I write software for a living and sometimes write on substack: https://taylorgordonlunt.substack.com/
Taylor G. Lunt
Karma: 666
What claims were fabricated, specifically? It seems like mostly minor stuff. As in, a man with visual agnosia probably did mistake very different objects, like his wife or his hat, though maybe Sacks created that specific situation where he mistook his wife for his hat just for dramatic effect. It’s shitty that he would do that, but I still feel that whatever I believed after reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat I was probably right to believe, because the major details are probably true?
Hey, I did Halfhaven, and I’m not sure it’s right to say it’s really a faster pace than Inkhaven, since Inkhaven was an in-person residency where the residents were working either part-time or not at all, and could focus entirely on writing. Halfhaven, on the other hand, was something you did in addition to your normal life.
I kind of agree that one post a day (or every other day) feels too frequent, but also, too frequent for what? Is the goal to produce great posts during the event, or to improve as a writer? I think the optimal frequency for these two goals are likely different. If the goal is to get better at writing quickly, then I’m reminded of the story people quote from the book Art & Fear:
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
It may be the case that the optimal pace for learning will simply feel too fast, because it’s not the optimal pace for exploiting your existing skills to make great posts (in the short term).
Thanks! I wasn’t sure anyone was even reading them until the end, but apparently people liked them. Now I wish I’d had a bit more time to read more of the posts to seek out ones I liked, especially in this last one when I was busy and only read a handful.
And thanks about The Confession. I think most of the fiction I write doesn’t fit here on LessWrong so I mostly just write it and then nobody sees it. I’m trying to get better at having protagonists that are actually trying to do something, rather than just ending up in a situation. In general I’d like to have a better understanding of what story is, so later maybe I can bring some storytelling ability back into my nonfiction writing.
Halfhaven Digest 6 + Retrospective
We just need to invent a device that reliably shoots you in the head if you experience any suffering above a certain threshold.
14 Concerns About Immortality
I don’t fully buy this alternate explanation, because I find the same increase in literacy when I read older books that were not so popular even when they were published. I’ve even read some letters written by normal people in the ’70s, and they seemed to be shockingly literate for normal people.
That said, I’m sure the effect you’re pointing to is real, I just don’t think it’s the whole story.
I don’t mind if Homer Simpson sutures my wounds, as long as there’s a pathway to me getting in front of a real brilliant person if I have a tricky health problem. The problems start when Homer Simpson starts thinking he’s brilliant and starts blaming you when he can’t figure out what’s wrong with you. And when you can’t tell him apart from the real brilliant people.
I don’t think it’s wildly popular, but it has around 500 reviews on the Canadian Amazon, which seems okay for a reference book, and is similar to the number of reviews for If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. I think they keep making new editions because it’s popular enough. I don’t know how to estimate more precisely than that.
Thanks for the context.
I just wrote a comment defending sneering recently on LessWrong, and I think this is a good time to put my beliefs into action.
You may feel smart, but your comment does not convey any of that intelligence, if you have it. You may be very confident in your opinions, but you are doing nothing to confer that confidence to anyone else. If you want me to believe what you believe, you’ll have to be convincing. A digital temper tantrum won’t do it.
Halfhaven Digest #5
The solution is not in fact to add more flowery prose or complicated sentences, its to write about something else.
I would certainly never suggest this. You seem to be implying that good prose is independent of useful prose, but it’s not. Good prose isn’t just flowery and fancy, it is respectful of the reader and their time, and delivers a message clearly and in an entertaining way.
It seems like you’re acknowledging the 2022 version is a bloated waste of space, while also suggesting at the same time that actually it’s very informative, and that this is all just relative? I definitely do not believe this is all just relative, or that girls forced to read Emily Post in the 1920s would have thought the writing in the book was hollow. It’s clearly full of useful information. Not to mention wit and charm. I weep for the future of our species if women in 2122 would think the 2022 version was “so informative!”
Thanks! I definitely agree, and that’s what I was alluding to when I said more people were entering the intellectual class, possibly diluting its literacy. I learned about this from Paul Fussell’s book Class. He suggested the same number of people, around ten percent, are still going to real university, and the rest are essentially fakes.
I’m not sure what it’s like for American high schools, but in Alberta (Canada) we had different streams for different kids. Dash-1 courses were for academic stream kids, dash-2 was either non-academic or for someone who wants a college certificate or a trade, dash-3 focuses on employability, and dash-4 is for students with learning disabilities. There was also an extra distinction between normal dash-1 students and dash-1 students who were also taking the IB program, which is like AP. I’ve never thought about it, but I’ve never heard of anything like this in America, and I wonder if it’s common or not. It seems like a pretty good idea to keep different groups of students separate. Though I don’t really see a point of having the dash-2 and dash-3 students there at all. Let them join the workforce and make some money. It doesn’t matter how valuable you think the information is for them. They’re not paying attention anyway.
Everyone was just pretending to understand each other? Some kind of social signaling game? Is there a reason this seems plausible to you?
And, yes, a vast increase in the portion of the population with a college education. And of course we explain the basics more than we did, because we are increasingly conscious of a broad audience with many odd gaps in their knowledge. Every skipped step risks losing a reader who might have benefited from an author’s thoughts. And some of our readers may even speak English as a second or third language.
If this is true, I wonder if the advent of AI will lead to prose in books that doesn’t have to do this anymore, because the reader-otherwise-left-behind can just ask AI if they end up confused about something.
I wonder if you missed the other differences, like the constant explanation to the reader of things they must already know. There have been plenty of writers throughout history known for their brevity who did not waste it explaining the obvious. I don’t mind short, simple sentences, though as the book I’m currently reading [[1]] suggests, the “brevity of Seneca and Tacitus” can be “too artificially epigrammatic”, and too much concision risks “sail[ing] down to posterity in an armada of nutshells.” I think a little wordiness, a little complexity gives writing a bit of room to breathe. Don’t write Gordian Knot sentences, but I think a little complexity is okay and basically doesn’t risk confusing a literate reader.
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Style, the Art of Writing Well by F. L. Lucas
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Also because if you don’t have a Twitter/X account or aren’t logged in, you can’t see the thread, only the initial tweet.
Yeah that seems to be the most serious one, and the only one I could see that I had a real issue with.