Venkatesh Rao

There are 3 types of details required to define a work well enough to actually create it: Essential details: which determine the nature of the thing Influential details: which meaningfully shape that nature Interchangeable details: which are necessary but not uniquely so.

We’re talking selectorate theory for creative work, where instead of people/citizens/voters we’re talking about the hundreds or thousands of details that go into individual works by individual creators. Goes up to millions or billions for group works like movies.

The thing that fiction and engineering share is that they are like democracies. There is a HUGE group of interchangeables. Details that don’t really matter by default, but can occasionally matter as a function of strategy or chance. Eg: color of a wheel, drink the hero drinks.

This makes both harder work than respective “theory” cousins. Math for engineering, nonfiction for fiction. If you want to build an airplane, you HAVE to bind every detail even if you don’t care. If you’re doing airplane math, you can throw away details you don’t care about.

For eg. if you’re doing fluid dynamics, throw away everything except the shape/geometry. If you’re doing controls, throw away everything except the differential equation. But real planes have: paint colors, tire vendors, seat cover material choices.... about 10k more detail.

Same with nonfiction. If you’re writing a cryptography paper, “Alice” and “Bob” will do. They’re even expected. Or just “user” or “customer” in other kinds of writing. In fiction, you do have to come up with an apt-enough name that it feels like a story about a person.

Nonfiction/math are like absolutist dictatorships, where the set of interchangeables is much smaller than in a democracy and does not include most who would be included in a democracy. They can be suppressed/disenfranchised. Though sometimes they may fuel a popular uprising.

Sometimes you may choose to elevate a detail from interchangeable to influential. Hercule Poirot and James Bond are names loaded with symbolism that shape the story. Otoh, Ross, Rachel, Monica, Joey, Chandler could easily be a million other names and it would make no difference.

Fiction and engineering are so full of detail because they must either become part of reality (engineering results in real things) or present a sufficiently realistic illusion of it to allow immersion. But the theoretical cousins don’t need to be.

Or in the case of engineering, consider the vast gulf between the schematic CAD drawing of a minimalist widget vs the widget itself. Where widget = coffee mug, armchair, iPhone body...

The point is, don’t confuse the minimalism or lack thereof in a design for there actually being fewer details that need binding. When people get lazy about binding details using minimalist aesthetics as an excuse you end up with designs or stories that don’t work at all.

I like minimalism done well where there is no good reason to complicate things, and so long as you you don’t sacrifice details that matter (a la infamous Apple puck mouse). I’m not a fractal-fetish trad, prizing texture in fiction/engineering for its own illegibly vitalist sake.

But for all but the simplest artifacts and stories, I do like non-minimalism in a different sense: opinionated design. I don’t need richly textured design. But I like things and takes where a few interchangeable aspects have been elevated to influential or essential aspects.

Interchangeable aspects of a design define a vast design space. Indifferent design picks randomly or lazily (eg uncritical imitation) from the space, which is as it should be for most details. But if you don’t promote say 5-20% of detail to influential, you fail in a key way.

The thing is, vast design spaces are scary and distressing to experience. They channel the vast indifference of the universe. It’s like a total perspective vortex. Opinionated design cuts that vast dimensionality a bit and makes you feel a bit more at home in the universe.