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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4031 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I want to prompt all the contestants: @TheDag, @f3zinker, @felipec, and @Pitt19802.

Did you find the topic difficult to write about?

I think people judging our essays might be very quick to criticize and say: why didn't the writer mention X? how didn't the writer connect Y with Z? (it's obvious)

I think the readers might not be aware of the vast idea space that can be explored. It takes time to explore a branch, and as you do you realize there's many more branches that can be explored that probably would take even longer time. And if you do take the time to explore other branches, you realize that the first branch you explored was not as important as you initially thought, and might not even be worth mentioning (there's plenty of examples I ended up not mentioning).

This is particularly worse if you've never written about the topic (as I), and then of course the time limit doesn't help (although without it I probably would have delayed the work even more than I did).

It's very easy to criticize, but I think only the people that actually sat down and tried to write about the topic would understand why a particular try might not have turned out to be as fruitful as many readers would hope, but it's still worthy of praise. Also, the end result might not necessarily be a reflection of your thoughts on the subject, which are probably evolving as we speak (the very next day I had yet another insight that I feel should be worthy of writing about).

Yes I have mentioned before, its a difficult prompt. Especially if its not something you ever thought about before, like me.

There is also the onerous constraint of making it an effort post that the motte in particular will like. I can go on all day about various intuitions and their nitty gritty details and nuaces about my hobbies of choice, but that wouldnt suffice.

I do wish more people participated. There would have been more (definitelt better than mine) submissions to read and as you mentioned, more people realizing that its hard to write on command, and that might do some work against people thinking they are better writers than they are because they only write about what they like writing about.

Wanted to start off by saying I really enjoyed your submission. I think the model of intuition you laid out is largely one I agree with.

Yeah, I found it to be a difficult topic, which is ok.

I was mostly motivated to submit something because I really like the competition model.

I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Prize_Foundation pretty fascinating.

I really like the idea of scaling it down, both to try and shape a nascent internet community (does this internet community still count as nascent???) you're part of, and even just to generate insights into something that's just bothering you.

I really like it conceptually, so I felt like I should submit something, if nothing else, to support it as a model of something I think we should get more of.

I'm not sure I had any particularly fantastic insight into the topic, certainly none I would have thought to share if FiveHourMarathon had posted 'hey, how do you think intuition works?' in a Small-Scale question thread or something. (Reading over the posts, I think this is somewhat reflected in that my submission seems to do the worst job of staying on the topic).

I think that's sort of what makes the competition model cool though. If nothing else, its a way to break people out of their shells. If there's a particular topic you want to mine the board expertise about, this seems like a good model.

I like it enough that I think I might found a 2nd competition on a different question.

If people have any thoughts about shaping the competition in a way that works well, I'd be interested in that. This topic was pretty broad, would a narrower topic work better?

"I think people judging our essays might be very quick to criticize and say: why didn't the writer mention X? how didn't the writer connect Y with Z? (it's obvious)"

Again, I enjoyed yours quite a bit.

Not sure writing generates these sorts of responses unless its good enough to be engaged with. I would take any such response as a perverse form of flattery.

"then of course the time limit doesn't help (although without it I probably would have delayed the work even more than I did)."

I'll just speak for myself as someone who submitted the final, without the deadline, I wouldn't have gotten around to generating a submission.

"the end result might not necessarily be a reflection of your thoughts on the subject, which are probably evolving as we speak (the very next day I had yet another insight that I feel should be worthy of writing about)."

fwiw, I had the same experience, if anything, I think that's one of the real values of getting it out of my head and into the real world, thoughts that are sort of 80% formed, you can keep 80% formed for a long time in your head, exposing them to light forces them to evolve.

I found it difficult, but mainly because I’m at a very busy point in my career and didn’t have as much time to research as I’d like. It’s definitely a topic I plan to come back to.

I want to come back to it as well. I didn't research anything at all, I just thought about it a lot. But doing a bit of research afterwards I've found some resources of interest for people who want to explore the topic more.

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