For me, shitty style / lazy writing make me put a book down immediately. I was raised on the worship of style you find in writers like Flaubert or Nabokov (who also happened to have deplorable political views) and I can’t shake it.
Others commented here recently that making every female character in a story into a sex object is a bad thing.
What are some reasons you’ll put a book down after you’ve spent at least a little time giving it a try?
He's a fine example of the folly of "autodidacts." He isn't particularly good at anything except promoting his own brand and steering his own cult with a lot of billionaire backing because he kisses that much ass. He wrote very bad poetry about how it's too bad that the masses won't learn to code, but he fucking doesn't know how to code either.
I have a very specific and parasocial beef with the guy. Probably the biggest part of my being able to imagine a better world and become a filthy commie was through rationalism. I tried to get a less wrong meetup going, emailed him a bit, visited other groups. It was what allowed me to imagine a better world was possible after obama broke my faith in the dnc. It was the specific failure of that group to be less wrong that primed me for chapo and bernie. I still have specific enmity for them starting a fucking cult dedicated to logic and consistently being irrationally credulous fools.
I can relate. I don't want to doxx myself any further than I already have, but I was big into the extropian then futurology convention circuits from the late 90s all the way into the late 2000s when just about every gathering became bought and owned by billionaire oligarchs and started having Department of Defense guys showing off their surveillance and killing machines, too. There was even a phantasmagoric presentation where someone was getting a crude implant stuck in them with an audience watching, blood and all. The cult vibes were too much and I left forever. It gave me great ideas for my book trilogy, though.
He's one of those "too smart for school" types, which I used to think I was back in high school. Then I went to college and had to overcome serious academic challenges for the first time, and I realized just how limited that knowledge was. He dropped out of high school and never went to college, so he never had that sort of humbling experience. Instead he, as you say, gets his ego inflated by billionaires because he tells them what they want to hear.