"Meanwhile, the shared literature that forms the basis of our common language becomes more obscure and forgotten The reference pools of popular culture are ever more fragmented"
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"When I say Scylla and Charybdis I convey in a three word metaphor what would take a paragraph for me to describe literally"
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"Having to explain how it's different from a rock and a hard place, how Scylla is a known threat with frightening fixed costs but Charybdis an unknown one whose costs are probabilistic, which might do nothing or be catastrophic"
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"And hence why Odysseus displayed a difficult kind of moral courage by erring on the side of Scylla even when she was devouring his men Do you see? Today it takes one line of code to do what once required a hundred, but it takes a hundred lines if English what once required one"
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"We make it easier and easier to communicate with our machines, just as it becomes harder and harder to communicate to our fellow humans And we wonder why we've come to prefer the former"
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It was kind of a Boomer rant (the guy was an obvious author avatar for the author, who was in fact a Boomer who majored in English and became a programmer) But he has a point Memes are the new literary allusions, but the audience for memes is probably a lot narrower
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The very fact that, you know, if I'm trying to use the Distracted Boyfriend meme to say something I'm probably not talking to anyone my parents' age
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Actually I'm trying to think if there is a Twitter meme that means what "Scylla and Charybdis" does "The movie villain vs the real villain" isn't really it
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Replying to @arthur_affect
first thing I see on google is using them as an analogy of "choosing the lesser of two evils"
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Replying to @NarandiaOwl
Yeah that's not completely it though Part of the point is Charybdis is invisible and there's a huge temptation to gamble by steering closer to it
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A very apropos use of Scylla and Charybdis as a metaphor would be the pandemic Scylla = huge economic costs of a lockdown Charybdis = even bigger economic costs of exponentially expanding death rate followed by locking down anyway a month later
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Replying to @arthur_affect
yeah its more a risk comparison scenario I suppose. Some of the "two buttons" or trolley memes would be comparable.
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Replying to @NarandiaOwl @arthur_affect
given the nature of twitter memes i think many of them -- guy looking back, two buttons, exit swerve, possibly even "is this x"-- would conditionally work as scylla + charybdis, given the right text, but there doesn't leap to mind one that inherently carries that meaning
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