I didn’t like this post, but I did very much like the “insight porn” post it linked to. (Unfortunately LW doesn’t let you simultaneously downvote and strong-upvote a post, so consider my weak-upvote as a sum-of-vibes.)
If someone says ‘What’s for supper?’ a beginner will desperately try to think up something original. He will carefully evaluate dozens of options in his mind.
“Is this funny?” “Will this not reveal something weird about myself?”
It will take him ages to come up with something and eventually he will say something “fried mermaid”.
An improv pro would simply respond “fish”.
Taken—almost verbatim, without attribution—from Impro, by Keith Johnstone. (I don’t know whether LW would consider this plagiarism, or consider that to be bad.)
I don’t know exactly what the LW norms are around plagiarism and plagiarism-ish things, but I think that introducing that basically-copied material with
I learned this by observing how beginners and more experienced people approach improv comedy.
is outright dishonest. OP is claiming to have observed this phenomenon and gleaned insight from it, when in fact he read about it in someone else’s book and copied it into his post.
I have strong-downvoted the post for this reason alone (though, full disclosure, I also find the one-sentence-per-paragraph style really annoying and that may have influenced my decision[1]) and will not find it easy to trust anything else I see from this author.
[1] It feels to me as if the dishonest appropriation of someone else’s insight and the annoying style may not be completely unrelated. One reason why I find this style annoying is that it gives me the strong impression of someone who is optimizing for sounding good. This sort of style—punchy sentences, not too much complexity in how they relate to one another, the impression of degree of emphasis on every sentence—feels like a public speaking style to me, and when I see someone writing this way I can’t shake the feeling that someone is trying to manipulate me, to oversimplfy things to make them more likely to lodge in the brain, etc. And stealing other people’s ideas and pretending they’re your own is also a thing people do when they are optimizing for sounding good. (Obviously everything in this footnote is super-handwavy and unfair.)
In case anyone is in doubt about abstractapplic’s accusation, I’ve checked. The relevant passage is near the end of section 3 of the chapter entitled “Spontaneity”; in my copy it’s on page 88. I’m not sure “almost verbatim” is quite right, but the overall claim being made is the same, “fried mermaid” and “fish” are both there, and “will desperately try to think up something original” is taken verbatim from Johnstone.
I didn’t like this post, but I did very much like the “insight porn” post it linked to. (Unfortunately LW doesn’t let you simultaneously downvote and strong-upvote a post, so consider my weak-upvote as a sum-of-vibes.)
Taken—almost verbatim, without attribution—from Impro, by Keith Johnstone. (I don’t know whether LW would consider this plagiarism, or consider that to be bad.)
I don’t know exactly what the LW norms are around plagiarism and plagiarism-ish things, but I think that introducing that basically-copied material with
is outright dishonest. OP is claiming to have observed this phenomenon and gleaned insight from it, when in fact he read about it in someone else’s book and copied it into his post.
I have strong-downvoted the post for this reason alone (though, full disclosure, I also find the one-sentence-per-paragraph style really annoying and that may have influenced my decision[1]) and will not find it easy to trust anything else I see from this author.
[1] It feels to me as if the dishonest appropriation of someone else’s insight and the annoying style may not be completely unrelated. One reason why I find this style annoying is that it gives me the strong impression of someone who is optimizing for sounding good. This sort of style—punchy sentences, not too much complexity in how they relate to one another, the impression of degree of emphasis on every sentence—feels like a public speaking style to me, and when I see someone writing this way I can’t shake the feeling that someone is trying to manipulate me, to oversimplfy things to make them more likely to lodge in the brain, etc. And stealing other people’s ideas and pretending they’re your own is also a thing people do when they are optimizing for sounding good. (Obviously everything in this footnote is super-handwavy and unfair.)
In case anyone is in doubt about abstractapplic’s accusation, I’ve checked. The relevant passage is near the end of section 3 of the chapter entitled “Spontaneity”; in my copy it’s on page 88. I’m not sure “almost verbatim” is quite right, but the overall claim being made is the same, “fried mermaid” and “fish” are both there, and “will desperately try to think up something original” is taken verbatim from Johnstone.
Plagiarism is bad, on LW or anywhere.
Repeating other people’s useful thoughts is good. Pretending you came up with them yourself is bad. Attribution is the difference.
(Which post was it that you liked?)
This, linked at “Never.” in the OP.