I've been sort of idly tweeting about this reading bunnytrail/yak shave for a while now. I oughta do an overview blog post of all the stuff I've looked at and what I've learned/failed to learn from them.
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The thing about fiction is that there’s no point writing a *bad* story. By contrast, there is often a point to writing bad non-fiction. If you have interesting enough things to say, it doesn’t matter if you say them badly. This is not true of fiction.
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If I knew I was writing a Catch-22 it’d be worth a decade of effort. Writing 10 dreck novels would likely be less fulfilling for me than flipping burgers for 10 years. Some authors manage to be both good and prolific, but unlike nonfiction there’s no strong correlation.
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I suspect fiction writing is naturally a guild economy, while non-fiction writing is naturally a free market. So when the internet killed distribution scarcity and tastemaker gatekeeping, nonfiction exploded but fiction remained basically the same.
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Fan fiction communities in relation to “published” fiction markets (text, screen) are a joke, compared to nonfiction social media vs old media. Non-fiction new media (blogs, newsletters) have pretty much brought all but the costliest investigative non-fiction to its knees.
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The only reason to publish non-fiction in old media now is street-cred in circles that don’t actually read much. But there’s reasons besides market access and cred to participate in the fiction guilds. They actually possess IP that’s still mostly shared via apprenticeship.
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In fields with a good “beginner game” how seriously you can take someone is a function of raw number of pots they’ve made. If they’ve made more pots the chances are good that they’ve made more *good* pots. A 200-pot person should be taken twice as seriously as a 100 pot person.
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Nonfiction, math, programming are like that.
More words written = likely better writer
More problems/proofs done = better mathematician
More lines of code = better programmer
More pots = better potter
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Fields that are NOT like that
More startups != better entrepreneur
More novels != better fiction writer
More acting credits != better actor
More movies != better director
More bills passed != better politician
More arrests != better detective
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Good question. I don’t think so. The learning curve seems intrinsically longer. It’s not a tech or tools problem. Kinda like better shoes won’t turn more people into Olympic-grade athletes. Slight chance AI could help, a la TextSpark.ai
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Replying to @vgr
Do you see any way the ecosystem of fiction could change in a meaningful way in the near future? Is there a product or cultural event that could upend it, or are we so far into the Internet age that the system has proven cemented?
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Neato! Russian Campbell. How come there’s a Russian version of everything?
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Replying to @vgr
I heard about Vladimir Propp in @lexfridman's interview of Vladimir Vapnik (can't remember if it was 1st or 2nd interview--both intense listens but worth attention for interesting ideas even if you don't care about ML/AI). Seems like Russian Campbell. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_
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Hmmmmmmmmmm
The re-enchantment bunny trail I’ve been going down offers an alt to Campbell twitter.com/buttontapper/s
This Tweet is unavailable.
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Learn about this guy, if you haven't already. Russians probably have more Campbells than the rest of the world.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_B
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