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How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

simonwillison.net

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Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#451

Post by santoshalper »

killthebuddha wrote: post #444
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th g…

I think it’s basically “HN is extremely hostile to iconoclastic ideas”

How about even more basic "HN is arrogant."

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#452

Post by nirava »

elliotec wrote: post #426
simonw wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t try to extract positives, I extracted what I personally found most interesting. I skipped the “no doesn’t mean no” section because it felt like pure hustle culture to me, not to mention something which wouldn’t work outside of MrBeast because they can lean so heavily on their brand - “find an employee who has a kid who is a fan” etc. I didn’t actually spot the relationship between the “no means no” section a…

You didn’t spot the relationship with the “no doesn’t mean no” stuff because as you said in the next sentence, you skipped it. Nice one.

sigh skip as in skipping to write about it in the blog

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#453

Post by danpalmer »

MrVandemar wrote: post #328
danpalmer wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really enjoyed the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about the Enron scandal for two reasons. The first and more obvious was that it was a deeper look into the systemic issues that led to the failures, which meant it was less "they did a fraud" and more about the way culture evolves at a company to the point that they did it. Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was tr…

> mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud . You know, criminal behavior. Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilag…

This is the point of the original comment, you have failed to engage in the actual material and have instead just concluded a binary position of "bad".

Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a slow transformation from things that were obviously legal, to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.

Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't work (in this way at least). We know that now because Enron tried it, legally, and it didn't work, somewhat spectacularly.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#454

Post by johnfn »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #443
shalmanese wrote: post #217

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized t…

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th g…

I think OP is saying:

* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.

* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#455

Post by nine_k »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #443
shalmanese wrote: post #217

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized t…

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. I genuinely do not know what you're trying to say here. For funsies, I tossed this into Claude 3.5 Sonnet with the prompt "Translate this into 7th g…

Maybe it's exactly the wide support for irrational but mainstream views is what concerns the author. I mean, that's what you'd expect from a conversation in a random bar, but maybe HN used to be somehow different.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#456

Post by slt2021 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #298

It's interesting to see the discussion from two different angles—there's a lot of support for the type of A/B/C delineation in parts of this thread, and some people who decry it in other parts. I was on the set for one of the productions, and I'll just say at the time I thought the experience was a one-off for one of the bigger productions they've put on. Since reading other people's stories, it seems more a case whe…

MrBeast has given up his life for his youtube channel (he writes exactly this in the doc) - and he is looking for other people willing to give up theirs for his channel

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#457

Post by mkl »

devjab wrote: post #347
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't real…

I think it mostly happened when HN became flooded by Reddit users. One of the reason I think this is because of how HN and Reddits way of dealing with new lines is different. In a lot of the comments on HN that I would consider to be fitting on GPs point you’ll see a format a long the lines of this: This is the first line of my paragraph. This is the second line of my paragraph. They are separated because HN and Redd…

I think that's because people are commenting on mobile, where the lines are way shorter. What looks like a paragraph on my phone (e.g. this comment), turns out to just be a line or two.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#458

Post by daedrdev »

shalmanese wrote: post #217

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized t…

People on HN need to think about how wrong others can be about topics they are knowledgable about, then consider that they might be that person in topics they don't know much about

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#459

Post by hattmall »

danpalmer wrote: post #305
shalmanese wrote: post #217

One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence, excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine your priors. He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized t…

I really enjoyed the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room" about the Enron scandal for two reasons. The first and more obvious was that it was a deeper look into the systemic issues that led to the failures, which meant it was less "they did a fraud" and more about the way culture evolves at a company to the point that they did it. Perhaps more importantly though, was my takeaway that it mostly wasn't fraud, it was tr…

That is a pretty interesting and accurate take. There is absolutely a ton of new innovative accounting going on still today. When / If these companies fail due to market conditions some of these accounting practices will most certainly be labeled as fraud. The takeaway from the Enron tale for the remaining firms wasn't we should stop finding new ways to increase revenue and decrease liabilities it was that we need to hire more teams to write white papers explaining why what we are doing isn't fraud.

Re: How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)

#460

Post by rootsudo »

devjab wrote: post #347
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "sour grapes" attitude has IMO really started crowding out other content. Pretty much any popular content here just has a flood of social signaling content all about how morally wrong, bad, evil, etc the content is. And if you don't want to pile on the commentary, which is all pretty much the same thing regurgitated in different ways, then your content just kinda languishes at the bottom of the page. I don't real…

I think it mostly happened when HN became flooded by Reddit users. One of the reason I think this is because of how HN and Reddits way of dealing with new lines is different. In a lot of the comments on HN that I would consider to be fitting on GPs point you’ll see a format a long the lines of this: This is the first line of my paragraph. This is the second line of my paragraph. They are separated because HN and Redd…

This is also how 4chan differentiated users, by double space and ironically using >greentext wrong. I thought it was ironic to see this comment here, because, I've been using the old 4chan archives as datasets for interesting things. https://archive.org/details/imageboard_datasets
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