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Comment by tappio | Hacker News Reader

This is a false assumption. We will only know retrospectively whether it was valuable or not.

1. She gets better all the time, and might be super popular in the future 2. Many writings became relevant only long after the death of the author

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A lot of those relevant writings became relevant because of the horrible experiences the author went through forged them into an interesting writer. If we're assuming that we only know retrospectively whether the writing is important then the best course of action would be for people to write as a hobby and make choices that are likely (rather than unlikely) to lead to a comfortable life. Particularly in this current era where we might suspect that writing and publishing a book is getting much easier thanks to technology.

Are you arguing that most good writers from history were poor? This is after all the only "horrible experience" a subsidy would alleviate. I don't think that's actually supported by evidence, most great writers I can think of were relatively extremely sheltered (although they often were sensitive to the horrible experiences of others)

> Are you arguing that most good writers from history were poor?

No. If I was arguing that I'd have said that.

I'm observing that a lot of great writers had pretty miserable lives and I'm arguing that people should aim to live comfortably.

Sorry, I must have misunderstood, I thought you were still on the topic of the subsidy.

I think the argument is a) most writers have to do a lot of writing to achieve writing consumable/appreciated but sufficient to be considered successful, b) most great writers had to go through some shit in life to incorporate that in their writing to make it interesting in order to be successful.

> A lot of those relevant writings became relevant because of the horrible experiences the author went through forged them into an interesting writer.

Sometimes artists suffer, but it's mostly a legend at this point. Plenty of great artists have perfectly fine lives. Look at like, any modern fantasy or sci fi author.

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