Comment on Science vs. art

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:33:10 GMT

That's cause there's a difference between reason and emotions?

I would feel a greater sense of fulfillment giving a kid an ice cream cone and seeing his eyes light up, than I would donating $1,000 to a a children's charity and knowing it would help dozens of children in need. I'm not saying that's better, just that my pre-programmed emotional responses react more strongly to it.

Your question seems to assume becoming a novelist is fundamentally a charitable act, or that novelists are working to maximize total world utility (unlike...everyone else?). I think most of them are just people who really, really like writing. I remember one novelist who said that the only valid excuse for becoming a writer was that you can't keep yourself from writing even if you try.

Even rejecting all that, the world does need a certain number of novelists, and not every novelist could succeed as an investment banker. If you assess yourself as having a certain high amount of literary skill and no even higher amounts of skill in other areas, then it may be that your best bet for contributing value to the world is in writing. Shakespeare's probably was.

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