Think of it as personalizing reality for humanity, and manifesting abundance, by caring to bind variables you don’t have to.
Hero’s name, dress style, mannerisms, backstory — if you don’t bind *some* subset of it you’ve created a nonfiction role, not a livable story.
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You can’t, and shouldn’t aim to, make designed realities as rich as naturally evolved realities. That’s how you get to overwrought/baroque. You should also leave room in design for future growth/complexification etc. But this doesn’t necessarily look a certain way.
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The Sherlock Holmes stories have room to grow/age. Both the Jeremy Brett (classic/trad) and Benedict Cumberbatch (modernist/radical) versions are enjoyable in their own way. Both charming Italian towns and glass-and-chrome modern downtowns have their own evolutionary paths.
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An ongoing beef I have with what I consider the Christopher Alexander/Taleb school of trad design thinking is about this. I buy the conceptual point (stories and things grow/evolve/complexify) but not the uncritical lindy-paleo fetish for the old. But that’s a nerdy aside.
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But back to selectorate creation theory, the vast gulf between “nonfiction” and “fiction” in this general sense is a big deal. It’s the essence of: analysis vs synthesis, or destruction vs creation, or maps vs territory.
Nonfiction = analysis = destruction = maps.
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I’ve mostly been on the analysis/destruction/maps side as both an engineer (math/models over making) and writer (nonfiction over fiction).
Now in midlife, I feel myself changing gears on both sides. And the biggest challenge is just the excruciating slowness of creation.
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It’s not so much that it’s harder or different. It’s the same kind of thinking. It’s that everything takes 100-1000x longer because there’s a 100-1000x more interchangeable detail to lock down. And if you don’t make an active effort to make it interesting, it’s boring by default.
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Sometimes a creative Aha! leads to a network effect in your head and vast trees of detail bind themselves down with low marginal effort, but that is draining and exhausting. There’s no way around the fundamentally higher work needed (time*power-output).
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Simple example: my thread this year is to do 99 jokes/micro-stories based on specific prompt words from people. It’s not *hard* per se, it’s just very slow going. An equivalent quality nonfiction thread would take me ~1h. This will take me weeks to finish.
Quote Tweet
1/ Ok let’s do this @threadapalooza thing
My topic: jokes and microfictions
I’ll do it as a semantic variant of a 1-like-1-tweet ratchet. Reply to this tweet with a single prompt WORD, and I’ll try to QT with EITHER a joke using it, OR a 1-tweet microfiction about it. Limit 99.
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In each joke/story, coming up with the gag or idea takes 1% of the time. Binding it with the right kind of opinionated detail is the slow part. The more you’re a naturally abstract/analytical thinker, the more it will feel like brute force search rather than blithe inspiration.
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When you read purely manually written fiction or review fully human generated design, you can tell which details the author/designer just chose arbitrarily vs deliberately. The proportion is much higher in genre fiction and generic engineering.
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When you read literary fiction or review the design of extreme engineering, like the Mars rover, you are struck by how much more of it is consciously chosen or painstakingly optimized. The reason is trying to pack a lot more reality into fewer words/atoms.
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This is not “realism.” It’s not that Ulysses is more “realistic” than say a pulp western or that the Mars rover is more “real” than a cheap Kia. It’s that there’s a lot more at stake, lot less room for error, and far higher cost of evolutionary learning through trial and error.
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Most fiction and design have a ton of slack because there is design room you can waste. Lots of variables can be indifferently phoned in. But extremes have less slack. If something isn’t essential or influential, but merely interchangeable, it’s a sign there’s slack to eliminate.
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Humans are the bottleneck in authorship btw. Designs and fictions are limited in complexity by how much detail individual human brains can be opinionated about. As a result, when you throw machine learning at human design domains weird things can happen.
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Check out the Autodesk gallery in SF if you get a chance. All sorts of weird ML-generated designs no human would ever think of. Because ML procedural generation can handle vastly more detail.
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Many engineered artifacts are already featuring a high percentage of machine-generated design content. Mostly in hidden parts we can’t see, otherwise we’d be creeped out by the clearly alien aesthetics at work. This isn’t AGI btw, nor a portent of it. This is narrow, closed AI.
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Fiction is going to be harder than engineering, but ultimately it’s the same sort of problem — working in bigger design spaces and binding a greater proportion of interchangeable detail in opinionated, influential ways, that go beyond nominal function and feel more like home.
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In a way, this is the purpose of all synthesis, construction, creation etc. To make ourselves more at home in the universe rather than understanding it. Turning abundance into serendipity, and the apathy of the universe into serendipity. Immanetize the eschaton etc.
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I think this is fundamentally the appeal of fiction of the sort represented by Iain M. Banks Culture novels. They are about presenting a vision of a benevolent domestic cozy universe, engineered for human delight. The fully-automated-luxury-gay-space-communism is a side effect.
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Related thread
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Plot and character are in some ways the commodity elements of fiction, and how-to books spend 90% of their words on those. But good genre fiction usually seems to center a non-basic element:
LOTR: fake languages
Culture: names of ships
Star Trek: species
This seems important.
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