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> breadth and depth of understanding about psychology have improved dramatically

Provide one tiny bit of evidence for this. Do you seriously think that Shakespeare (for e.g.) did not have a profound understanding of human psychology?



not who you are replying to - but: Shakespeare was limited by the number of interactions he had with humans. He did not have the internet.

We also have neurology as a science now. So that's one bit of evidence for the claim.

Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.


> not who you are replying to - but: Shakespeare was limited by the number of interactions he had with humans. He did not have the internet.

The internet may increase the number of interactions, but decreases their quality.

Looking at most online interactions it looks to me that people show less empathy and understanding than they do IRL.

> Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.

Does that help write better books. If the claim was true the best fiction would be written by psychologists and neurologists. Is it?

I think that knowledge is on the wrong side (for writing fiction) of Chesterton's distinction (in a work of fiction - I cannot remember which Fr Brown story) between understanding someone from the inside with empathy and from the outside with analysis.


Hard disagree. I made an analogy in another reply to Monet not knowing quantum physics. Lacking that information didn’t deter his famous explorations of light effects.

Humans are great at figuring out how things behave before we have a great model of why they do it. And by Shakespeare’s time, we had a pretty good grasp on practical human psychology, even if we had less understanding of the mechanisms behind it.


We are excellent at figuring things out. We get better at it over time, as we grow our collective knowledge base.

I agree that we are great at figuring out things before we have a model of why things work. And we have a mountain of context to work from already. Shakespeare wasn't an idiot, and he wasn't in a vacuum but his 'context window' was 'smaller' than a lot of people today(quotes because dubious terminology).

Art is improving. Science is improving. human understanding, and communication of that understanding is improving too. That is my point.


I won't argue against that at all. Someday we're going to have someone with Shakespeare's brilliance and modern foundations, and I can't wait to see what that looks like.

(And maybe we already do have that person. I'm shamefully out of date with modern literature.)


> Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.

Yes, but this doesn't prove that a modern author could produce a better text than a historically great author, which was the original line of thought. Or is there a specific modern text that you have in mind that proves the point?


Define 'better'...

How about 'more accurate' as a measure...

Then every text book is an example of this measure of better improving over time...

How about 'more representative of the human experience'... (or enjoy/like more)

Then we measure how well a human relates to a book: which is taste, a subjective quality that is notoriously hard to measure in any meaningful way. This measure becomes not a single measure, but a collective measure against the sum of humans who interact with it: an untenable standard - and biased towards the present anyway - which doesn't give charity to your position.

...So how do you measure a book to be 'better'? That's the neat part: you don't. You can measure what you 'like' more, you can measure 'features'... but we probably won't even agree on what makes a book 'better'. We like what we like, and most of us have a hard time even explaining why we like something.


If he did it's not shown in his writing, or really any pre-20th century writers really.


have you read any pre-20th C writers? Or any novels or plays at all?


The conflicts in his plays just aren't that profound, you know? Compared to modern "psychological turmoil" it's relatively simplistic, something like Macbeth's "ambition vs morality".

Modern writers pull in more layers of depth, explain the ebbs and flows of motivations and identities through social forces and work more with complex ideas like self-deception and rationalization. Shakespeare's characters are generally reliable narrators in a way that later lit tends not to be.


this is bait


there's a reason Harold Bloom titled his book about Shakespeare The Invention of the Human




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