Comment by Paracompact
18 hours ago
> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!”
As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain
You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with.
It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their perspective the way you can. Not necessarily because you’re intrinsically better, but because they’ve chosen to pay attention to you.
I’m scrolling Hacker News and this post happened to be on the front page. Your comment happened to be the first comment. Im in the audience for OP and for you. If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know. But it is different. The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
> If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.
Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.
> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.
And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.
and then I’m reading you
This, coupled with fear of making mistakes in public, was the thinking which for years kept me from writing about my work. Until a comment here on HN encouraged me to just do it.
I am so happy that I listened because it seems the few people who have checked it out generally enjoy it. Most commenters have positive things to say and some have stated they learned things.
How the information is shared can be as important as the act of sharing it in the first place. You might have a particular voice and style for communicating these ideas, but your audience may have otherwise passed it over without your unique approach.
Writers often help the reader secure knowledge that they already feel is correct but have not yet full distilled.
I’ve never thought about it quite like that, but it’s a great point. So, thanks for sharing the thought in this unique way.
Yes, for instance science communication is a whole field. Otherwise we wouldn't hold Carl Sagan et al. in such high regard.
Most relevant xkcd I thing:
https://xkcd.com/2501/
There's an xkcd for everything, I wonder if there's an xkcd for that?
https://xkcd.com/1053/
"I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"
Indeed. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic)
“When everybody knows that everybody knows” by Steven Pinker is about this.
I think this is some sort of modern academia bias. What you say it is true in academia, most things have already been thought and studied and that's why any academic book or paper has a citation in every sentence. I understand why this rigor is important in academia, but is it in the rest of the world?
If I have an interesting thought about a topic and I share it with an audience that is not PhDs, to them it might be interesting and insightful and provoke new thoughts. Most likely yes, someone in the 70s somewhere in the world already wrote a paper about this idea or even a book. Does it matter though? Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
I don't think that what's worth sharing are only documents that quote everyone else that already talked about it and their thoughts. That might work if I want to prove that my work is at boundaries of human knowledge or that is the most plausible explanation for something, but if I just want to share ideas then I find it limiting. Not just because it limits the people with the knowledge to write anything to a handful, but also because for those people there is this anxiety of "not worth it, wasting people time" if it's not researched for months like you mention. Share your thought, if some expert will find it wasteful or naive they will not read it, but someone else might and it might open their mind.
This makes me think about philosophy, if you really dig down into it virtually all philosophy ideas were already discussed first by Plato and Aristoteles. You cannot find a modern philosophy thought that isn't in some way already discussed by those two. Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
> Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.
"Relevant" needs disambiguation. It does not make your thoughts less valid in any moral sense that you should feel ashamed of them or anything, but IMO, it does mean that they are less worthy in the attention marketplace. If these thoughts are not competing in the attention marketplace, and rather being shared amongst acquaintances, or offered up in the aim of constructive criticism, then it does not risk turning the attention marketplace into a competition of hustling mediocrity.
> Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?
Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
I don't agree with this view of an "attention marketplace". Besides the HN small (and arguably irrelevant) bubble, most of the world attention is swayed by pop-stars, actors, musicians and influencers talking about what they had for breakfast and the gossip surrounding them. That on top of politically-controlled content/slop factories. A non-researched piece of content presenting an idea that was somewhere already talked about in a book or a paper can't do that much damage imho. If it reaches anyone and makes them think about something it can only be a net positive.
> Most (continental) philosophy is closer to art in my opinion than scientific inquiry. If you accept it as art, then you at least open the door to there being many valuably different ways of saying "love is good" or "reality is complicated" or what have you. And if you consider it as something beyond art, well, then it has some very pointed questions to answer.
I would invite you to read more philosophy if that's your idea of what philosophy is, because it feels very far from what has been discussed over the centuries by many authors way smarter than me and you.
Popularity is not quality, and quality depends on the audience and your own value system, not internet randos.
One of the signs that you're writing really great or really bad is if people ignore it. You're not popular so if it's really good nobody cares, and if it's really bad? Well, it's bad.
The problem comes when you write a really good essay that's just a point or two less than perfect. It's flawed enough to gain readers. It's insightful enough to help people. But guess what? Now you're in a popularity war with all the other bozos who want to create content around your topic.
That's why the greatest compliment you can receive is "Well, heck, that's been done before. There's nothing new here."
Everything has been done before. Don't sweat it. I am reminded of a great scene from the TV show Third Rock From The Sun where John Lithgow's character accuses another professor of plagiarism. His line is roughly "It's obviously shabby and repeats things done before. Take a look at the text. (he then holds up a book) Have you ever heard of the _Dictionary_??"
Write for yourself. Use writing to learn stuff. Done.
ADD: Here's the scene I was referring to. John Lithgow had far, far too much fun chewing up the furniture on that series. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIN4tC5Zwx0
Maybe society just rewards the first penguin to jump into the sea.
tangentially related:
https://youtu.be/4PwDFddpo4c
This is one of my favorite videos. After the first penguin jumps the crowd follows till then they confused. Regardless the sight of penguin jumping is breathtaking.
Well, the first few do jump, the next bravest continue jumping in, but some do get pushed off the cliff into the water too :)
Thanks for the video!
The first penguin certainly rewards the orcas.
That's quite a novel negative counterpart to "the early bird catches the worm"
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> it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing, and maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
> Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
Languages are themselves redundant, because it aids in comprehension.
Sometimes people need to hear the same thing over and over before it sinks in.
Sometimes it needs to be said in different ways, before it sinks in.
Sometimes it can be short and pithy, and other times it can fill a short book.
How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell.
tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing.
Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes.
> Maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
Not sure how you mean "style," but it is some sort of inferiority complex or insecurity. I do not claim it is a good or rational feeling.
> How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell. tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual. Are those rituals a good thing on the whole? Even if they are, why dress it up with all these theological truth propositions and elaborately fraudulent mythologies? Why do we have to be so verbose and repetitious, and pretend there's really 10,000 books' worth of depth to the Serenity Prayer?
> Not sure how you mean "style,"
You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."
> Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual.
The core of the Serenity Prayer is not really religious. Sure, it starts off "God grant me the..." but really, that's not really different than saying "Today I hope I have the strength to..."
In any case, many of the books saying the same thing are not religious at all.
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One way AI can help here is identifying prior art. Write a quick sketch of you idea, and ask an LLM with uncapped long-running web search capability to find if any prior art exists!
Sorry, I don't mean to single you out in any way, but why does AI/LLMs have to get shoehorned into every discussion here? It's getting exhausting.
I think GP found it useful for this particular use case, as did I and my coworker who is even more enthusiastic about it (he calls it compressed human culture).
And no, Google search (or Wikipedia) won't come close to capacity of LLMs to find similar things.
I understand this sentiment but also society as a whole is grappling with how AI will change everything so it kinda makes sense that peoples first reaction to anything is "will this hold in the new age".
Doesn't make it non exhausting, just understandable
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The added value of the LLM here is probably zero. Just type a search propmt in a search engine. If the top 5 results don't cover the same ground your article is covering, at the very least, your article will expose new knowledge to people using that search term.
Typing up LLM instructions and reading the output is probably more work.