makes a decent living.

Others have day jobs of varying levels of financial security, and they gig whenever they can. Others have their gig days mainly behind them (including another musician who had aspirations of a record deal), but they jam regularly with a circle of guys.

The only thing they all have in common is they love music and love to play. I don’t know a single one who fits the cliche you describe, that person who risks all for a pipe dream, only to ultimately fail, gnashing their teeth at their folly. How stupid I was! Uh, no, they play because they love to play, and they find whatever way permits them to continue playing as much as they can. That’s not to say no one had loftier aspirations, but all of them seem to have in common the vibe of, “This will lead where it will, I’m gonna keep doing what I love.” Not a single one did a CBA, that’s true. But neither would they have seen the need.

95

Maybe a little depressing, but some may see sports as the only way out of their situation.

Here’s scene from an old TV Mini-series called Hopkins 24/7. It’s a scared straight type of scene where the trauma surgeon is talking to a group of inner-city Baltimore kids and they’ve just visited a gun shot victim in recovery.

Some of the kids, instead of thinking about academics and becoming a doctor at a place like Hopkins, state that they need to concentrate on their basketball game and make the pros.

By the time I was 16 years old, I was getting DI letters from coaches in football and lacrosse, but a knee injury ended all that. I wasn’t big enough for high level football and there wasn’t any professional lacrosse at which you could make a living. Luckily, I was smart enough to go to grad school and get some degrees. But others may not even think that way.

96

I was a musician for quite a long time. Yes, clearly people do not understand what would motivate such an undertaking.

I did get a very good academic scholarship- full tuition at any public university in the US. I wanted to be an engineer/scientist, and seemed well on my way. Sadly for my prospects, I was born into the wrong family. They limited my college choices to Anti-Intellectual Fundamentalist Bible-Beater University (“Where science is a sin!”[sup]tm[/sup]), or no support at all. I should have just run away, so obviously in hindsight I was not as smart as I needed to be right from the start.

I started out fairly popular at college- I was there on the big scholarship, I was doing well. But the popularity was a trap- once people realized that I was not a fundamentalist bible-beater, word spread and I was basically shut out of the local society. Most places I went, I had to endure the evangelical stink-eye. What a pain in the ass! But long story short, I was trapped there, they did not offer the program I wanted, and anyway it was not the kind of environment that was supportive of my success.

So, you have to understand that my career plans were ruined. It was all over for me- being born into the wrong family meant that I did not get to be somebody, it didn’t matter how well I did. I had had a music hobby going back into high school, playing in bands for fun. I didn’t have any expectation of making it big in music, but then again I no longer had any expectation of making it in anything, period. The slim chance of music stardom was infinitely greater than the zero chance of professional success, though ‘music stardom’ was never the motive for me.

No, I poured my spare energy into music because it satisfied my need for escapism, primarily. In a hostile social environment, playing in a band amounted to creating my own independent social scene, which was good for more people than just myself. The other thing to understand was just how anguishing it was to have my golden career opportunity trashed for such dumb reasons. It was good to have an excuse to yell into a microphone. Without it, maybe I would have become violent, who knows what might have happened. I really had something to get off my chest- I was being destroyed, I had art fuel.

I don’t know if people can really understand. Art fuel is not the same as talent. I never really thought I was good enough to make it big- I didn’t have enough time to practice properly, and maybe I just didn’t have the talent anyway. Making it big would have been nice but was not the point, not at all (we didn’t try to be pretty or cool, part of the schtick was a minimalist stage show). It seemed like audiences were easy enough to fool about talent though- at a certain point I was playing a lot of local shows, and people didn’t seem to notice that I was practically a hack, but rather reacted as if I were a ‘real’ musician who knew what he was doing. That’s how I felt as a performer, a hack, but it was ok, I felt a lot worse in my normal life. I had an excuse to try to write the saddest song in the world- not the whole point of the band, but one goal. I felt like the folk/blues forms were something I was clinging to like a barnacle, that if I could practice enough I could figure out how to fly free of those forms and express what I really wanted to play. It was there, too, a kind of musical vision, and I tried and tried but never felt like I really got there. Moments of clarity in certain parts of the performances, sure, but not the whole thing.

As for the saddest song in the world bit, eventually I realized that I was never going to top Woody Guthrie or Amalia Rodriguez, I just didn’t have big enough problems. I was just being maudlin. It was therapeutic ultimately- I never beat anybody up or resorted to vandalism or anything like that, furious as I was.

And no, I didn’t make it. I finally got out of that place and into a place I really like, and as it turns out I wound up with a 6-figure job anyway. It isn’t what I originally set out to do, but I am doing pretty well, it is hard to cry about it. My experiences as a performer have actually enhanced my whole life. I don’t have as much money as I might have otherwise, but, for one thing, I get to keep my deep appreciation of music. I got to be more of a star than I ever imagined I would be, an experience I don’t think you can get any other way. I seem to have extinguished my need for a lot of attention and can focus on my success. After all those years of yelling at crowds, I seem to be able to persuade people with my voice or otherwise do little ‘glamour tricks’ (I don’t know what to call it) that seem to fly under people’s radar unrecognized as musical craft.

And those experiences probably explain why I have had so much luck with dating. I haven’t made good dating choices in retrospect, I never got married, but I could always talk someone new into dating me for a few years until things fell apart. After enough iterations of that, I think I finally figured out what to go for, and now I have the coolest gf ever, an entrepreneur who has it together and who I can relate to as a public figure because of my past experience. She’s competent, assertive, insightful, and kind of a sex enthusiast :slight_smile:

So, everything seems resolved for me. Yes, for a long time I was poor and/or distraught, but I never gave in and submitted to what I thought was unacceptable. I fought back in my own way, and though I really did not make it as a musician, those times are key to my present state of victory.

97

One thing that hasn’t been mentioned, except tangentially by me, is that there’s failed professionals too, would-be doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers, architects, scientists, businessmen. Failure to attain a means of making a living doesn’t just occur in the athletics and arts fields.

98

But the difference is that the probability of being able to make a living in these fields is much higher, even if you are relatively mediocre. You don’t have a long tail of people making almost nothing.
A lot of that is because people bad enough at these fields to fail in them get screened out before they get credentials.