/lit/ - Literature

Books are the middle of the road items that are being crushed in usefulness and the market. This goes for fiction and non fiction.

Fiction:
>Low: Movies, TV, tiktok, YouTube
>Low effort slop consumed by lowest common denominator
>Middle: Books
>Time investment required but the market for them is shit
>High: Video games
>Huge blockbuster budgets, huge technical work required, huge investment possible

Non- fiction:
>Low
>Articles, blogs, tweets
>Efficient and minimised time investment to transfer and learn information
>Middle
>Non-fiction prose books
>Awkward and more expensive than the above. Many non-fiction books seem to be half written as things to reference and half written to be read all the way through, which is awkward
>High
>Textbooks, internet tutorials, courses
>High intelligence and investment required, high benefits

This is obvious when you see people asking to learn about maths or economics on /lit/ and they get recommend prose books which are upper midwit tier at best.

.

>>19736017
forgot pic

I recently realized I'm a midwit. Truly average and will never be great at anything. books for dealing with this?

>>19147711
This is actually an excellent question. Why must the peacock have large cumbersome tails to attract a mate? Many other animals measure suitable mating partners by other much more efficient metrics. You could argue that the tail doubles as a defense mechanism for scaring away predators, but this doubtedly outweighs the benefit of simply being more nimble and less visible.

When the population fares well and the females can safely afford to be selective, each iterative generation of peacocks will have more beautiful and grander tails. This is a reproductive strategy that seems less about survival and more about art. There seems to be a caste of animals that share this progression towards higher aesthetic ends, such as fireflies, which selectively mate to glow brighter despite the obvious downfalls of that mechanism. And what about humans? It is in a way difficult to and costly to survive as humans. We are physically weaker and need to adapt through technology and through science. The amoeba on the other hand expends little to no effort to reproduce and survive, and there are more amoeba than humans on an unimaginable scale. If the metric is survival, why did nature progress past the ultimate reproductive model?

It is because we do not survive simply for survival's sake. We survive in order to be complex. We survive in order to understand both the universe and ourselves. The biological mechanisms Darwin observes are not strictly for survival in our case, but for the perpetuation of a self-aware being that interprets experience intelligently.

I think its apparent that there is more to our existence, and the existence of almost all creatures, than mere reproduction. The reproductive strategies themselves are more often than not conducive to something greater than mere survival. There is real purpose and intent behind the composition of many organisms that exceeds the general principle of evolution. Thus, I find it only fair to make the case for using darwin as a buttress, not a cornerstone, for understanding our existence.

>>18994319
>>18994438
>Wow! dinosaurs and big sandworms are cool!
>NOOOOO! WHY ARE YOU ONLY INTERESTED IN THE MONSTERS IN THESE BOOKS THERE ARE SUBTLE THEMES OF MAN SHOULDNT MEDDLE IN NATURE AND BE GOD IN THE FORMER AND THEMES OF IMPERIALISM AND HEGEMONY AND MYTH AND HONOR IN THE LATTER, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR POTENTIAL WITH THESE BOOKS!!
>>Wow! dinosaurs and big sandworms are cool!

>>18766112
Fuck no. I'm a retarded high school drop out.

>>17775805
You in the middle.