First, make me care

My favorite example is actually one that I believe could be true[0]: self-reinforcing cycles of human conflict, that resemble the life cycle of a parasite. From an old (2014) SlateStarCodex essay[1]. Some of it is going to be controversial read today[2], so I'll just give you the relevant "money quote" from the end:

What would it mean for a meme to have a life cycle as complicated as toxoplasma?

Consider the war on terror. They say that every time the United States bombs Pakistan or Afghanistan or somewhere, all we’re doing is radicalizing the young people there and making more terrorists. Those terrorists then go on to kill Americans, which makes Americans get very angry and call for more bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Taken as a meme, it’s a single parasite with two hosts and two forms. In an Afghan host, it appears in a form called ‘jihad’, and hijacks its host into killing himself in order to spread it to its second, American host. In the American host it morphs in a form called ‘the war on terror’, and it hijacks the Americans into giving their own lives (and tax dollars) to spread it back to its Afghan host in the form of bombs.

From the human point of view, jihad and the War on Terror are opposing forces. From the memetic point of view, they’re as complementary as caterpillars and butterflies. Instead of judging, we just note that somehow we accidentally created a replicator, and replicators are going to replicate until something makes them stop.

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[0] - In whatever sense models are "true", i.e. a nice way to describe reality, that's succinct and has good predictive power, or something.

[1] - https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rag...

[2] - Which is not the same thing as saying it turned out wrong.

This definitely seems true to me, from my limited short content usage. I try to avoid getting sucked into the feed (Youtube Shorts is the one I have used), but if I do find myself scrolling through the morass of clips from Shark Tank or Family Guy [1], the one guy I'll almost always stop for is FunkFPV, who just does a duet on clips of stupid "hacks" and incidences of dumb stuff happening in factory / warehouse / construction settings.

He's just a blue-collar type guy who is mildly funny when critiquing the stupidity of, say, a guy walking up a badly placed ladder with a mini split condenser on his shoulder - but it's a niche that for whatever reason I enjoy, and I don't think I'd remember his handle if it wasn't for his very specific niche.

Interestingly enough [2] I've noticed a number of other creators seem to have sprung up in this niche and will occasionally find a video of some other blue-collar-lookin-dude doing the same schtick. I doubt FunkFPV is the first (in fact he sort of reminds me of an "AvE-lite") to tap this weird market, but he's my touchpoint, at least.

[1]: Yes, it is embarrassing that the algorithm has determined that these are likely to garner my attention

[2]: it's actually not really interesting because almost nothing on the topic of short-form video is actually interesting by any reasonable definition of that word, so this is just a turn of phrase

You’re right. I was just riffing on the implied subject matter based on the title of Gwern's imaginary essay and how it reminds me of something that Devereaux would write about. In asking if he had anything that sounds as striking as the title that’s as far as I was taking the link between the two.

The ‘serialized’ voice that Devereaux uses works. Especially when you start from the beginning. I only hopped around a few posts while browsing his archive, but what I’m imagining is from the first post in 2019 all the way until the more recent one you shared, is an ongoing conversation. [1] Or something like a tour (“Welcome to my collection!”). Confident is a good way to describe the style. I like how I feel immediately orientated about the subject matter and the context surrounding how the writing came about.

Here’s a similar introduction from 2022:

> This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons of the ACOUP Senate. The original questions here were ‘what caused the loss of state capacity during the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West’ and ‘how could science fiction better reflect such a collapse or massive change?’ By way of answer, I want to boil those questions down into something a bit more direct: how bad was the fall of Rome in the West?

— https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f...>

I deliberately sought out the introduction of an essay that was the beginning of a series instead of one that is...Part IVb. Whoever is reading Part IVb of the history of "the heavy infantry of the ancient Greek poleis" is probably too invested and enthused not to care about meta-commentary about alternative sequencing for the series. The quote above is from a Part I entry and I can’t say that the meta-commentary that similarly starts this off makes me less interested in it. The intrigue is set early on and with confidence. If I didn’t care before, well I do now. I sort of feel compelled to care. I have at least a weeks worth of lectures to catch up on about the fall of Western Rome and there’s apparently a senate’s worth of similarly-invested readers who have already deliberated that the severity of its collapse is of utmost importance this week.

`Jach madę a comment elsewhere about how “style is more important when you want to reach someone who hasn't heard of you.” [2] The thing is that in Devereaux’s case most of the essays that I’ve found begin with this ‘casual professorial’ sort of tone. I’m meandering and I don’t want to conclude all of this with a point that misinterprets your own to forge the upper-hand in an argument that doesn’t exist.

Referring back to the sample “Farm” essay:

> Venice ruled half the Mediterranean. And yet… it had no farms. How do you have an empire without farms?

I don’t think that this is cleverly phrased or that it's a set up for something clever later on. At least I don’t think so if we’re using the word in a way that evokes strokes of ingenuity and not with a negative connotation, like ‘trite’ or ’slick’. It may be ‘clever’ in a sense like “This sounds like the intro from a page straight of a pop history NYT best seller”. I could go with that. Yeah, it is indicative of something I probably wouldn’t care to read not only because it comes across as ‘clever’, but more so unsophisticated. Let us bear in mind however, that this is a softball introduction used to make a point. It looks like neither of us are convinced that it does so successfully anyhow.

Devereaux’s second post, and first essay on acoup.blog start off:

> Evaluating armor designs, especially in works of fantasy or speculative fiction, can be a tricky business. Often times, we can see a design and know something is off about it, but not quite what. Or alternatively, fans and internet commentators will blast this or that design in TV or a movie simply because it does not conform to their own narrow vision of what armor is ‘supposed’ to look like. I’ve seen fictional examples of gambesons, muscle cuirasses, mirror-plates and pectorals all mocked by self-appointed expects – and these are armors that were worn historically!

> So how can we do better assess if armor ‘makes sense,’ even when it is a non-historical design?

From what I could find, this is the sole departure from the ’serialized’, ‘casual professorial’ voice I described earlier. What would you call this? I think it lacks the air of sophistication and in media res meta-commentary that the rest of his writing begins with. To `Jach’s point it does appear to stylistically serve as an introduction of its own to the author himself.

Informative is what I’d call it. And there are so many different ways to inform the reader depending on the circumstance.

> Venice ruled half the Mediterranean. And yet… it had no farms. How do you have an empire without farms?

This is uninformative. Clever? If information is to be turned like a trick, for sure.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/05/03/blog-overview-a-collection-of-...>

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759159>

> It's good of you to beware immature judgment lest you so be judged.

A dear reminder best expressed by the second Caliph of the Islamic state Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه: “Bring yourself to account before you are taken to account.”

I think I’ve come across both that quote of Tolkien’s before and I’m also vaguely familiar with A Modest Proposal, to the degree that after reading the subtitle I was reminded that it’s satire. I’m not sure how this will affect my reading of it but I intend to assign myself both Letter 213 of Tolkien’s letters and the whole of A Modest Proposal with the questions you presented in relation to it as homework! Thanks.

Edit: I also just found your blog and am subscribed to your RSS feed. “Hard Labor” is a nice read. It’s hard to come across this level of introspection that doesn’t go out of its way to appeal to an audience. Well I’m reading your stuff now. And I am judging you too! (Half joke).

It's impossible to discuss TikTok in isolation without discussing its algorithm or the whole 'the medium is the message' nature of it - which is precisely what distinguishes it from the era of the weird and bizarre personal website. In other words, it's inherently biased towards one form of content in a way that the general web is not (a website can contain anything, unlike TikTok).