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First, make me care

gwern.net

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Re: First, make me care

#161

Post by bigDinosaur »

wetpaws wrote: post #52
tolerance wrote: post #30

You know I’ve never read an article by Gwern that made me feel like he was sensitive to this idea, one that in my head essentially breaks down to the use of narrative and the leverage of “stakes” that inform the reader of kinds of conflict that make a narrative special. I’m reminded of a remark made by David Foster Wallace (on KCRW? Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with the purpose of writ…

Gwern has hands down one of the worst blogs, readability wise, ever created on the internets. His writing style can be hit or miss too.

Gwern does actual research into usability, and that's the reason there aren't any ads on Gwern.net (which alone makes it far from the worst for readability, I mean have you used the internet without an ad blocker on the median blog??).

Anyway, it's readable for me, and I quite enjoy it, so perhaps you just aren't the target audience. That doesn't matter at all, you don't need to read Gwern at all.

Re: First, make me care

#163

Post by sizzle »

rossant wrote: post #136
kmoser wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video. There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a certai…

Fifteen years ago, I ran a YouTube channel with hundreds of obscure French videos about pediatrics and parenting. One of them suddenly attracted massive attention worldwide, especially from Pakistan and Indonesia. According to the stats, 99% of the viewers were male. Millions and millions of views. For months, it sat in the top five French videos on YouTube. Ad revenue went through the roof, like three figures per da…

That’s really actually hilarious and would probably get your account flagged by AI for showing obscenity or something nowadays.

Re: First, make me care

#164

Post by [deleted] »

andai wrote: post #42
simonw wrote: post #4

This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…

>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind. I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.

[deleted]

Re: First, make me care

#165

Post by figman3 »

andai wrote: post #42
simonw wrote: post #4

This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video. You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is heavily used by other accounts. This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology, with literally…

>TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human psychology Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a distributed hacking attempt on the human mind. I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.

[dead]

Re: First, make me care

#166

Post by teiferer »

> We could easily have a 2026 LLM deliver high-quality editing advice to fix this up extensively, but it would still be mediocre.

This seems to suggest that a human needs to be in the creative loop, but that could be short sighted. LLM training has humans in the loop which optimize for not being bored. That's a reason for LLM texts typically being recognizeable because at the current stage they are a little too simplistically flashy. But give it a few iterations and the machine will excel humans at catching their attention, i.e., making them care.

As others wrote: Tiktok is already excellent at that. While the content in there still has humans in the loop, the choice what to show to whom and when is already entirely mechanical.

Re: First, make me care

#167

Post by antonvs »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #146
antonvs wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is all on TikTok! This is classic equivocation fallacy.

Not classic enough. You need to add an actual explanation if you want that comment to work. What are the multiple meanings to the same phrase? Presumably "weird and fun" is what you're calling out? But to me their post looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times.

> Presumably "weird and fun"

Yes, you figured it out, so apparently I didn't need an "actual explanation".

> looks like it's using the exact same meaning both times.

That's a fascinating equivalence operator you're using.

Re: First, make me care

#168

Post by andrei_says_ »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #152
komali2 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snow Crash explored this much more literally, supposing that there may be memes so powerful they can function basically as magic spells that reprogram people's brains.

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 t…

For more ideas - One can definitely see multigenerational patterns of abuse and trauma as self reproducing parasites.

Re: First, make me care

#169

Post by zkmon »

BeetleB wrote: post #32
zkmon wrote: post #22

> When writing, first, make the reader care, one way or another. Because if I am not hooked by the first screen, I will probably not keep reading—no matter how good the rest of it is! Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing. This artificial goal pollutes the connection between writer and reader. It makes them buyer and seller and rewards sales tactics. You don't write for the reader.…

> Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of writing. This is common advice in English classes and it predates the World Wide Web (and likely the Internet). Hook them in the first few sentences or lose them. And yes, of course, it does depend on who the intended audience is. You wouldn't do it in The New Yorker. > You don't write for the reader. You write for yourself first. Readers sometimes,…

Never cut out stuff that you felt important to include. Just forget the reader. The content you write should reflect you, not the reader. It's your expression. Don't make it a sales pitch, or a reflection of average reader's taste.

I get scared when an author is talking to me, the reader. I stop reading when they pretend to be aware of my context. Things like "So you are reading this book because you want to learn about AI" sounds very cheap.

Also I hate when the actors on TV suddenly start talking to the viewer about what they did and why did etc. Disgusting.

Audience want to observe the performers, not converse with them. Your best performance comes out when you are not much aware of the audience. Like a child playing, ignoring people around.

Re: First, make me care

#170

Post by nicbou »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #96
firefoxd wrote: post #26

I wrote my story and titled it, "My experience at work with an automated HR system". I sent it to a few friends, only a couple of them read it. A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew up! I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book is that yo…

That's the LinkedIn "broetry" formula. LI only shows a sentence as a teaser, and good "broets" have learned to write a good teaser line.

This is such a perfect term for it. Thank you for starting my day with a chuckle. I feel validated.

More about this weird phenomenon: https://fenwick.media/rewild/magazine/dead-broets-society-be...

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