81–90 of 262 posts
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…
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…
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…
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
There is also a writing where people are looking for the information, and they are showing up at your door because they already care. Presumably you wrote, because you saw the open question, and want to try answering it. History books, encyclopedias, classic literature by dead people, falls under this. Ironically, so does the example of Venice - you would read about Venice if you were already curious; there is little profit in "making someone care" about Venice otherwise. An attention grabby style would be forced and counterproductive in this.
Increasingly, readers don’t have time for this shit. Be direct, and if the reader doesn’t care, they were never meant to be your reader anyway. Someone will care, write for them.
1. First, make me care.
2. Then provide an indication (e.g. in the video description) giving the time in the video where the question starts to be answered.
If you make me somewhat care, but I have to binary search through your video to skip the rambling, I'm likely to back button out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question: - They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult - They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply - Fish - They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats (note: I read a few sources…