Comment by notjtrig
5 years ago
The author notes by the use of insane he means different, but is it really that unique for a person to post online or are we just seeing a pattern where there is none.
Books are written by insane people, on average person does not write a book.
Rock climbers are insane people, very few people rock climb so why listen to safety tips the 0.2% of the population who do. They are not normal people from a statical standpoint.
On average a person does not do any one spicific thing.
Everyone online has contributed to the internet, everyone has written something and everyone has excersised.
I've seen this brought up before that only 2-3% of redditors contribute, like it's a bad thing or a unique thing. That number it's way higher than books, tv, radio any form of convenientional media.
I think these examples still support the broader hypothesis that creators are outliers and not representative of everybody else. Normal people don’t write books. Reading only books and not talking to normal people will give you a skewed impression of reality.
Even that statement "creators are outliers" doesn't really seem supported by the evidence from the article. Seems just as plausible that most people create in a singular or small set of domains, but consume from a much broader set.
I mean, sure, only .2% of visitors contribute to Wikipedia, but that's because Wikipedia has huge general applicability. I bet the 99.8% of non-contributors also includes the guy that streams on Twitch 12 hours a day, or folks who moderate Reddit forums, or lots of book authors.
Far from being "outliers", could be that most people just focus their creative pursuits on one thing.
Everyone creates, and most people write, a book isn't so different than a dairy or a blog. You could say TicToc creators are not normal people or Pinterest submitters, but I think the only time we see a cross section that does not represent the general population is when there is a high barrier to entry.
There is a phrase in Icelandic, "ad ganga med bok I maganum", everyone gives birth to a book. Literally, everyone "has a book in their stomach". One in 10 Icelanders will publish one, so in that society it's stastically normal to publish a book. But in any society it's normal to create and publishing is just one out of thousands of ways to do something everyone does.
Thanks, came here to underline the very same, with quote FTA:
> Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is.
The post is about 'how unusual their behavior is' not about 'their (in)sanity'. In hindsight a questionable use of terms, given the author's profession, but I appreciate the edit.
I remember reading about a study to try to find the statistically average soldier.
I seem to recall that after doing hundreds of measurements on thousands of soldiers they found that there was too much variation. None of the soldiers was average in all measurements.
Edit: here's a link
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
From the comments:
"Creation has always been the province of outliers. Has every creator--from Grady Harp all the way back to God--been insane?"
It’s also perspective. People usually underestimate what doing a little bit of something daily actually accumulates to in a given year. Before you know it, you hit certain thresholds. It can appear overwhelming at first glance to most of us, but it’s really just a total sum of daily progress.
The perspective on this can be the shallow assessment that something is insane, or the wisdom to know it was discipline. Take your pick.