Careful with this advice. If you max it out you end up with
"You won't believe the weird trick that the city of Venice did to feed itself"
First, make me care
61–70 of 262 posts
Re: First, make me care
#62I'm beginning to think that origin stories are an underrated way to find these angles. Like why exactly did you start thinking about this topic. I guess the recipe bloggers were on to this with their long rambles about where they first tried this dish (albeit it may have been for SEO too...)
Re: First, make me care
#63I have often thought that all good fiction is mystery. This is obviously an overstatement, but I think it’s not too far off. Humans are mystery solvers. If I don’t have a compelling mystery to solve—something like the “what’s going on beneath the surface in this town?” that David Lynch does so well—when I’m reading your book or watching your tv show or playing your game, I’m usually out unless I have a strong prior i…
I'm usually the opposite. Mystery feels like the characters, the narrator, etc are all being intentionally obscure, for no reason other than to pad page count and incite drama.
I prefer stories that are either about evoking feelings (adventure, romance, slice of life) or about exploring ideas / what-ifs (scifi, fantasy). And ideally stories at the extremes of this spectrum. Maybe I've read too many but ones in the middle tend to be too cliched to hook me.
Re: First, make me care
#64I 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…
"The Machine Fired Me" is one good hook. I found the original post and its good:
https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me
Re: First, make me care
#65You 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.
I think that's a little extreme to say it's one of the worst. It's definitely a different style to a lot of blogs, but I like how much information is spread across the site. It's satisfying to explore on a desktop.
Re: First, make me care
#66Know your audience is right, and Gwern misses the most interesting thing about Venice- that it was a merchantile Republic with reasonable independance from the Catholic Church. Lots of the political ideas which influenced British and American democracy came from the Italian city states. Ruskin's Stones of Venice and Bowsma's "Venice and the defense of republican liberty" capture this well, as do parts of Quentin Skinner's "The Foundations of Modern Political Thought."
Re: First, make me care
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s so addictive but so soul destroying. I feel dirty after spending time on that platform. The term brainrot fits perfectly.
I've started using these platforms for learning (stretch exercises, argentine tango patterns/musicality I might want to lead, etc) and am finding the experience to work better in those kinds of situations. Agree it can be brain rot if using it for entertainment, politics, etc.
To respond to everyone at once -
I have experience and teachers so I'm not solely relying on these videos. I use the short videos as a fast discovery of what's out there and I'll sometimes watch long videos afterward. LLM sites also work well for this discovery and I use that sometimes but it is a bit more work from me (which sounds strange to write re: AI) because I have to type out what I want instead of relying on algorithms that use data collected about me.
I use Facebook Reels (rather thank TikTok) which show me stuff anyway after I click on a link shared by friends so having it show me things relevant to learning seems like the best option here in case I click on next video.
Re: First, make me care
#68This 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.
Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos. Like the actual meaning of the word.
Re: First, make me care
#69You 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…
I think for a lot of people, simply having "Author: Gwern" (or some other author they like) is the sufficient bit of information to make them care, it's generic on the content. I've read a lot of not very stylish writing simply because of who wrote it. Or in other words, "Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." Whatever quirks of bad style there are will get a pass because I already care -- style is more important when you want to reach someone who hasn't heard of you.
Re: First, make me care
#70This 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…
> You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever
That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing. They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir content is and then their entire personality and content becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.