[HN Gopher] First, make me care
___________________________________________________________________
First, make me care
Author : andsoitis
Score : 199 points
Date : 2026-01-25 19:03 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (gwern.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (gwern.net)
| huhkerrf wrote:
| "First, make me care" is exactly right. But I also know that
| anytime you have narrative non-fiction on here, someone without
| fail argues that the author didn't get straight into the details.
| some_furry wrote:
| Know your audience: Technical people want the details.
|
| Most people aren't technical.
| sublinear wrote:
| This is why good writing on the web is broken up into multiple
| posts split by concern, and with links to the others at the top
| of the article.
|
| The real problem is when they SEO the shit out of it and
| replace those links with irrelevant trash meant to steal your
| attention and people only want to share the "make me care"
| posts.
|
| The writers stop bothering even posting details when they have
| them. They bury the lede because it's what the "make me care"
| crowd forces them to do.
| acc077877 wrote:
| Someone may have already been curious about the topic
| beforehand. I'm guessing they already have some kind of itch or
| curiosity. For example, someone who is interested in reading a
| dense technical textbook that gets straight into the details
| likely has a preexisting question waiting to be answered, which
| is why they care. That's what motivates them to keep reading,
| even when the material jumps directly into the details
| furyofantares wrote:
| My personal distaste for typical narrative presentations of
| interesting information is how often the first interesting
| details come 4-5 paragraphs in and then are slowly peppered
| from there. Really doesn't seem at odds with the advice here
| which can easily be applied to the opening sentence or
| paragraph, and title.
| simonw wrote:
| This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that
| platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention
| of your audience before they skip to the next video.
|
| You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever
| because people will get bored of it - including if that hook is
| heavily used by other accounts.
|
| This makes TikTok a fascinating brute-force attack on human
| psychology, with literally millions of people all trying to find
| the right hooks to catch attention and constantly evolving and
| iterating on them as the previous hooks stop being effective.
| sublinear wrote:
| You say "human psychology", but there are a ton of people who
| can't stand any of that shit and see it for the tarpit that it
| is.
|
| It's not very effective at doing anything but making lowbrow
| content slightly more appealing.
| simonw wrote:
| I keep seeing people complain that the internet isn't as
| weird and fun as it used to be. The weird and fun stuff is
| all on TikTok!
|
| Here's a guy who rigged a theremin and a hurdy gurdy up to
| Singer sewing machine and performs spectacular covers on it h
| ttps://www.tiktok.com/@singersoundsystem/video/751772710192..
| .
|
| And here's someone living my dream, he moved to the Scottish
| Highlands to start a workshop creating mechanical sculptures
| inspired by my childhood heroes the Cabaret Mechanical
| Theater and he just made a piece for them! https://www.tiktok
| .com/@mechanicalcreations/video/7598189362...
| sublinear wrote:
| Opinions of what's "weird and fun" can vary a lot. I find
| this stuff about as appealing as watching AI-generated
| Queen Elizabeth fight Stephen Hawking, or someone sneaking
| into Chernobyl to practice their parkour.
|
| I don't want "weird and fun" anymore, and neither does
| everyone else who avoids TikTok.
| tombert wrote:
| This is part of why I hate TikTok so much.
|
| I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I do
| this is actually _specifically_ because it gives me less choice
| than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.
|
| A lot of time when I do the autoplay of YouTube Music, if I
| don't like the song in the first 15-20 seconds, I skip it to
| something else. I eventually realized that a lot of songs that
| I end up really liking require you listening to the entire song
| to come together. The inability to skip to the next song on
| SiriusXM forces me to listen to the song, and I've found a ton
| of songs that I likely would have otherwise skipped with
| anything else.
|
| I feel like with TikTok, we're effectively training ourselves
| to ignore things that don't immediately grab our attention.
|
| Maybe this is just my "Old Man Yells At Cloud" moment though.
| squigz wrote:
| Check out KEXP and SomaFM. KEXP in particular is a great way
| to discover new music that you might not normally listen to.
|
| https://www.kexp.org/
|
| https://somafm.com/
| keyringlight wrote:
| I'd say streaming radio in general is low profile in how it
| lets you discover new things. I use the search/directory
| built into foobar2000 or apps like radiodroid, but there
| are sites like https://www.radio-browser.info/ for the web.
| It's an interesting and low cost way to find things you
| wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and likely curated by
| whoever is running the station. What really stood out to me
| is how different countries or regions have their own
| tastes, or at least are likely to be playing something
| different to local broadcasts.
| ErroneousBosh wrote:
| > I recently started doing SiriusXM again a lot. The reason I
| do this is actually specifically because it gives me less
| choice than something like Spotify or YouTube Music.
|
| No, I think you're right.
|
| I'm old enough to have swapped pirated cassettes of whatever
| was doing the rounds in high school. I remain convinced that
| Appetite for Destruction can only be listened to the way it
| was intended to be heard, if it's been copied onto a ratty
| old TDK D90 that's been getting bashed around in your
| schoolbag for months by your mate's big brother who has the
| CD and a decent stereo.
|
| There's a lot of stuff I listened to that I probably wouldn't
| have if I'd had the selection that's available on streaming
| services. When you got a new tape, that was Your New Tape,
| and you listened to it over and over because you hadn't heard
| it a thousand times yet. Don't like it? Meh, play it anyway,
| because you haven't heard it a thousand times yet.
|
| I got into so much music that's remained important to me
| because of a chance tape swap.
|
| Maybe Spotify et al needs instead of unskippable adverts,
| unskippable tunes that are way outside your usual range of
| tastes. "Here have some 10,000 Maniacs before you go back to
| that R'n'B playlist!"
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, similar for me; when I was a teenager I would buy a
| CD specifically I liked a single on the radio and put it in
| my car. I would be too lazy to take it out and listen to
| something else, so I'd listen to that CD dozens and dozens
| of times, and I would grow to appreciate the non-single
| songs a lot, very often more than the song I even bought
| the CD for.
|
| The non-singles are generally a lot less "radio-friendly",
| almost by definition, so a lot of artists were more willing
| to try stuff that is a little less immediately-appealing,
| and there are a bunch of albums I have basically memorized
| now because of that.
|
| With Spotify and YouTube Music, there's an infinite number
| of songs to choose from and as a result you never have the
| same excuse to listen to the same songs over and over
| again. I'm not necessarily saying it's "worse", just that I
| miss the way it used to be.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| It's so addictive but so soul destroying. I feel dirty after
| spending time on that platform. The term brainrot fits
| perfectly.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| I've started using these platforms for learning (stretch
| exercises, argentine tango patterns/musicality I might want
| to lead, etc) and am finding the experience to work better in
| those kinds of situations. Agree it can be brain rot if using
| it for entertainment, politics, etc.
| ericmcer wrote:
| It is still doing the same thing, the dopamine hit is just
| feeling like you learned something instead of seeing
| something funny/shocking/etc.
|
| The idea you can gain any kind of actual
| experience/knowledge about a thing through a series of 30s
| clips that are competing with millions of other 30s clips
| to grab you is folly.
| xandrius wrote:
| Honest question: why wouldn't you simply search for exactly
| the same things but on longer format platforms such as
| YouTube?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Why short form though? I've always learned much better from
| long form, more comprehensive videos. Or I guess to put it
| another way I don't believe I've ever learned anything
| besides quick hacks on reels/shorts/tiktok. Not even quick
| guitar licks.
| jaredsohn wrote:
| To respond to everyone at once -
|
| I have experience and teachers so I'm not solely relying on
| these videos. I use the short videos as a fast discovery of
| what's out there and I'll sometimes watch long videos
| afterward. LLM sites also work well for this discovery and
| I use that sometimes but it is a bit more work from me
| (which sounds strange to write re: AI) because I have to
| type out what I want instead of relying on algorithms that
| use data collected about me.
|
| I use Facebook Reels (rather thank TikTok) which show me
| stuff anyway after I click on a link shared by friends so
| having it show me things relevant to learning seems like
| the best option here in case I click on next video.
| something765478 wrote:
| Yeah, I had to get rid of my youtube plus subscription
| because I was getting too addicted to the shorts.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Pretty sure it destroys something in you as well. So many
| context changes with no relation whatsoever and regular hooks
| that give you a pinch.
|
| We haven't evolved for that. Our brain is trying to figure out
| a narrative between two things following each other. It needs
| time to process stuff. And there is so much shock it can absorb
| at once. So many "?!" and open loops in a day.
|
| I made a TikTok account to at least know what people were
| talking about. After 3 months, I got it.
|
| And I deleted it.
|
| I felt noticeably worse when using it, in a way that nothing
| bad for me, including the news, refined sugar and pron, ever
| made me feel. The destruction was more intense, more
| structural. I could feel it gnarling.
|
| In a way, such fast feedback is good, because it makes it easy
| to stop, while I'm still eating tons of refined sugar.
| andai wrote:
| >TikTok [is] a fascinating brute-force attack on human
| psychology
|
| Security researcher once told me that he sees social media as a
| distributed hacking attempt on the human mind.
|
| I think it's a genetic algorithm. You try random stuff and when
| something works you clone and mutate and crossbreed it.
| tstrimple wrote:
| Isn't this pretty much the definition of a meme? I mean
| before meme just became synonymous with funny cat videos.
| Like the actual meaning of the word.
| ericmcer wrote:
| There almost is no hook, the hook is that the time investment
| for each video is so small your brain doesn't even need to
| think about whether it should watch or not.
| kmoser wrote:
| > This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that
| platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention
| of your audience before they skip to the next video.
|
| Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image
| thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video.
| There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a
| thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a
| certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming
| their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that
| time.
| ctoth wrote:
| Attention is all you need, after all.
|
| On its own, this is interesting. But when you consider that
| people actually need attention for things like their jobs, the
| road, their children, &c... it starts to sort of look a bit
| like a superweapon.
| klustregrif wrote:
| > You can't just find one hook that works and reuse it forever
|
| That seems to be exactly what succesfull acounts are doing.
| They go a year or two creating content in a theme and then find
| that one hook that makes people stay a second to see what heir
| content is and then their entire personality and content
| becomes that one hook repeated until naseum and no matter what
| they do to try to escape it it's impossible since they don't
| control their content exposure newcommers will aways be flooded
| in a repeat storm of that same hook, and people who get tired
| will move on no matter what. So the only reliable way of trying
| to "pivot" to anything else is to create a new account, but
| that's going to get you back at the start with no guarentee
| that you'll have another hit in the next 2 years, so they just
| accept their fate as "the cucumber guy" or "the funny outfit
| girl" and then ride that as far towards the sunset as possible.
| amelius wrote:
| Except the hooks only attach to the lizard brain while the
| rational brain just sits there with a palm in its face.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| This was quite a good article. It could have been excellent if it
| answered its own hook somewhere the piece though.
|
| I came away not having a resolution to the hook - violating the
| articles second principle.
| makeitrain wrote:
| I can't click on any links on pages (the header works).
|
| Using brave on iPhone.
|
| Firefox and Safari works...
| skybrian wrote:
| Suppose you fed this article into an LLM, along with whatever
| other documents you had, and asked it to come up with some good
| candidates for opening sentences? And picked one, and let it take
| it from there?
|
| I assume you'd get a mess, but it might be an interesting mess.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| I think "Just... start with the interesting part first" is quite
| different, and actually much better advice than "make me care".
| I'm more than done with stupid hooks and attention grabbing
| techniques, just plainly and honestly state at the outset what
| the point is of what will follow.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, there are two basic schools.
|
| 1. Broadcast what the article is about to let the interested
| readers find it easier
|
| 2. Trick people into reading as much of the article as possible
| through any means
|
| The first makes sense if you want readers. The second makes
| sense if you're counting page impressions.
| treetalker wrote:
| Zeroth, proofread.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Eh, if your hook is interesting and your writing is generally
| solid, I'm not about to begrudge a few typos
| jfengel wrote:
| True, but any re-reading will let you pick up a lot of the
| typos. If you write it once and ship it unedited, then you
| weren't interested, and the reader likely won't be either.
| Typos clue the reader into that early.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| This article succeeded spectacularly in making me want to know
| all there is to know about medieval Venice, that's for sure.
| skybrian wrote:
| It's really too bad it's not a quote from an actual book.
| treelover wrote:
| "When writing, your first job is this: First, make me care."
|
| It really depends on who the audience is...
| bravura wrote:
| Understanding your audience is your first job as a writer or
| communicator.
|
| Speaking to them and making them care is job two.
| tines wrote:
| I have often thought that all good fiction is mystery. This is
| obviously an overstatement, but I think it's not too far off.
| Humans are mystery solvers. If I don't have a compelling mystery
| to solve--something like the "what's going on beneath the surface
| in this town?" that David Lynch does so well--when I'm reading
| your book or watching your tv show or playing your game, I'm
| usually out unless I have a strong prior interest (which simply
| means that I brought my own mystery).
| Frotag wrote:
| I'm usually the opposite. Mystery feels like the characters,
| the narrator, etc are all being intentionally obscure, for no
| reason other than to pad page count and incite drama.
|
| I prefer stories that are either about evoking feelings
| (adventure, romance, slice of life) or about exploring ideas /
| what-ifs (scifi, fantasy). And ideally stories at the extremes
| of this spectrum. Maybe I've read too many but ones in the
| middle tend to be too cliched to hook me.
| pcrh wrote:
| The hook was great, but article was mediocre. I glazed over at
| the mention of LLMs in the second paragraph, skimming the article
| through to the end didn't improve things.
|
| If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...
| zkmon wrote:
| > When writing, first, make the reader care, one way or another.
| Because if I am not hooked by the first screen, I will probably
| not keep reading--no matter how good the rest of it is!
|
| Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary goal of
| writing. This artificial goal pollutes the connection between
| writer and reader. It makes them buyer and seller and rewards
| sales tactics. You don't write for the reader. You write for
| yourself first. Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it
| about as much you do.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| I agree with your first assertion but not so much on the rest.
| There is more than one reason to write and for many it is about
| communication, they have something they want to express and you
| would be wise to consider your reader if that is your goal.
|
| Hooking the reader with the opening page is swinging to the
| other fence of having a terrible opening page that no one will
| get through, generally not good to swing to the fences. I think
| the writer should be honest and upfront with the reader, the
| opening pages should be representative of what is to come, they
| should represent the whole and not just the beginning.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Keeping the reader glued to the screen is not the primary
| goal of writing.
|
| This is common advice in English classes and it predates the
| World Wide Web (and likely the Internet).
|
| Hook them in the first few sentences or lose them.
|
| And yes, of course, it does depend on who the intended audience
| is. You wouldn't do it in The New Yorker.
|
| > You don't write for the reader. You write for yourself first.
| Readers sometimes, just happen to appreciate it about as much
| you do.
|
| Depends very much on the medium. It's definitely not true that
| most professional writing is written for the author's sake. It
| is for an audience. Read books on writing and you'll often find
| the advice to cut out things if they won't interest the reader
| - no matter how valuable it is to you.
|
| I myself struggle with this. Some years ago, I took a trip to
| my childhood home in another country after being separated for
| decades. Almost none of my friends from the time have been
| there in decades either. I made notes during the trip, and when
| I got back I started writing what I saw, and shared it with my
| friends who grew up with me. How various neighborhoods have
| changed. Anecdotes from my childhood tied to those places. And
| a lot more.
|
| I got 30% done, and then decided to hold off sharing till I'd
| written the whole thing. I now have a first draft. It's the
| size of a proper book. It contains a _lot_ of stuff that is of
| value to me, but likely not to most of the (small) audience. I
| know if I share it with them, chances are high no one will read
| it.
|
| On the one hand, the stuff I wrote is highly valuable to me -
| it's become an unintentional memoir. But on the other hand, I
| do want to share quite a bit with my friends, and I know
| they'll value it if they actually read it.
|
| I'll either have to cut a lot out, or write two versions
| (impractical).
|
| The point being that even when you have a very limited
| audience, it is important to care about them and sacrifice your
| needs to an extent.
| derektank wrote:
| The primary goal of writing is communication. If you are trying
| to convey information, you need someone to actually sit down
| and read it. Most of the time, this isn't a problem, you're
| writing for someone you have a pre-existing relationship with
| and they want to read what you have to say, whether that be a
| friend, a coworker, or your future self.
|
| Problems arise when you move from one:one, to one:many
| communication. If you are trying to pass knowledge on to people
| you have no prior relationship with, you do need to attract
| their attention in a sea of options. If you actually have
| something important to say that other people need to hear, it
| does nobody any good for you to go unnoticed. In those
| circumstances, I don't see anything wrong with taking Gwern's
| advice.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| aaand, how to apply this technique to a CV?
|
| prepending a one-liner-about-some-feat that _might_ interest that
| particular company, before the usual cv afterthat?
|
| hmm. made me think..
| arjie wrote:
| This insight is what caused the rise of the clickbait headline
| and its predecessors in eras past. You need a hook or there's no
| point reading the tale.
| firefoxd wrote:
| I wrote my story and titled it, "My experience at work with an
| automated HR system". I sent it to a few friends, only a couple
| of them read it.
|
| A week later, I renamed it to "The Machine Fired Me". That seemed
| to capture it better. The goal wasn't to make it click bait, but
| it was to put the spoiler, and punch line right up front. It blew
| up!
|
| I had just read Life of Pi, and one thing I like about that book
| is that you know the punch line before you even pick up a copy. A
| boy is stuck with a bengal tiger in a boat. Now that the punch
| line is out of the way, the story has time to unfold and be
| interesting in its own merit. That's what I was trying to
| recreate with my own story.
| stephenbez wrote:
| "The Machine Fired Me" is one good hook. I found the original
| post and its good: https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-
| fired-me
| oncallthrow wrote:
| This didn't make me care
| jfengel wrote:
| Agreed, because it's not very actionable advice. At best it
| provides some examples of what not to do.
|
| The example leads to one classic bit of writing advice: tell
| only the very most important things and omit everything else.
| Start the story as late as you can and end it as early as
| possible. This applies to nonfiction just as much as to
| fiction.
| tolerance wrote:
| You know I've never read an article by Gwern that made me feel
| like he was sensitive to this idea, one that in my head
| essentially breaks down to the use of narrative and the leverage
| of "stakes" that inform the reader of kinds of conflict that make
| a narrative special.
|
| I'm reminded of a remark made by David Foster Wallace (on KCRW?
| Or oft-repeated elsewhere) about how he had to come to terms with
| the purpose of writing not being to show off how smart you are to
| the reader. Instead your writing has to evince some kind of
| innate investment to the reader that piques their genuine
| interests and intrigue.
|
| A lot of writers are tainted by the expectations set in grade
| school. Write for a grade and good writing is what yields a good
| grade according to the standards set by the subject which often
| is not 'Composition' but more like 'Prove to me that you remember
| everything we mentioned in class about the French Revolution'.
|
| I've never felt _drawn into_ an article by Gwern at least not in
| the way that I have been by some writing by Maciej Ceglowski, for
| example. Reading Gwern I am both overwhelmed by the adornments to
| the text (hyperlinks, pop-ups, margin notes; other hypertext
| doodads and portals) and underwhelmed by the substance of the
| text itself. I don't consider Paul Graham a literary _griot_
| either. But I find that his own prose is bolstered by a kind of
| clarity and asceticism that is informative and not entirely void
| of good style and form.
|
| Lawrence McEnery of the University of the Chicago contributed a
| lot of good thinking to this kind of stuff though.
|
| This wasn't meant to be a criticism of the author of this post's
| own work. But here that's how it's left. I haven't come across
| any writing of his that's as intriguing as "Empires Without
| Farms: The Case of Venice" seems. If anyone has any
| recommendations, do share.
| wetpaws wrote:
| Gwern has hands down one of the worst blogs, readability wise,
| ever created on the internets. His writing style can be hit or
| miss too.
| 1dom wrote:
| I think that's a little extreme to say it's one of the worst.
| It's definitely a different style to a lot of blogs, but I
| like how much information is spread across the site. It's
| satisfying to explore on a desktop.
| Jach wrote:
| I think for a lot of people, simply having "Author: Gwern" (or
| some other author they like) is the sufficient bit of
| information to make them care, it's generic on the content.
| I've read a lot of not very stylish writing simply because of
| who wrote it. Or in other words, "Your ideas are intriguing to
| me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." Whatever quirks
| of bad style there are will get a pass because I already care
| -- style is more important when you want to reach someone who
| hasn't heard of you.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Probably should be marked (2025).
| zahlman wrote:
| It literally says 2026 in the URL. Perhaps it was written
| before the new year and published now, but that doesn't seem
| particularly relevant to the advice given anyway.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Counterpoint.
|
| People our so tired of sensational intros and baiting questions
| which bury the actual lede up to the point where you discover it
| requires an annual subscription to find out the actual answer,
| that now it's actually counterproductive to start with an
| interesting "question".
|
| It's facts first or gtfo. Prove to me that I'm not going to waste
| my time until you deliver what you promised, by delivering enough
| of that relevant background up front, otherwise I don't have time
| for your shenanigans.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Starting with the point (a.k.a. the inverted pyramid) is
| actually a pretty good way of finding readers that care[1]. I
| fairly often often put the conclusion in the title, and must
| have been on the HN front page over 20 times by now.
|
| This is obviously not the _only_ way to construct an article
| (nor the only one I employ), but it is surprisingly reliable,
| and will attract and retain the readers who are actually
| interested in what you have to say, while letting those that
| aren 't interested find something else.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid_(journalism)
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question:
|
| - They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a
| blockade difficult
|
| - They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off
| their food supply
|
| - Fish
|
| - They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the
| former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which
| was important to aristocrats
|
| (note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)
| yetihehe wrote:
| And thus "question-bait" was born.
| blauditore wrote:
| I disagree with the stated examples and literally quit reading
| there.
| seydor wrote:
| 10 reasons why clickbait is good for you:
|
| 1)
| fukukitaru wrote:
| Chuunibyou-tier slop.
| mvkel wrote:
| This seems like a cheap trick to hook someone into a blog post
| (ironically, Gwern seems to disregard this almost universally).
|
| If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a
| "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post.
|
| Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I
| was dead...
|
| Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next:
| judgment.
|
| Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...
| otikik wrote:
| Careful with this advice. If you max it out you end up with
|
| "You won't believe the weird trick that the city of Venice did to
| feed itself"
| firasd wrote:
| I'm beginning to think that origin stories are an underrated way
| to find these angles. Like why exactly did you start thinking
| about this topic. I guess the recipe bloggers were on to this
| with their long rambles about where they first tried this dish
| (albeit it may have been for SEO too...)
| danderedandolo wrote:
| Know your audience is right, and Gwern misses the most
| interesting thing about Venice- that it was a merchantile
| Republic with reasonable independance from the Catholic Church.
| Lots of the political ideas which influenced British and American
| democracy came from the Italian city states. Ruskin's Stones of
| Venice and Bowsma's "Venice and the defense of republican
| liberty" capture this well, as do parts of Quentin Skinner's "The
| Foundations of Modern Political Thought."
| PeterWhittaker wrote:
| Perhaps I am too much of a curmudgeon, but the example first
| sentence made me not care at all - not about Venice, but about
| the writer's approach, which seems to want to conjure breathless
| mystery about something I could easily look up on Wikipedia (or
| read in tl;dr comments in this thread).
|
| It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why
| should I spend any of my time on you?
|
| A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective,
| at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.
|
| Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great
| first sentence I devoured the series.
| dvrp wrote:
| Care is the most important trait of people who make great things;
| it's not money or time. Is not even skill.
|
| I was interviewing a candidate yesterday and I noticed that a
| project inside their personal website was not working. I told him
| my opinion on care and he said that he hasn't had the time to
| deploy it, since he's been working on it for 2 weeks already and
| it was working on his local machine.
|
| A few hours after the interview, the project was online.
|
| The bitter pill of realizing the importance of care is that this
| applies not just to literary works, like Gwern's case, but it
| also applies to any creative endeavor: writing, music, drawing,
| and yes, software engineering.
|
| That CLI tool without a tutorial. That product with a confusing
| sign-up flow. The purchase without a confirmation dialog such
| that I don't feel I was just scammed.
|
| It's all the same. Lack of care.
|
| I've also noticed that when caring is there, skills follow.
| atmosx wrote:
| Adrian Wooldridge (the Economist) in "Aristocracy of Talent: How
| Meritocracy Made the Modern World" argues, rather successfully
| IMO, that what made Venice the maritime super-power was
| meritocracy. Indeed, he argues, that the fall of the Venitian
| empire came swiftly when the Doge was forced to place only
| Venitians (birthright) to top positions, instead of the most
| "capable". Hence the available talent pool shrunk.
|
| The book makes for a fine read IMO:
| https://www.amazon.com/Aristocracy-Talent-Meritocracy-Modern...
|
| ps. this book came out as a response to Michael Sandell's "The
| Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?" which was a
| best seller at the time.
| oytis wrote:
| So how did Venice maintain its dominance?
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