Another Look at Sam Bankman-Fried on Shakespeare

Posted on by Joseph Shieber

by Joseph Shieber

Oh, he’s wrong. So are many of the people coming at him.

One of the most-cited passages of Michael Lewis’s new Sam Bankman-Fried book, Going Infinite, is a quote from a blog post from 2012. In that post, a twenty year old Bankman-Fried expresses contempt for the consensus view that Shakespeare is a literary genius.

Bankman-Fried offers two arguments against the consensus view.

The first argument involves an argument on the literary merits: that Shakespeare’s plots rely “on simultaneously one-dimensional and unrealistic characters, illogical plots, and obvious endings.”

The second argument – and the one that raced across the internet after the release of Going Infinite – is a probabilistic one. Given the much smaller population of English speakers in the 16th century, and given the much lower prevalence of education, what are the chances that the best writer in the history of the English language would have been born then? As Bankman-Fried put it:

… the Bayesian priors are pretty damning.  About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that.  When Shakespeare wrote almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate–probably as low as about ten million people.  By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere.  What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564?  The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.

The problem with this, says the 20 year old Bankman-Fried, is that “We like old plays and old movies and old wines and old instruments and old laws and old people and old records and old music.  We like them because they’re old and come with stories but we convince ourselves that there’s more: we convince ourselves that they really were better.  … We don’t just respect the old; we think that the old is right and that those who prefer the new to the old are wrong.”

Why, given these arguments against Shakespeare and other olds, would we persist in revering them? Bankman-Fried cites at least two reasons. (“At least” two reasons, because the reason-giving comes at the end of a blog post written at 2:40 am and Bankman-Fried is rushing to give the peroration and conclude, so it becomes harder to disentangle the reasoning.)

One reason is that “that there is a whole lot of inertia in the system.  If Shakespeare is the most respected thing in 1900 then teachers will teach it in 1900 and academics will write about it in 1900 and if you’re young in 1900 and want to be ‘in the know’ and want to become an insider in academic literature, then, well, you’d better study Shakespeare; and so it’s passed on from generation to generation.” The second reason is a general conservatism: “once something acquires a label, it’s very hard to dislodge the label–even if the label is as the best author ever and there are more and more authors every day giving the old one a run for its money (and then some).”

The most common reaction to Bankman-Fried on Shakespeare has been to mock him or to decry him as a cultural philistine – and to mock the credulousness of Michael Lewis, who cites Bankman-Fried’s Bayesian argument against Shakespeare’s greatness as early evidence of Bankman-Fried’s iconoclasm in the mold of other Michael Lewis heroes like Billy Beane of Moneyball or Kahneman and Tversky of The Undoing Project.

 

Such reactions, however, are unhelpful. If someone argues that the respect for Shakespeare is merely a result of conformism and signaling, then piling on to that person on social media only provides evidence for their claim, rather than effectively rebutting it.

For that reason, what I want to do here is to address Bankman-Fried’s arguments, before turning to some larger lessons that we can draw from both Bankman-Fried’s arguments and their failings.

I’ll have only a little to say directly about Bankman-Fried’s first argument – that Shakespeare’s plots are subpar and his characters one-dimensional – because that argument is not terribly substantive. Bankman-Fried only cites two plays, Much Ado About Nothing and Romeo and Juliet, and his very brief discussion of both doesn’t suggest that he read the plays or that he read them carefully, since the points he made could easily have been made by someone reading a Wikipedia summary. Most significantly, he cites no direct textual evidence supporting his claims.

There is, of course, much more that one could say here. Since many of Shakespeare’s plays – the histories, of course, but most of the others as well – were based on stories that were well-known to his audiences, it would be unsurprising if the plots were predictable. (Although – again, at least in the case of the histories – it would be surprising if the plots were, as Bankman-Fried suggests, “unrealistic.”) Certainly one part of Shakespeare’s genius lies in his use of language. For example, Shakespeare coined more than 1700 words that we still use today. Furthermore, giving the lie to Bankman-Fried’s claim that Shakespeare’s characters are one-dimensional, Shakespeare was a very subtle observer of human psychology – so subtle that even his “monsters” like Iago, Richard III, or Caliban elicit our sympathy as well as our revulsion.

There is a reason, of course, why Bankman-Fried’s first argument, addressing the actual merits of Shakespeare’s writing, is so cursory. If he’s already convinced that Shakespeare is vastly overrated, then it would be a waste of time for Bankman-Fried to engage with the writing in sufficient depth to provide a more detailed assessment of Shakespeare’s work. I’ll return to this point.

Bankman-Fried’s main argument, and the argument that provoked so much outrage on the internet, is the Bayesian one: given how low our prior probability should be that a 16th century writer would turn out to be the greatest writer in the English language, we would need a LOT of evidence that this writer is in fact great before we could come to accept that they ARE in fact the greatest.

One immediate problem with this argument is that the very nature of genius is that it defies our expectations. Consider Newton. The same arguments that tell against a 16th century writer turning out to be the greatest English writer – the relatively small population, the low prevalence of education – also tell against a 16th century thinker turning out to be an Isaac Newton (well, at least the inventor of the calculus Isaac Newton; not so much the alchemist Isaac Newton). We can make analogous observations about Bach, Euler, Mozart, Gauss, or Einstein.

One element characterizing a genius is that their existence is uncanny. As Freud observes of Gretchen’s response to Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, what is unsettling is the otherworldly ability that Mephistopheles seems to possess. Mephistopheles notes of Gretchen that “Sie fühlt, dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie, vielleicht wohl gar der Teufel bin.” (“She feels that I am certainly a genius and perhaps even the devil.”)

When we experience the work of a genius, then, part of what characterizes that experience is that we can’t imagine anyone having created such a work. Who could imagine that an obscure Swiss patent clerk could write one of the articles – let alone all four – that Einstein produced in his annus mirabilis of 1905?!

If this is correct, however, then the phenomenon of genius indicates a point at which Bayesian reasoning breaks down.

That such cases are a problem for Bayes’s Theorem is not a new idea. Indeed, Richard Price, who as Bayes’s literary executor was responsible for the publication of “An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,” was well aware of this problem.

For example, in his Four Dissertations, Price writes

The improbability of drawing a lottery in any particular assigned manner independently of the evidence of testimony or of our own senses acquainting us that it has been drawn in that manner is such as exceeds all conception. And yet the most common testimony is sufficient to put us out of doubt about it. Suppose here a person was to reject the evidence offered him on the pretence that the improbability of the falsehood of it is almost infinitely less than that of the event or suppose that universally a person was to reject all accounts which he reads or hears of facts which are more uncommon than it is that he should read or hear what is false. What would be thought of such a person? How soon would he be made to see and acknowledge his mistake?

Here’s the case Price has in mind. Suppose the PowerBall lottery is drawn on a Wednesday. The chances of winning the PowerBall are roughly 1 in 292 million. In other words, the chance of any particular sequence of numbers being drawn for the lottery is highly unlikely. Whatever you think of the reliability of a newspaper, say, or some other site on the internet, you have to admit that the chance of a mistake appearing in a newspaper or other site is much greater than 1 in 292 million. Nevertheless, when you want to check about the PowerBall numbers on the Thursday after the drawing, chances are that you check one site – one site! – and believe whatever the site relays about the numbers of the drawing.

The appearance of a Shakespeare or a Newton is like winning the PowerBall – an almost miraculous event. Given the analogy to miraculous events, I can sympathize a bit with Bankman-Fried’s contrarian impulse. Many millions of people believe that Jesus performed miracles, but that doesn’t incline me to accept the divinity of Jesus. Bankman-Fried seems to think that the near-universal acclaim enjoyed by Shakespeare is more like the belief in religious miracles; the various testimonies on behalf of Shakespeare’s genius are not independent, and therefore cannot serve as strong evidence of that genius.

I noted before that, because he’s already convinced that Shakespeare is vastly overrated, Bankman-Fried fails to engage with the writing in sufficient depth to provide a more detailed assessment of Shakespeare’s work. In the case of the work of a genius – whether Shakespeare or Bach, Gauss or Einstein – by failing to engage with that work one ultimately only diminishes oneself.

My problem with Bankman-Fried, in other words, isn’t that he experienced a contrarian impulse. It’s that when he experienced that impulse, he either didn’t actually read Shakespeare to judge for himself whether the universal acclamation was justified, or – if he did read Shakespeare to form his own opinion – his reading was so blinkered and unsympathetic that he failed to appreciate what he was reading.

In either case, when contemplating Bankman-Fried’s reaction to Shakespeare I was reminded of John Stuart Mill’s essay on Bentham. The essay is so excellent that I’m going to quote from it at length.

Mill decries Bentham’s inability to “draw light from other minds.” In a passage that recalls Bankman-Fried’s own blindness to the Shakespeare’s genius, Mill writes that:

His writings contain few traces of the accurate knowledge of any schools of thinking but his own; and many proofs of his entire conviction that they could teach him nothing worth knowing. For some of the most illustrious of previous thinkers, his contempt was unmeasured. … He had a phrase, expressive of the view he took of all moral speculations to which his method had not been applied, or (which he considered as the same thing) not founded on a recognition of utility as the moral standard; this phrase was “vague generalities.” Whatever presented itself to him in such a shape, he dismissed as unworthy of notice, or dwelt upon only to denounce as absurd. He did not heed, or rather the nature of his mind prevented it from occurring to him, that these generalities contained the whole unanalysed experience of the human race.

Mill’s analysis of Bentham’s weakness might also serve well to characterize Bankman-Fried. Like Bentham, Bankman-Fried prides himself on a rigorousness of thought and an iconoclasm founded on contempt for common opinion:

… it must be allowed, that even the originality which can, and the courage which dares, think for itself, is not a more necessary part of the philosophical character than a thoughtful regard for previous thinkers, and for the collective mind of the human race. … Every circumstance which gives a character to the life of a human being, carries with it its peculiar biases; its peculiar facilities for perceiving some things, and for missing or forgetting others. But, from points of view different from his, different things are perceptible; and none are more likely to have seen what he does not see, than those who do not see what he sees. … The collective mind does not penetrate below the surface, but it sees all the surface; which profound thinkers, even by reason of their profundity, often fail to do: their intenser view of a thing in some of its aspects diverting their attention from others.

The hardiest assertor, therefore, of the freedom of private judgment; the keenest detector of the errors of his predecessors, and of the inaccuracies of current modes of thought,—is the very person who most needs to fortify the weak side of his own intellect, by study of the opinions of mankind in all ages and nations, and of the speculations of philosophers of the modes of thought most opposite to his own. It is there that he will find the experiences denied to himself; the remainder of the truth of which he sees but half; the truths, of which the errors he detects are commonly but the exaggerations. If, like Bentham, he brings with him an improved instrument of investigation, the greater is the probability that he will find ready prepared a rich abundance of rough ore, which was merely waiting for that instrument. A man of clear ideas errs grievously if he imagines that whatever is seen confusedly does not exist: it belongs to him, when he meets with such a thing, to dispel the mist, and fix the outlines of the vague form which is looming through it.

… How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never been made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow-creatures. Other ages and other nations were a blank to him for purposes of instruction. He measured them but by one standard,—their knowledge of facts, and their capability to take correct views of utility, and merge all other objects in it. … He saw accordingly in man little but what the vulgarest eye can see … 

Reflecting upon Bankman-Fried, it’s hard to avoid applying to him the same diagnosis that Mill forms of Bentham: “Knowing so little of human feelings, he knew still less of the influences by which those feelings are formed: all the more subtle workings both of the mind upon itself, and of external things upon the mind, escaped him; and no one, probably, who, in a highly instructed age, ever attempted to give a rule to all human conduct, set out with a more limited conception either of the agencies by which human conduct is, or of those by which it should be, influenced.”