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First, make me care

gwern.net

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Re: First, make me care

#71

Post by PeterWhittaker »

Perhaps I am too much of a curmudgeon, but the example first sentence made me not care at all - not about Venice, but about the writer's approach, which seems to want to conjure breathless mystery about something I could easily look up on Wikipedia (or read in tl;dr comments in this thread).

It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you?

A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.

Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.

Re: First, make me care

#72

Post by tombert »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #47
tombert wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is part of why I hate TikTok so much. I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that I end up really liking…

> I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do this is actually specifically because it gives me less choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music. No, I think you're right. I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it was intended to be heard, if it's been…

Yeah, similar for me; when I was a teenager I would buy a CD specifically I liked a single on the radio and put it in my car. I would be too lazy to take it out and listen to something else, so I'd listen to that CD dozens and dozens of times, and I would grow to appreciate the non-single songs a lot, very often more than the song I even bought the CD for.

The non-singles are generally a lot less "radio-friendly", almost by definition, so a lot of artists were more willing to try stuff that is a little less immediately-appealing, and there are a bunch of albums I have basically memorized now because of that.

With Spotify and YouTube Music, there's an infinite number of songs to choose from and as a result you never have the same excuse to listen to the same songs over and over again. I'm not necessarily saying it's "worse", just that I miss the way it used to be.

Re: First, make me care

#73

Post by amelius »

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…

Except the hooks only attach to the lizard brain while the rational brain just sits there with a palm in its face.

Re: First, make me care

#74

Post by dvrp »

Care is the most important trait of people who make great things; it's not money or time. Is not even skill.

I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a project inside their personal website was not working. I told him my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and it was working on his local machine.

A few hours after the interview, the project was online.

The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing, and yes, software engineering.

That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such that I don't feel I was just scammed.

It's all the same. Lack of care.

I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.

Re: First, make me care

#75

Post by atmosx »

Adrian Wooldridge (the Economist) in "Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World" argues, rather successfully IMO, that what made Venice the maritime super-power was meritocracy. Indeed, he argues, that the fall of the Venitian empire came swiftly when the Doge was forced to place only Venitians (birthright) to top positions, instead of the most "capable". Hence the available talent pool shrunk.

The book makes for a fine read IMO: https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern...

ps. this book came out as a response to Michael Sandell's "The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" which was a best seller at the time.

Re: First, make me care

#76

Post by furyofantares »

huhkerrf wrote: post #2

"First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.

My personal distaste for typical narrative presentations of interesting information is how often the first interesting details come 4-5 paragraphs in and then are slowly peppered from there. Really doesn't seem at odds with the advice here which can easily be applied to the opening sentence or paragraph, and title.

Re: First, make me care

#78

Post by GeoAtreides »

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 [...] You don't write for the reader.

This is contrary to all writing advice I have read, from Robert Olen Butler to John Gardner. Sure, the natural geniuses might write from themselves or their friends (like Kafka) and because they're geniuses the writing is good, but most people aren't geniuses, so they need to keep the reader and its needs firmly (VERY firmly) in their minds.

Speaking of John Gardner, here is a quote about writing that perfectly encapsulates what the job of writer is:

"A true work of fiction does all of the following things, and does them elegantly, efficiently: it creates a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind; it is implicitly philosophical; it fulfills or at least deals with all of the expectations it sets up; and it strikes us, in the end, not simply as a thing done but as a shining performance."

..."Make me care" is part of the "expectations it sets up". "Make me care" begins with the first word of the first chapter, continues with the first paragraph and the first page and, through the first scene, it eases the reader into the "vivid and continuous dream" from which the author should never jolt awake the reader.

Re: First, make me care

#79

Post by eichin »

Jach wrote: post #69
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…

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 alrea…

Yeah, but even that isn't going to make me care about why Gwern is obsessing over Venice. Part of that is that I follow Overly Sarcastic Productions on youtube and "Blue" did a vastly better job of expressing/performing "I'm excited about Venice, and in a couple of minutes you will be too!" - an advantage of the medium and of their chosen style, for reaching someone like me who isn't all that compelled by European history.

(Yes, I get that it was an example to make a point about a writing style; one of the risks of really concrete examples is bouncing off of the example itself :-)

Re: First, make me care

#80

Post by munificent »

dyauspitr wrote: post #23
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…

It’s so addictive but so soul destroying. I feel dirty after spending time on that platform. The term brainrot fits perfectly.

Wait until a generation of people who have been mainlining that since infancy while their thought patterns were still being formed becomes old enough to vote.
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