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Comment by mihaic

3 days ago

For the past 5-6 years I've been writing a book in my spare time. The outline of it is how reason emerges in past societies from the needs of social complexity, how it's lessons get converted into rules and rituals, which in turn remove any competitive advantage of aquiring reason, ending it to setup a new cycle. And in the meanwhile LLMs became the ultimate heuristic of humanity.

I've gotten it 60-70% ready, and I really don't know if it'll have an audience in a post-AI world. I never meant to strike big with it, but I'm now wondering if thousands of hours of research and writing can amount to more than a novelty gift I'd give to friends.

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mihaic

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jdw64  3 days ago

I really hope you don't give up. I've built and shipped systems with 80000 to 90,000 lines of code, only to see most of the companies that bought them go out of business. But there was still immense value in the act of delivering them. By putting our creations out into the world, we connect with each other.

The act of writing and building is, in itself, humanity's grand narrative for trying to understand the world. The journey itself is inherently valuable. Isn't the ability to organize our thoughts, pass them down to the next generation, and continue that narrative exactly what makes us uniquely human?

Even if only a few people around you end up reading it, those few could be deeply inspired to go on and build an even greater world. Please don't stop. I'm rooting for you.

pryelluw  3 days ago

I’m also a writer and publish my works every week. Also working towards a book. My take? I don’t care. Still doing it for myself. God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots and I wouldn’t change my mind.

  • doitLP  3 days ago

    > God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots

    With imagery like this, I’d love to read your other work! Link?

saaaaaam  3 days ago

Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience. Yes, AI means there are more poor works competing. But if it’s actually good writing, you will find an audience if you market the book. Pay an editor. Publish to kindle. Pay for marketing. Get people to sign up for an email list.

  • mocpocalypse  3 days ago

    The idea that "marketing" is a simple, turnkey thing one can do to build an audience is incorrect. It's time-consuming and expensive, and most people lose money.

    It's like saying "you can make money on Kalshi." Not false, but reductive.

    I know plenty of authors, self-publishers and traditionally published, who've lost five and six figures marketing their own books. Whether this is worth doing is subjective, but for most people, it's not.

  • lacewing  3 days ago

    > Why wouldn’t people read it? The problem is not writing - the problem is finding an audience.

    And that's precisely the issue here. For a while, the internet allowed you to find an audience, just like that. Start a blog / podcast / YT channel, keep going, get enough attention. You could then approach a traditional publisher and tell them "hey, I'm kind of a big deal", or you could self-publish and rely on the word-of-mouth from your followers.

    Now, how would that work? If you have a blog, AI answers will summarize it without attribution and not send anyone your way. Even the "references" cited in AI answers often point to AI-slop blogs, not the original source. The articles we discuss on HN are often AI-written too. So yeah, it's about reaching the audience, but you're now competing with machines that produce an endless stream of human-like text, good enough for most consumers, practically for free.

    • saaaaaam  3 days ago

      Word of mouth is not marketing. The way you find the audience is by marketing. Paying to get in front of people. Targeting people who read similar books. Getting people who already have audiences to review your book or interview you.

      A book won’t sell itself.

      Which addresses your second point: machines can produce an endless stream of human-like text, but they have exactly the same problem as human generated text: finding an audience.

      How are these endless streams of human-like text finding an audience? Most of the time they are not.

      And as soon as you scratch beneath the surface there is no one to interview. No one to turn up at literary festivals. No one to write opinion pieces or blog pieces for book-interested audiences. As I said: writing isn’t the problem. Finding the audience is the problem.

      What distinguishes a book that is read by no one from a book that is read by a bunch of people? It’s definitely not the writing. There are great books out there that never find an audience because no one ever went out there to find an audience for those books.

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backprop1989  3 days ago

For what it’s worth, that sounds like a very interesting premise. N=1, but you have a potential reader here!

XargonEnder  3 days ago

Your comment makes me wonder what the historical ratio was between books and readers. I know that books were in very short supply a thousand years ago, but readers were also very short in supply. I wonder if things are worse in the tiktok era or the pre-printing press era.