11–20 of 56 posts
McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative. However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World . That was a long slog which, althoug…
— Tracy Kidder, author of The Soul of a New Machine and many other great writings.
Basically: Don't crystallize too early, have a primordial soup of notes that you coagulate/congeal bit by bit. Take little iterative steps on local slices, don't try to construct the final product from the get-go. This method came quite naturally to me during my writing-based personal projects since I have no deadline or anything and am literally just collecting thousands of little A6/A7 notes that I capture as they…
I wonder how the non-fiction element plays into it. I guess if you have a lot of fragments the hard part is organizing and then glueing them together. But in non fiction a lot of this is done or you. You are given the order and a lot of the glue. The glue you are missing is probably relatively obvious ("why did they do this?") and you can get that information and include it, or you cant and there is nothing to be done about it ("the motive is unknown" etc).
Whereas in fiction these are all unknown. You have to decide. And you have to make it compelling, and believable, and maybe astonishing and otherworldly at the same time.
In some limited experience in fictional writing, this is the hard part. I have all these fragments (this happened, this happens, there is this dynamic with 2 characters, some broad themes I want to hit on, etc). Makes me think about if non-fiction stories could be used as a sort of "seed" for the glue. I feel like the content is pretty highly coupled to that sort of pattern though.
McPhee was recommended as someone whose writing "makes boring things interesting". I did enjoy The Curve of Binding Energy (nuclear science) and to some extent Coming out of the Country (Alaska). Both of those featured interesting vignettes and colorful characters which propelled along the narrative. However, I then turned to his magnum opus on geology, Annals of the Former World . That was a long slog which, althoug…
It’s been shown that people in fact prefer to have their beliefs confirmed, rather than challenged by investigative reporting, hence the decline in real journalism, because it is both more difficult and in the end less popular across a large audience.
> He said, if you tell someone you’re a journalist they’re going to believe you. Your job is to honor their trust.
Sadly, that is no longer true. Today's "journalists" far too often see their job as proselytizing rather than reporting.
The McPhee method sounds like a great framework for making writing prompts. That is, prompts for LLMs to write things.
>in stage one he accumulates notes; in stage two he selects them; in stage three he structures them; and in stage four he writes. By the time he is crafting sentences the structure of the piece as a whole, and of each section, even paragraph, and the logic connecting them all, is already determined, thanks to the mechanical work done in the first three stages. McPhee is on rails the whole time he writes his first draft. From there it’s all downhill and the standard thing that everybody does: revision, revision again, then refinement—a sculptor with ax, then knife, then scalpel.
I know hackernews kinda hates LLMs but I don think this idea has to be so offensive. Much of the work and value from the author is in collecting these fragments and structuring them. Purely from a communication standpoint, I have no issues whatsoever with an LLM stitching them together and choosing the vocab and grammar.
This is about journalism, in an age when journalism is being bulldozed by cheap content, AI hallucinations and other clickbait tactics. Journalism still has the idea of finding facts, things that correspond to something in reality. It’s been shown that people in fact prefer to have their beliefs confirmed, rather than challenged by investigative reporting, hence the decline in real journalism, because it is both more…
I think people prefer to be right. Any animal that wants to walk the Earth successfully has an intrinsic need to understand the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Wanting the fruit tree to be right outside the cave doesn't make it so.
But that desire to have correct beliefs is complex in humans where we also have beliefs about ourselves and others have beliefs about us. We don't want to just be right, but believe ourselves good at being right, and be known to others as someone who is usually right.
That puts some hysteresis in our belief system where we have a tendency to disregard evidence that goes against out beliefs for a while until it's sufficiently compelling.
But, also, no one wants to be a gullible rube or an out-of-touch idiot. We will update our beliefs when in a social and information environment that permits us to do so. The problem today is largely that we have so much choice of our social and information environment, then it's much easier to select an echo chamber that lets us think we're already right then be confronted with the reality that we're wrong.
The decline in investigative journalism can, I think, be explained largely in economic terms. The news has always been driven by ads. Even when people paid for papers, the subscription cost didn't fully cover the newspapers' expenses. The classified ads filled that gap.
Then the Internet arose and transferred advertising out of classifieds and into Craigslist, eBay, and others. And it transferred human attention out of newspapers and into social media. There simply weren't enough resources left to fund expensive investigative journalism.
This is a beautiful website. The article and homepage.