First, make me care
gwern.net456 points by andsoitis 10 hours ago
456 points by andsoitis 10 hours ago
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 millions of people all trying to find the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.
> 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.
Yeah, I instantly disagreed with that point in the comment you replied to - TikTok's algorithm seems to reward sticking to your niche.
>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.
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.
See also John Barnes' Century Next Door books, where "memes" are basically computer viruses that jump to running on human brains, not just silicon chips. The results are... not pretty.
> 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 certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that time.
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 day, for months, from that single video. None of the others on the channel saw anything remotely similar. It was baffling.
Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand.
Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.
Attention is all you need, after all.
On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit like a superweapon.
There almost is no hook, the hook is that the time investment for each video is so small your brain doesn't even need to think about whether it should watch or not.
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 require you listening to the entire song to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with anything else.
I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention.
Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.
Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way to discover new music that you might not normally listen to.
I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web. It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me is how different countries or regions have their own tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something different to local broadcasts.
The problem I have with streaming radio is that it seems to be caught rehashing rather than discovering.
For example, I like SOMA's Underground 80s, but I also want to hear new artists in the same vein. I haven't found any streaming stations that are actively good at curating like this.
Where are the streaming stations that play Smiths and Smithereens but also play Blossoms and Johnny Marr's new stuff, for example?
Yeah, that's why I specifically called out KEXP for this, as they do lots of live shows, themed segments, etc, that really do enable discovery.
Unfortunately you're quite right about Soma (and probably other streaming radio) - but I imagine licensing new music can be difficult/expensive.
> 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 copied onto a ratty old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the CD and a decent stereo.
There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape, and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway, because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.
I got into so much music that's remained important to me because of a chance tape swap.
Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts, unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to that R'n'B playlist!"
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.
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.
It is still doing the same thing, the dopamine hit is just feeling like you learned something instead of seeing something funny/shocking/etc.
The idea you can gain any kind of actual experience/knowledge about a thing through a series of 30s clips that are competing with millions of other 30s clips to grab you is folly.
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.
Honest question: why wouldn't you simply search for exactly the same things but on longer format platforms such as YouTube?
Why short form though? I’ve always learned much better from long form, more comprehensive videos. Or I guess to put it another way I don’t believe I’ve ever learned anything besides quick hacks on reels/shorts/tiktok. Not even quick guitar licks.
Yeah, I had to get rid of my youtube plus subscription because I was getting too addicted to the shorts.
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.
Oh no, will they elect a president who primarily operates in ragebait, heavily uses social media, and has no meaningful attention span for anything outside of receiving direct praise? Good thing we have such enlightened voters right now who would never for someone that!
Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks that give you a pinch.
We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out a narrative between two things following each other. It needs time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day.
I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were talking about. After 3 months, I got it.
And I deleted it.
I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more structural. I could feel it gnarling.
In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.
Thirty years ago, I read a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, in which he made very similar points about broadcast television. I don't remember all his points, but I vividly remember how talked about how you'll be watching a news story about something awful, maybe an earthquake in which hundreds of people died, and then with practically no warning you'll be hearing a happy jingle from a toothpaste commercial. The juxtaposition, he said, was bad for the human mind, and was going to create a generation that couldn't focus on important things.
I suspect that the rapid-fire progression of one one-minute video after another does something similar, and is also equally bad for you.
I've noticed that I can read or see something very emotionally engaging - something that really resonates with me, so much so that I'm maybe even choking up over it - and while I'm still having that emotional response, move onto the next post. I almost always have a moment of meta-reflection that scares me - why wasn't I content to just sit there and process these big emotions? How is the dopamine part of my brain so much more powerful than even the emotional part, that it forces me to continue what I'm doing rather than just feeling?
Except the hooks only attach to the lizard brain while the rational brain just sits there with a palm in its face.
You say "human psychology", but there are a ton of people who can't stand any of that shit and see it for the tarpit that it is.
It's not very effective at doing anything but making lowbrow content slightly more appealing.
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!
Here's a guy who rigged a theremin and a hurdy gurdy up to Singer sewing machine and performs spectacular covers on it https://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/751772710192...
And here's someone living my dream, he moved to the Scottish Highlands to start a workshop creating mechanical sculptures inspired by my childhood heroes the Cabaret Mechanical Theater and he just made a piece for them! https://www.tiktok.com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
Opinions of what's "weird and fun" can vary a lot. I find this stuff about as appealing as watching AI-generated Queen Elizabeth fight Stephen Hawking, or someone sneaking into Chernobyl to practice their parkour.
I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does everyone else who avoids TikTok.
If you don't like weird and fun at all, are you sure you're fairly judging whether things are weird and fun?
> 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.
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 you know the punch line before you even pick up a copy. A boy is stuck with a bengal tiger in a boat. Now that the punch line is out of the way, the story has time to unfold and be interesting in its own merit. That's what I was trying to recreate with my own story.
Reminds me of Veritasium's recent videos, really driving that initial hook and maintaining the viewer's attention. He had an explanation video about it which explained how people who would be interested in something like "the Lorenz equation" probably don't know what it's called, so it might be more accurate to phrase it in terms that someone would search for or initially peak their interest.
And I think it fits neatly with making people care first. I want to learn more about the machine that fired you, that's more the start of a narrative arc. It's almost like I have more trust that you will make it interesting, since you put a little more work up front.
"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
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.
There is content you write for acquisition and content you write for retention and my #1 tip for writers who want to engineer growing an audience is be clear before you sit down to write a piece which it’s going to be.
Content for acquisition, the reader’s relationship is to the topic, they have to be convinced the topic is relevant to their life goals but it’s valuable despite who the topic.
Content for retention, the readers relationship is to you as the writer and the topic is merely there as a MacGuffin to help illuminate some aspect of you that is unique.
Business Insider had this down to a science over a decade ago. They started a series called “So Expensive”, detailing why various things were expensive, the first 4 videos in the series were: Caviar, Saffron, Rolexes and Horseshoe Crab Blood. Statistically, some tens of millions of people have organically had the thought of why the first 3 were expensive but zero people have even wondered why horseshoe crab blood was expensive. The 4th video was a way to test, of all the people who were willing to click on the first three, how many were willing to follow along to the 4th because of a trust in BI? The next 4 in the series was Vanilla, Silk, Louboutins & Scorpion Venom.
Creating all content for acquisition is both too exhausting and also sub optimal for the reader because they want deeper stuff to follow as well. I suggest up to 1 in 3 acquisition articles if you can manage when starting out but then ramping down to no more than 1 in 10 fairly quickly or you burn out.
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 but this is not thorough research)
Venice is the extreme "tail wagging the dog" situation. Venice is dinky. It's not much bigger than San Francisco. Yet it was a major European power for centuries.
Venice was small by land mass, but controlled the Eastern Mediterranean, and therefore the Black Sea endpoint of the Silk Road, which was immensely profitable.
Consequently, Vasco da Gama rounding Africa in 1498 doomed Venice as a great power.
(All from memory, 100% factuality not guaranteed)
Thanks. Ironically, the article started off great with that but clearly it wasn't going to answer the question, so I only read the first paragraph.
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 writing not being to show off how smart you are to the reader. Instead your writing has to evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue.
A lot of writers are tainted by the expectations set in grade school. Write for a grade and good writing is what yields a good grade according to the standards set by the subject which often is not ‘Composition’ but more like ‘Prove to me that you remember everything we mentioned in class about the French Revolution’.
I’ve never felt drawn into an article by Gwern at least not in the way that I have been by some writing by Maciej Cegłowski, for example. Reading Gwern I am both overwhelmed by the adornments to the text (hyperlinks, pop-ups, margin notes; other hypertext doodads and portals) and underwhelmed by the substance of the text itself. I don’t consider Paul Graham a literary griot either. But I find that his own prose is bolstered by a kind of clarity and asceticism that is informative and not entirely void of good style and form.
Lawrence McEnery of the University of the Chicago contributed a lot of good thinking to this kind of stuff though.
This wasn’t meant to be a criticism of the author of this post’s own work. But here that’s how it’s left. I haven’t come across any writing of his that’s as intriguing as "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” seems. If anyone has any recommendations, do share.
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.
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 :-)
I like where you’re heading with this and to a degree I think that it leads toward considerations about the personality of the author in tow with their writing and writing ability which on its head evokes questions about what makes a person, well, personable. Which turns this into a sensitive discussion about what one can glean about an author’s character traits based on their writing style and when the author in question is only a ‘public figure’ in the eyes of the niche collection of online enclaves who are even aware that Gwern exists it becomes tough to candidly critique his literary persona with the sort of freedom that one may have when talking about say, some guy who’s written for the Atlantic for 30 years and is further from the spaces where criticisms about his work are held.
My criticisms about Gwern’s writing is not meant to be taken...ahem...personally in the sense that I don’t want to use Gwern as a subject for whatever literary critique I’m trying to proffer beyond how useful it is—and is presenting itself—as a fine case to help make whatever point I’m trying to make more clear about how Writing style is inextricable from and indicative of personality or lack thereof. And this is probably a part of what makes reading and writing such a profound experience.
One of the most interesting remarks about Gwern’s writing is this comment [1]:
> Everything I read from gwern has this misanthropic undertones. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but it grits me when I try reading him.
— <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42135302>
While I can't agree with the entirety of `mola’s comment—I simply haven’t put that much thought into making as grave of an evaluation into Gwern’s character as such a judgement would demand, nor am I that interested in deliberating over such an evaluation—it still resonates with me as a reader and you’ll find in my comment downthread from `mola’s remark that it’s at least plausible that an affinity for self-expression and intellectualizing about the world doesn’t necessitate an interest in the rest of its inhabitants in a way that causes me not to find the thesis behind “First, make me care” to be coloured with a stroke of irony, considering who’s behind it.
You say "style is more important when you want to reach someone who hasn't heard of you.” I agree with that and I reckon that it’s still style that forms a non-trivial amount of how you identify with ‘who’ the author is once you’ve become familiar with they’re work and can set an expectation for why their ideas may be worthwhile to engage with in the first place. Again, Paul Graham’s writing has a style although no where to the degree that Maciej Cegłowski does. You can evince characteristics about each of them relative to how and what they write about. You can even speculate on ways that their respective personalities could lead to friction between them. [2]
When we interrogate the “who” behind “who wrote” we are making judgements about the personality of the author and how that that makes us interested in their ideas. Today there are various non-literary mediums that give us a glimpse at a person’s personality with which we can anticipate whether it’s worth reading what they write. But if all you go by is their writing then how they write is about the only way for you to speculate about 'who' the author is and what they’re like as a person.
There are probably holes in this line of reasoning but I don’t think the lines between writing style, personal appeal and the ability to appeal to readers through how you write—effectively signaling to your personality in the process!—are as distinct as I think you’re portraying them. What’s the opposite of orthogonal? Correlated?
To end: Gwern’s writing lacks personality to me. This makes it hard to reconcile with the point he’s making in this article (which I agree with!) and my perception of his own writing (which invariably and perhaps even unfortunately invites speculation into any writer’s own personality).
Again, please, Does Gwern have anything that sounds as striking as “Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” or was that example a tacit hat tip to Brett Devereaux’s work? I don’t think the guy is a misanthrope but I do sense a wall of text—both figuratively and literally—between he and I when engaging with his writing. He is evidently well and widely read and despite my dislike for the visual form of his website I think that it is still a solid technical display of hypertext for personal web design and information architecture. But in spite of this all I find that it lacks depth, not intellectually but personally. ’Spiritually’, if you will.
[1] Now you may be able figure out my reasoning for the first paragraph re: public figures and criticism. I guess that’s this puts me in the camp of those who don’t believe that’s possible to separate art from the artist. Discussing one commands a look into the other, otherwise why bother with ‘art’ and ‘artists’ at all?
[2] Those who are familiar with both Graham’s and Cegłowski’s writing can take a guess at who once called the other a “big ole weenis” in an exchange on this very site.
> Again, please, Does Gwern have anything that sounds as striking as “Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” or was that example a tacit hat tip to Brett Devereaux’s work?
I don’t quite see the link to Devereaux here. But, if anything, I think Devereaux is not at all similar to the writing style in the “Empire without farms” thing here. On ACOUP, he just bluntly tells you what the plan is and then executes it. He does engaging content and funny stuff, but it is sprinkled throughout the text rather than being a gimmicky hook to draw the reader in. For example,
https://acoup.blog/2026/01/16/collections-hoplite-wars-part-...
Starts out with one paragraph about where we are in the series of blog posts and a super zoomed out description of what the series is about.
Then a paragraph about the fact that he had been planning an alternative ordering for the blog posts. If I don’t already care, that’s not going to make me care.
Then we finally get a direct no-frills statement describing the specific question to be answered in this post. It’s blunt and it doesn’t ask a “get ready for a surprise” type question.
I like it. This is a confident and adult writing style. To me,
“Venice ruled half the Mediterranean. And yet… it had no farms. How do you have an empire without farms?”
Comes off as an author a trying to convince the reader that they have something clever to say. Almost always this is the result of worrying too much about style.
IMO, the best way to come up with a clever phrasing is to start by writing down a direct version first, to figure out what you really want to say. Then, just don’t write a clever phrasing, the reader will appreciate your respect for their time.
It's risky business inferring personality from writing samples because people can and do adopt different styles in their writing depending on circumstance and whimsy. As an exercise, read something from James Mickens, and try to imitate his style for some other technical topic. It's actually not that hard, at least to get within throwing distance, refinement is always possible. He probably doesn't write family letters or most emails or technical documentation that way though. Once you have a broader sample from an author across different topics and genres, and even sampling on short-form writing or interviews, you can be on better footing for guessing what their personality is like without having to go through the effort of getting to know them as an individual (which is otherwise the usual constraint) but you still risk being quite over-confidently wrong.
Certainly you're right that aspects of writing including style come to be expected over time by an audience, and if what were supposedly fixed things suddenly change it's usually not pleasant. Though to a fresh reader, the new version might be far preferable. Some authors could use an editor, some authors could tell their editor to back off more.
In the similar space of personalities we're discussing, I'd also bring up patio11, whose writing I've sampled for a long time here and elsewhere (I still think of him as the bingo card guy). I've mostly enjoyed it but I would not mind at all if his question-anticipating style and stating-things-precisely-but-also-precisely-vaguely-so-as-not-to-create-any-chance-at-liabilities style went away. The content overcomes the style and matters more, which I'd like to think is usual for me and how I evaluate things anyway.
The misanthrope comment is pretty funny. I'd disagree, especially considering how gwern has handled crazy person emails, but also because I'm somewhat misanthropic myself and figure gwern is probably less so, but who knows, it's a pretty bold thing to claim of someone else you don't know personally one way or another. I think what might be there for people to pick up on is a sense of superiority but in the form of distance, illustrated by this anonymous quote: "If I am superior to others, if I am above others, then I do not need others. When I say that I am above others, it does not mean that I feel better than them, it means that I am at a distance from them, a safe distance." (But again perhaps not, I just like that quote and is how I've felt of myself at times, more when I was younger.)
The opposite of orthogonal is non-orthogonal, the components are not completely independent, but it's left unstated how dependent they then are. (You could also say the inner product is non-zero if talking about vectors. There are many numbers that are non-zero.) I'd agree that there is something of an artist in an artist's works, but it's again risky (if you care about not being wrong too much anyway, or whatever consequences can come from being wrong) to speculate what exactly that something is, especially if all you have is the work. People all too often read way more into things than what is actually there. The author themself is a more reliable source for what parts of themselves are in something. (I'm reminded of Tolkien's hatred of allegory that he talks about in the preface. His letters go into further detail about what of the artist is or is not in art, intentionally or unintentionally. You could say the art itself talks about it too -- e.g. the Ring by nature of its maker is not like other mere tools which can be used for either good or evil.) For your first footnote, then, I'm in the camp of separation, and it's perfectly fine to talk of one without talk of the other, and for little of an artist's being to leak through. It's also healthier, at least I think it's unhealthy how many people seem to work themselves into a frenzy about something about the artist that prevents them from looking at the art more on its own. And again, if you're not using outside sources, what you can infer about someone purely from the art, purely from the fact that they made something rather than nothing, and this particular something rather than something else, is more limited than what some people imagine. "The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz" is a work of bizarro-fiction, I think there are plenty of people who would wish the author were killed just for admitting to having such thoughts by fact of putting them to paper. I don't actually know anything about the author, if there was any blurb about him in the book I've forgotten it over the actual book, but in any case I'd bet he's a fine guy in day to day life and not deserving of any trouble. (I am rather certain it's a he, though I don't recall his name.)
I also think it's fine to talk of the art and artist together, but it's not necessary, and usually less interesting, fruitful, or certain. But a sometimes-fun exercise in some fiction analysis can be: find the author's self-insert character. (That presupposes there is one, there sometimes isn't.) How sure are you that you've got it right? You should probably consult some information about the author themselves outside the art itself. And even then, is it a "complete insert", or a partial one, or one made of past regrets or future ideals or alternative paths, but not present bits?
While we're tossing light criticism about other people around in public, or as I'd put it just sharing opinions and viewpoints (this is not structured enough to be criticism), what comes to mind first for the three writers brought up is this: Maciej is funny even when he's wrong, pg is just insufferable when wrong, gwern is rarely wrong. I liked pg's older writing more, at some point he fell off and neither his tweets that occasionally surface to me nor his newer essays that I've bothered to read (last one I believe was "Good Writing") have left much of an impact or held my interest content-wise or style-wise. I haven't kept up with Maciej in tweet or other form since 2017 or so because I thought his content and style were repetitive and became boring (and wrong about things in ways that didn't invite counter argument or correction). My exposure to gwern's writing was IRC and LW comments from many years back, I've only read a fraction of his longer form work on his site but occasionally I'll read new things he puts out because he's still occasionally writing about new and interesting things. His style has never put me off, but sure, it's not routinely funny like I remember Maciej, and it lacks some sharpness and brevity that old-pg had. I still think it has personality, and a particular gwern-like personality even when it's in "classic style" mode that is shared by many other writers, but that might just be familiarity especially with his shorter form words.
And I still find gwern funny at times. This bit of fiction, for instance, has some amusing bits: https://gwern.net/fiction/clippy I wonder, does it satisfy your query of something as intriguing as "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice"? There are several ways that link can "make me care", though the web page layout can make it awkward. Is it the "clippy" in the URL, the official title "It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World", the one-sentence summary that just tells you it's a fictional short story about something, the two-sentence summary below that which says the same with a tiny bit more detail, the picture of Clippy, or the first lines of the actual text: "In A.D. 20XX. Work was beginning. “How are you gentlemen !!”… (Work. Work never changes; work is always hell.)"? Those first lines are distinctive video game references that even if one hasn't played the games, if one has been on the internet enough during a particular time then they'll likely ring a bell. The recognition of such signals is going to either act like crack ("One of us!") and draw the reader further in, or act as a repellent (quirk chungus) and bring forth a groan if not abandonment; I've been both kinds of reader for the same references. Meanwhile others won't get the references at all, it's just weird. Whether including such references indicates something meaningful about the author's personality directly, rather than just them being aware of the shibboleths and making use of them to attract and entertain a certain audience, is hard to say. Fans often end up with "don't meet your heroes" kinds of feelings when they over-empathized with their inferred construction of someone and thought they were part of the tribe rather than just making use of the tribe's signals.
I appreciate your take on misanthropy. I returned to the topic in another comment in a way I think you may find apt: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760901>.
Additionally I appreciate the extent to which our perceptions on literature differ. This was an enlightening exchange. In an attempt to retain decorum between us I will withhold speculation on the character of (Mr?) Cameron Pierce whose work you made mention of. But it's tough to resist. And boy, am I confident about it.
Thanks also for the pointer to James Mickens. And if I may ask, do you have a reference for where I may find Tolkien's remarks on the relation between the artist and his art?
I'm going to make a gross fusion out of two points you made that I enjoy in conjunction:
> And again, if you're not using outside sources, what you can infer about someone purely from the art, purely from the fact that they made something rather than nothing, and this particular something rather than something else, is more limited than what some people imagine. [...] Those first lines are distinctive video game references that even if one hasn't played the games, if one has been on the internet enough during a particular time then they'll likely ring a bell. The recognition of such signals is going to either act like crack ("One of us!") and draw the reader further in, or act as a repellent (quirk chungus) and bring forth a groan if not abandonment; I've been both kinds of reader for the same references. Meanwhile others won't get the references at all, it's just weird. Whether including such references indicates something meaningful about the author's personality directly, rather than just them being aware of the shibboleths and making use of them to attract and entertain a certain audience, is hard to say. Fans often end up with "don't meet your heroes" kinds of feelings when they over-empathized with their inferred construction of someone and thought they were part of the tribe rather than just making use of the tribe's signals.
I think how we experience the phenomenon you describe in the second paragraph that I've appended above—the final one in your full response—is where we differ.
I can't help but use references like the ones you described above as data points to infer the personality of the author. It's an innate mental process that occurs concurrent to whatever else I think about while reading their work. And the world is filled with such data points even beyond ones that the author intentionally invites.
I'm probably more likely to expect that these references (that I consider to be outside sources; this may be irresponsible to you) are indicative of the nature of the author either directly or indirectly—that there is at least some genuine influence behind the reference of certain concepts, beliefs and shibboleths—because I don't read fiction the same way that I read non-fiction. Which is to say that I don't actually read fiction at all.
I do appreciate how certain fiction serves as literary representations of the ideas that the author has about the world (whether they're his own or those of other's that he wants to bring attention to) that they otherwise wouldn't express through non-fiction. So I do mine the work of some fiction authors for that kind of insight and nothing more; because my objective is to comprehend the diverse ways that people perceive life and the lives of others. Because of this I probably tend to interpret the effect of a piece of literature more seriously than others; in search of more intimate and perhaps more disquieting evaluations.
As you mentioned, sometimes the author is just trying to attract an audience. So that’s not to say that all references are worthy of as strong of a consideration that I’m describing. Maybe the fun part of this kind of work is vetting for authenticity—for better or worse—all things considered.
>David Foster Wallace (on KCRW? Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with the purpose of writing not being to show off how smart you are to the reader.
He expands on this in his conversation with Bryan Garner (of Garner's Modern English Grammar) published as Quack this Way, and I think he gets to the core issue, which is that your ideas are not interesting to anyone but you; if you are showing off how smart you are, you are assuming the reader will find your ideas as important and interesting as you do. It is the writer's job to show the reader why they should be interested, why they should care.
Infinite Jest is a also a good example of something which goes against TFA's point, it opens with a very sterile, impersonal, literal and completely disconnected first person narrative, he gives us nothing to care about. But it evolves, but he still doesn't give us anything to care about, just has the narration turn in on itself despite it seeming to have nothing to turn in onto. All he really gives us is the suggestion that there is something more than what we can see. He gets us interested and curious but I don't think we really care at that point.
To his credit and with the exception of mentioning an objective to show his smarts off to readers (which I don’t think he wants to do anyhow) Gwern informs us that he is assuming that we will find what he writes as useful as he does, because his objective is to write things that are useful to himself:
> The goal of these pages is not to be a model of concision, maximizing entertainment value per word, or to preach to a choir by elegantly repeating a conclusion. Rather, I am attempting to explain things to my future self, who is intelligent and interested, but has forgotten. What I am doing is explaining why I decided what I did to myself and noting down everything I found interesting about it for future reference. I hope my other readers, whomever they may be, might find the topic as interesting as I found it, and the essay useful or at least entertaining–but the intended audience is my future self.
— <https://gwern.net/about#target-audience>
We can reconcile this with the purport of the writing of his that we’re discussing now—it’s a notice with his future self in mind. And we can compare and contrast the above quote and the aforementioned piece with some of PG’s writing which I find is meant to be public-facing literature at full bloom. [1][2]
I think there’s a difference between 'writing for my future self’ and ‘writing with the public in mind’. Howard & Barton (1986) would argue that they represent separate stages of the writing process and I agree with that and prefer writing that is primed for the latter form. [3] I associate the maxim “First, make me care” with the latter as well and by-and-large feel like Gwern’s writing—that which I’ve come across most frequently—is geared toward the former form. Which I’m sure serves him well, as well as I’m sure it’s served well to those who enjoy his work. I’m yet to determine whether that’s a good or bad thing.
As I’ve cited earlier, some consider Gwern's writing to evoke a sort of misanthropy. But hey...I’m sure there’s someone else to say the same about Paul Graham and his stuff. I’ll withhold judgement against the both of them on that matter—for now—lest I get caught unprepared to be deemed one myself.
[1] <https://www.paulgraham.com/field.html>
I don't think we need to credit him or reconcile anything, what he says is not wrong or hypocritical, it is just his view of what makes a good blog post. I disagree with him but the only consequence for him is that I won't read his blog unless I feel compelled to because I want to join in the discussion on somewhere like HN and don't want to be one of those people who interjects into a discussion on an article they did not read, even if the conversation is clearly about the title and not the article or marginally related topics or I simply want to make a marginally related comment.
For me, it is the way he presents and develops ideas that prevents me from reading, it reminds me of reading a tutorial on how to reach his conclusion. Some people probably like the style, some probably don't care about the style, and some like me struggle to even skim a short post like TFA. But I find a great deal of what is on the internet to be difficult to read and think nothing of reading a book like Infinite Jest in a week. I am not the target audience.
Edit: Fixed some editing weirdness, I think.
We seem to be of like mind on this matter then. I look forward to us reconvening the next time Gwern hits the front page and we each feel compelled to voice some kind of informed dissent on the subject. Dissent probably isn’t the right word here because I don’t think either of us actually disagree with what he’s saying.
How fun is a conversation once it’s established that both parties are in agreement about something in principle? Does one probe to be provocative?
I place high expectations on writing that 1) I feel is right up my alley because I think I’m already familiar with the topic and 2) I’m unfamiliar with but am eager to learn about—it sparks my curiosity. Not all writing meets these expectations and this is probably why I’m disgusted by the though of using LLMs for information about subjects I have a genuine enthusiasm for and can care less about doing so for others, at least until I can figure out whether I want to know more about it. Then the subject becomes forbidden to prompt about.
> For me, it is the way he presents and develops ideas that prevents me from reading, it reminds me of reading a tutorial on how to reach his conclusion.
My assumption is that this kind of writing exists somewhere along the same strand of writing that lends itself to what’s expected from some writing in public school (‘Good writing is what shows the reader/teacher that you correctly grasped the material that was taught to you’); writing that is received well by ’The Masses™’ or some in-group (‘Good writing is what shows the reader/audience that you’re beliefs are in correct alignment with theirs’); something like a mathematical proof (a more literal representation of how to reach a conclusion if I correctly understand what a mathematical proof is); and a well-formed atomic note written for private consideration.
I feel the same. I found that blog from SSC/ACX and I still much prefer SSC/ACX despite gwern discussing topics that are much much more relevant to my interests (sw dev, Haskell, anime). I can't formulate why but your analysis sounds close enough.
ACX is honestly an incredible writer. I think it's a very high bar to clear.
I agree, the citations having the little icons were distracting and I had to force myself not to skim. Still though, it's a very illuminating article that applies the very simple concept we all learned in theory to hook the reader but never really seen explicit examples of. I also found the similar pages feature interesting!
Besides the quote, which I think is a good practice, having never read his stuff, he seems like he publishes his notes directly from his note taking app.
That's fine if you want to publish ideas in short form, but I don't think any of that is considered a piece of work that has been fully fleshed out. I don't really see any stuff that's designed to actually be a publication.
It’s a good quote from DFW but like all great useful pithy quotations it’s usually negated somehow by the activities of the utterer elsewhere. It seemed almost granted that one of the metaconcepts within Infinite Jest was that his ability to churn out reams of that stuff was far in excess of your ability to even read through it.
Assuming the poster's recollection of the quote is correct, there is nothing to be negated, coming to terms with something does not mean you overcame it, No clue how close that is to the actual quote but it sounds like Wallace's phrasing.
In conversation with Michael Silverblatt in 1996 (this is from a machine generated transcript, I’ll do my best to clean up after it’s attempts to parse DFW’s stammering):
> ...I guess when I was in my twenties, like deep down underneath all the bullshit, what I really believed was that the point of fiction was to show that the writer was really smart. And that sounds terrible to say. But I think looking back, that's what was going on. And uh I don't think I really understood what loneliness was when when I was a young man and and now I've got a much less clear idea of what the point of art is, but I think it's got something to do with loneliness, and something to do with setting up a conversation between human beings. And I know that when I started this book I wanted to I—I had very—I had very vague and not very ambitious ambitions. And one was I wanted to do something really sad. I'd done comedy before. I wanted to do something really sad. And I wanted to do something about what was sad about America. And um I—there's a—there's a fair amount of of weird and hard technical stuff going on in this book, but I mean one reason why I'm willing to go around and talk to people about it and that I'm sorta proud of it in a way I haven't been about earlier stuff is that I feel like I—Whatever's hard in the book is in service of something that at least for me is good and important. And it's embarrassing to talk about because I think it sounds kind of cheesy. Um I—I—I sort of think like all the way down kind of to my butthole I was a different person coming up with this book than I was about my earlier stuff. And I'm not saying my earlier stuff was all crap, you know, but it's just it seems like I think when you're very young and until you've sort of uh you know, faced various darknesses, um it's very difficult to understand how—how You're welcome to cut all this out if this just sounds like, you know, a craft product or something.
The part about writing having to "evince some kind of innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine interests and intrigue” is my own interpretation of what I took from interviews between Wallace and Silverblatt on KCRW between 1996 and 2006. Skimming through the entire transcript I have (there’s a 2+ hour compilation of all the interviews on Youtube) this is probably a mixture of remarks made in 1996 (Infinite Jest) [1] and 1997 (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) [2]. I vaguely remember a remark of his along the lines of the duty of a writer to ‘always let the reader know what the stakes are’. Or something like that.
Another quote from the 1996 interview in attempt to support my previous statements:
> [Fiction’s] got a very weird and complicated job because part of its job is to—is to—teach; Teach the reader, communicate with the reader, establish some sort of relationship with the reader where the reader is willing on a neurological level to expend effort; to look hard enough at the jellyfish to see that it's pretty. And—and that stuff's in that kind of effort is very hard to talk about and it's real scary because you can't be sure whether you've done it or not. And it's what makes you sort of clutch your heart when somebody says, I really like this...
My favorite one may be from the conversation they had in 2000:
> I—I think—I—I—I think somewhere in the late eighties or somewhere some at some point when that sort of minimalist fiction began to pass from vogue It wasn't that the class questions changed, it was that I think the class questions disappeared. And—and questions that were issues that were fundamentally about—about class and inclusion became more for people like maybe my age a little younger, questions of—of corporation, um corporations and consumers and consuming models versus kind of alternative uh homemade quote unquote non—non—corporate transactions. I don't know if this makes any sort of sense. Where I—I know for me a certain kind of smoothness, um, that you could th—that you can identify with resolution, easily identified kind of black and white um heroes and villains, um standard standardly satisfying endings involving the gratification of romance or, you know, epistemological problems. I associate with corporate entertainment whose—whose agenda is fundamentally financial, whose—some—some of and—some of it’s—some of it's quite good. Um but—but its fundamental—its fundamental orientation is um there —there's no—there's no warmth in it toward the reader or no attempt to involve the reader or the audience in a kind of relationship or interaction. It's a—it's a—it's a transaction of a certain kind of gratification in exchange for in exchange for money. [3]
[1] <https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>
[2] <https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>
[3] <https://www.kcrw.com/shows/bookworm/stories/david-foster-wal...>
Gwern's point stands on its own merits regardless of what you think of the rest of their blog. And the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way: Lots of people, and especially lots on HN, are very engaged with Gwern's writing, so Gwern seems to be onto something about how to engage readers. What do you think that is?
That would be valuable analysis. Or provide constructive feedback. The complaints aren't constructive and don't inform us about the OP. To me they seem pointless and in the wrong spirit, especially when someone is in the room, within earshot.
Edit: removed an error in what I said originally, sorry.
I think I know the answer, but people don’t want to hear it. Gwern has a kind of formula/structure really effectively markets his blog to the HN audience, which is Not Bad Actually, just effective messaging + giving people what they want.
You can’t really separate the content from its medium, its contex, and its audience if you’re thinking about “why is this successful” (why does the medium express the content n a particular content that works for some particular audience). What the blog post is really about is not “writing” or creating good content per-se, but how to structure content for a blog-like/feed-based medium where you’re competing for clicks, views, attention, participation in external narratives, and relevancy/memorability with an audience mostly looking to be entertained or scratch some curiosity itch.
Gwern has a good formula for that which matched the HN context and audience:
1. Pique interest and grab attention. Give me a reason to click.
2. Let the reader in on the secret, you and me vs all these other idiots. Validate me.
3. Back it all up with sources/references and a post that articulates something the reader already was aware of but fundamentally agreed with. Teach me something but make me feel like “Finally someone who gets it” rather than challenged or threatened.
4. Do the work to actually deliver on the hook. Satisfy my curiosity and give me a reason to come back and share it.
None of this is even necessarily manipulative, it’s just the form that successfully competes in a click-driven market for attention and information (the context). Nobody has to click or read through or share or comment on the thing. Most likely very few will click through to the sources, but they might peep them or be interested to know that they exist. It’s very effective progressive disclosure.
The thing is, this audience REALLY does not want to believe that they can be marketed to or that their decision making is many ways pretty damn emotional/predictable. Gwern does an excellent job validating that for them AND successfully marketing to them anyway. I think that’s the part that’s missing from this post.
The context is completely non-captive, the audience wants to feel smart, and believes that they are “too smart to be marketed to”. Here they are scrolling through an attention market looking for interesting information that they need to be convinced to click, read through, share, and engage with. Why was the link shared and content created to being with, and how did it structure itself to fit its content/audience, and why does a particular structure/messaging work while others don't?
The word for all of that is Marketing. It's just a Good Thing when done right.
I think that's a very interesting, thoughtful response.
> You can’t really separate the content from its medium, its contex, and its audience
Yes, I completely agree.
> the audience wants to feel smart, and believes that they are “too smart to be marketed to”. Here they are scrolling through an attention market looking for interesting information that they need to be convinced to click, read through, share, and engage with. Why was the link shared and content created to being with, and how did it structure itself to fit its content/audience, and why does a particular structure/messaging work while others don't?
> The word for all of that is Marketing.
I think that overemphasizes the significance of a 'market'. 'Market' is used as a metaphor for many things, such as 'attention market', but also implies commercial, transactional, profit-oriented relationships, which don't seem like such strong motivations here (though I can't speak for the author). And to me your claims seem assume that the author's primary goal is more attention - they are in an 'attention market', they do all these things with intent to drive more page views.
They could have many other motivations. As a general concept, people love to share what they know, sort of like the drive to make FOSS. Maybe the author just loves to learn things and the blog posts provide an excuse; I've fallen into similar hobbies - without regret. Maybe they feel validated, or it relieves stress, or it's an escape from a job they hate, etc. There are so many possibilities in addition to commerce, attention, or profit.
I do agree that the HN "audience wants to feel smart, and believes that they are “too smart to be marketed to”." Those are the easiest people to persuade.
I just finished this response to a sibling comment of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760312
I think it inadvertently touches on some valid points that you raise, especially the one about criticizing people within earshot.
> Gwern seems to be onto something about how to engage readers. What do you think that is?
I think that people read for different reasons; there are different kinds of readers. I think that there’s a dissonance between the point that he makes in this article and my perception of the rest of his work. That’s all. Of course defending my opinion so that it is received in good faith reveals more than I want to be taken as an assumption about what I think about Gwern the person, but these assumptions are inevitable when we’re talking about writing to incite intrigue in other human beings and how writing is peculiar form of expression and exchange not just of ideas but also of personality.
Some people may read Gwern’s work and find that its informational depth satisfies their interests as readers. “Embryo Selection For Intelligence” sounds like an interesting topic to me, but not interesting enough on its own to make me 1) wait for the page to load because the entire page took approximately 13 seconds to to yield almost 12MB of data and 2) read it all, in the form what is self-described as a “cost benefit analysis” on the issue, which makes it seem like more technical/scientifically-driven piece of writing as far as what we can expect by way of style. [1]
Lots of people on HN, I assume, are of the sort who are indeed engaged by technically-minded expositions on a subject and if they are at all interested in narrative then they reach for fiction writing and may even find non-fiction books that attempt to wind narratives as wastes of time unless they are immediately entertaining. And entertainment is not something that I intend to advocate for. But I suspect that there are a lot of readers on HN who view reading as a means to an end—the information; and the more the merrier and merit-worthy the writing is thought to be.
Gwern discusses a lot of topics. I’m probably sharing my reaction to the stuff that I’ve read from him that I think lacks personality. If my impression of the dominant literary bloc on HN is accurate then maybe I’ve only come across the information-dense-but-stylistically-lacking prose served on a Xanadu’s sled of a web page sort of work of Gwern's.
It’s been 4 hours. I am yet to come across an "Empires Without Farms: The Case of Venice” in his oeuvre.
> If you crack open some of the mustier books about the Internet—you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones which invoke Roland Barthes and discuss the sexual transgressing of MUDs—one of the few still relevant criticisms is the concern that the Internet by uniting small groups will divide larger ones.
Loading in 6 seconds and serving a little more than 4MB of content, "The Melancholy of Subculture Society” seems like a good candidate. [2]
That's a great response; thanks. I would guess you are right that Gwern particularly appeals to the HN crowd, though that might be saying the obvious. Personally - and I don't think my perception is somehow superior to anyone else's - I think Gwern's writing has a clear voice.
> I just finished this response to a sibling comment of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46760312
I didn't write the parent comment there.
> the entire page took approximately 13 seconds to to yield almost 12MB of data
13 seconds doesn't seem like much to me compared to the time required to read those pages. I think that objectively, it doesn't have any economic impact. But that is relativley slow.
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.
There are definitely less readable blogs, even restricting to ones that aren't intentionally hard to read. For example: https://www.lilywise.com/amusement (Disclosure: written by my kid, who was just shy of 7yo then)
Personally, I like Gwern's style and aesthetic a lot, and don't have trouble reading his stuff.
> 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. You write for yourself first. Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it about as much you do.
The primary goal of writing is communication. If you are trying to convey information, you need someone to actually sit down and read it. Most of the time, this isn’t a problem, you’re writing for someone you have a pre-existing relationship with and they want to read what you have to say, whether that be a friend, a coworker, or your future self.
Problems arise when you move from one:one, to one:many communication. If you are trying to pass knowledge on to people you have no prior relationship with, you do need to attract their attention in a sea of options. If you actually have something important to say that other people need to hear, it does nobody any good for you to go unnoticed. In those circumstances, I don’t see anything wrong with taking Gwern’s advice.
I agree with your first assertion but not so much on the rest. There is more than one reason to write and for many it is about communication, they have something they want to express and you would be wise to consider your reader if that is your goal.
Hooking the reader with the opening page is swinging to the other fence of having a terrible opening page that no one will get through, generally not good to swing to the fences. I think the writer should be honest and upfront with the reader, the opening pages should be representative of what is to come, they should represent the whole and not just the beginning.
> 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, just happen to appreciate it about as much you do.
Depends very much on the medium. It's definitely not true that most professional writing is written for the author's sake. It is for an audience. Read books on writing and you'll often find the advice to cut out things if they won't interest the reader - no matter how valuable it is to you.
I myself struggle with this. Some years ago, I took a trip to my childhood home in another country after being separated for decades. Almost none of my friends from the time have been there in decades either. I made notes during the trip, and when I got back I started writing what I saw, and shared it with my friends who grew up with me. How various neighborhoods have changed. Anecdotes from my childhood tied to those places. And a lot more.
I got 30% done, and then decided to hold off sharing till I'd written the whole thing. I now have a first draft. It's the size of a proper book. It contains a lot of stuff that is of value to me, but likely not to most of the (small) audience. I know if I share it with them, chances are high no one will read it.
On the one hand, the stuff I wrote is highly valuable to me - it's become an unintentional memoir. But on the other hand, I do want to share quite a bit with my friends, and I know they'll value it if they actually read it.
I'll either have to cut a lot out, or write two versions (impractical).
The point being that even when you have a very limited audience, it is important to care about them and sacrifice your needs to an extent.
> 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.
I think "Just… start with the interesting part first" is quite different, and actually much better advice than "make me care". I'm more than done with stupid hooks and attention grabbing techniques, just plainly and honestly state at the outset what the point is of what will follow.
Yeah, there are two basic schools.
1. Broadcast what the article is about to let the interested readers find it easier
2. Trick people into reading as much of the article as possible through any means
The first makes sense if you want readers. The second makes sense if you're counting page impressions.
This is fairly uncharitable. The goal is not to trick people into reading, it is to motivate them as to why they should read. It is more about highlighting the most interesting part of your article to tell people why they should spend the time. You still have to deliver on your promises.
I feel like Gwern’s example is quite illustrative of this point. Just framing the content differently makes you more motivated to jump into it, even if you’re reading about the same content as before.
I now try to follow something like bottom line up front (BLUF) when I'm trying to quickly communicate something and respect someone's time: the most important, actionable detail first with details expanding as you read more.
I first heard that it has a standard in an email from someone ex-military; they started the email with "BLUF: blah blah blah". Turns out the military had (has?) it as a standard for emails. Go figure.
Before then, I remember someone asking Adam Ragusea (Youtube cooking channel) why he gives away the point of the video at the very beginning. Ragusea explained that he was previously a journalism professor, and he refused to bury the lede.
I don't watch cooking content anymore, but I've remained impressed that he was able to have a Youtube career while avoiding that manipulate-the-audience behavior to drive stats.
There's a spectrum of writing, corresponding to supply/demand or push/pull. The article is giving advice for oversupplied writing, where the audience doesn't really want to hear you, and you're trying to badger it into reading it anyway - typically, for some sort of personal gain (getting an interview, making a sale, promoting a political cause). Yes, attention hacking is important in this case.
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.
“Venice built a maritime empire from a city that couldn’t feed itself; so who fed it—and why didn’t its enemies simply starve it out?”
I love ancient history and would read a good book about the Venetian empire, but the sentence answers the final question. Venice was a maritime empire (it's capital on an island), that's why its enemies could not starve it out. All in on finding out who fed it.
This reminds me of what my PhD supervisor told me as he was trashing my first draft of my first paper: “up until this point in your life you’ve been trained to convince someone who knows more than you that you know something by writing impressive equations and complex concepts. Now you are the expert and if you do that nobody will read your papers. And if someone stops after a few sentences you’ll lose citations too.”
Similar experience with my bachelor's thesis after I presented it.
Supervisor: "Great job with this."
Me: "The assessor didn't seem too impressed."
Supervisor: "You should have sold it better."
That was the point where I realized that all the technical stuff doesn't really matter if nobody realizes how hard it was or why they should care.
The actual story of how cod from Norway came to be a thing in the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Querini
I 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 interest (which simply means that I brought my own mystery).
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.
It could definitely be my systems-oriented writing. May I ask what your profession is? I’m a software engineer.
I felt like the movie Marty Supreme completely failed to make me care about the main character until the final act where the filmmakers had to pull out all the big easy stops to force me to care about him. A third of the way in to the movie I was wondering if it was going to be explained at any point why I should be interested in this guy or care about his difficult and fairly unremarkable personality. A lot of the time it seems as if creatives assume that if you’re watching/reading/engaging with their movie/book/artwork then you already care enough to care.
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.
This article succeeded spectacularly in making me want to know all there is to know about medieval Venice, that's for sure.
"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.
Someone may have already been curious about the topic beforehand. I’m guessing they already have some kind of itch or curiosity. For example, someone who is interested in reading a dense technical textbook that gets straight into the details likely has a preexisting question waiting to be answered, which is why they care. That’s what motivates them to keep reading, even when the material jumps directly into the details
Know your audience: Technical people want the details.
Most people aren't technical.
This is why good writing on the web is broken up into multiple posts split by concern, and with links to the others at the top of the article.
The real problem is when they SEO the shit out of it and replace those links with irrelevant trash meant to steal your attention and people only want to share the "make me care" posts.
The writers stop bothering even posting details when they have them. They bury the lede because it's what the "make me care" crowd forces them to do.
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"
This article is just a slightly upscale version of the million "YouTube hooks" videos you can find on, well, you know. Down to the "create a gap" advice.
Once upon a time "one weird trick" was good advice too, before it got ran into the ground.
Counterpoint.
People our so tired of sensational intros and baiting questions which bury the actual lede up to the point where you discover it requires an annual subscription to find out the actual answer, that now it's actually counterproductive to start with an interesting "question".
It's facts first or gtfo. Prove to me that I'm not going to waste my time until you deliver what you promised, by delivering enough of that relevant background up front, otherwise I don't have time for your shenanigans.
Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1]. I fairly often often put the conclusion in the title, and must have been on the HN front page over 20 times by now.
This is obviously not the only way to construct an article (nor the only one I employ), but it is surprisingly reliable, and will attract and retain the readers who are actually interested in what you have to say, while letting those that aren't interested find something else.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
> Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1].
I think this is an important distinction. I would argue that it's better to make the point clear to find readers that care, than to try to make all readers care.
What are those sun symbols after paragraph ends.
Always found them interesting.
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.
This was quite a good article. It could have been excellent if it answered its own hook somewhere the piece though.
I came away not having a resolution to the hook - violating the articles second principle.
Video edition:
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.
First, make me care and tell me the answer. In 30 seconds.
Then expand on it in increasingly advanced levels of detail.
If your knowledge is high, I won't care about the video production. If you're not getting to the point quickly, you're manipulating the audience into getting views; education and sharing knowledge isn't the main driver of your video.
But what I want is idealistic.
This insight is what caused the rise of the clickbait headline and its predecessors in eras past. You need a hook or there's no point reading the tale.
I'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...)
The hook was great, but article was mediocre. I glazed over at the mention of LLMs in the second paragraph, skimming the article through to the end didn't improve things.
If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...
"When writing, your first job is this: First, make me care."
It really depends on who the audience is...
Understanding your audience is your first job as a writer or communicator.
Speaking to them and making them care is job two.
Ideally you wouldn't need to make them care. Just give them enough information up front for them to determine if they care.
Suppose you fed this article into an LLM, along with whatever other documents you had, and asked it to come up with some good candidates for opening sentences? And picked one, and let it take it from there?
I assume you'd get a mess, but it might be an interesting mess.
Know 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."
A good writer should be able to write a catchy hook.
A wise person should be able to read text that is flavored like cardboard. In general, one thing I dislike about this moment, is the incredible emphasis we place on the first five seconds of everything because everyone is thinking about all the other things we could be doing.
But many things are great because of how they feel 20 years later. The first five seconds of playing a musical instrument is horrible, but 20 years later and it is sublime. Emacs, Vim, are both notoriously forbidding, and yet, they are wonderful tools. Some things can be massaged to meet both criteria (I can imagine some emacs configuration that made it less painful and surfaced its true power in the first five seconds maybe), but other things are hard by nature and derive their value from how we have to adapt to them instead of how well they are adapted to us. I feel like the AI era is going to just accelerate this trend where everything we interact with is a slick surface and many people will never experience depth.
Read boring shit.
This seems like a cheap trick to hook someone into a blog post (ironically, Gwern seems to disregard this almost universally).
If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post.
Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead...
Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment.
Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...
10 reasons why clickbait is good for you:
1)
I disagree with the stated examples and literally quit reading there.
I can’t click on any links on pages (the header works).
Using brave on iPhone.
Firefox and Safari works…
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.
So how did Venice maintain its dominance?
Expanding Gwern's well made point, just a little, is that writing of any length needs a thesis statement in the first paragraph or so.
Thesis statements are not a new techniques, and these days they are needed much more because there is so much to read. Many articles don't state their thesis at all or not for a long time.
I don't have time to read that far to find out if it's worthwhile to me. Unless you are Satoshi Nakamoto, I'm not going to read far to find out.
And thus "question-bait" was born.
Zeroth, proofread.
Eh, if your hook is interesting and your writing is generally solid, I'm not about to begrudge a few typos
True, but any re-reading will let you pick up a lot of the typos. If you write it once and ship it unedited, then you weren't interested, and the reader likely won't be either. Typos clue the reader into that early.
Probably should be marked (2025).
It literally says 2026 in the URL. Perhaps it was written before the new year and published now, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant to the advice given anyway.
This didn’t make me care
Agreed, because it's not very actionable advice. At best it provides some examples of what not to do.
The example leads to one classic bit of writing advice: tell only the very most important things and omit everything else. Start the story as late as you can and end it as early as possible. This applies to nonfiction just as much as to fiction.
aaand, how to apply this technique to a CV?
prepending a one-liner-about-some-feat that might interest that particular company, before the usual cv afterthat?
hmm. made me think..
I hate this. Basically it’s saying use constant clickbait to keep your reader reading.
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.
Chuunibyou-tier slop.
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