Comment by drc500free

3 years ago

This is a super interesting tool for self reflection. Looking at the top 10 similar accounts to mine, it gives me an arms-length view of how other people probably interpret my tone.

I appear to be a well-educated, over-confident know-it-all.

14 comments

drc500free

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pavlov  3 years ago

My #3 match is cstross, and now I’m convinced that my life-long secret dream of being a successful sci-fi novelist is basically a matter of typing. (Ideas? Character development? Ruthless editing? Developing an audience? Having a publisher? What do I need of those when the Computer told me I’m practically a genius…)

  • shagie  3 years ago

    I'd suggest giving the back story to Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi a glance.

    http://www.scalzi.com/agent/

    > In the summer of 1997, I was 28 years old, and I decided that after years of thinking about writing a novel, I was simply going to go ahead and write one. There were two motivations for doing so. First, I was simply curious if I could; I'd had up to that time a reasonably successful life as a writer, but I'd never written anything longer than ten pages in my life outside of a classroom setting. Two, my ten-year high school reunion was coming up, and I wanted to be able to say I'd finished a novel just in case anyone asked (they didn't, the bastards).

    > In sitting down to write the novel, I decided to make it easy on myself. I decided first that I wasn't going to try to write something near and dear to my heart, just a fun story. That way, if I screwed it up (which was a real possibility), it wasn't like I was screwing up the One Story That Mattered To Me. I decided also that the goal of writing the novel was the actual writing of it -- not the selling of it, which is usually the goal of a novelist. I didn't want to worry about whether it was good enough to sell; I just wanted to have the experience of writing a story over the length of a novel, and see what I thought about it. Not every writer is a novelist; I wanted to see if I was.

highwaylights  3 years ago

Same. Looking through some of the handles on my list tells me that I come across like a not-particularly-well-educated McSmug that needs to take a good long look at myself. Wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t reading the posts thinking I definitely could see myself writing this.

This was certainly eye-opening.

Update: It’s actually a little strange that reading through some of the matches it’s not just style that overlaps but perspectives in quite a few cases too. I’m definitely not the unique little snowflake that some others are finding themselves to be.

bee_rider  3 years ago

I also enjoyed reading one of my style-partner’s posts.

The most noticeable similarity is that we both clearly have strong opinions about some things, and like to share information, but also like to be clear about our unknowns or opinions. So, lots of “sounds likes,” “probably,” “could be” and so on.

The downside is, I guess, this could be seen as a bit weasel-word-y or indirect.

  • reducesuffering  3 years ago

    > like to be clear about our unknowns or opinions. So, lots of “sounds likes,” “probably,” “could be” and so on.

    Commonly called just “hedging” like hedging your bets.

    • bee_rider  3 years ago

      That’s a kinder description than I gave it in my next paragraph, so thanks I suppose.

      I do think it is an under-emphasized aspect of honesty, though, that we should be clear about our level of experience/understanding. Especially online — people like to discuss things, even (especially?) when we are just getting started. So if we’ve picked up opinions through osmosis and we start repeating them without testing them, we’re really just amplifying some possibly-incorrect viewpoint (and if we’ve picked it up, there’s a good chance it is already widespread in the community, which is bad if it is wrong).

      And I mean, more concretely a measurement is not complete without the error bars!

      Often this doesn’t really matter, because it is just chit-chat anyway. But it is nice to keep in mind.

      2 replies →

reducesuffering  3 years ago

> over-confident know-it-all.

I’m pretty sure participation in HN is a 99% sure filter for being called this many times in one’s life.