[allturtles]

The floodgates are now open for all the people who believe they have it in them to be great writers, if only it weren't for all of that tedious writing. As if the value in writing consists mainly in having an idea. This is much like people who believe that their great business idea is (by itself) worth millions.

[orblivion]

On the other hand - my dad is an industrial designer. He was initially irritated by how easy it was for lower grade designers to enter the field given the advent of new tools (even before computers). But he eventually embraced it and understood that the nature of his job changed to something more comprehensive. He just advised me to prepare for the same as a software developer in the age of ChatGPT. Perhaps he would say the same about writers.

[malauxyeux]

> understood that the nature of his job changed to something more comprehensive. He just advised me to prepare for the same as a software developer

What's that mean to you concretely?

[orblivion]

I don't know yet. I honestly don't want to think about it. (despite my dad's advice)

I guess what my dad would say is to find a way to sell some sort of package of yourself offering a service that includes development. The sort of thing where you might otherwise outsource programming, but now you can just have the computer do it. That's not concrete, but that's as far as I've considered it.

[malauxyeux]

Thanks for the reply anyway. I don't want to think about it either and was hoping you had an easy answer.

[frankfrank13]

reminds me of PG

> The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html#:~:text=The%20fact%20th....

[basch]

This is one of his essays I vehemently disagree with, and think has hurt Silicon Valley. The idea that ideas and idea people are worthless has had a cascading effect of putting non idea people in idea people seats, or locking out a class of people from participating unless they have some other engineering or marketing or leadership skill. Apple would never have become without Steve Jobs being able to see what was and wasn’t a good idea.

An idea person doesn’t just have one good idea, and maybe one idea alone is worthless. Good ideas include good taste for scope, what is and isn’t needed for success.

Having an idea and handing it off to a startup is very different from having an idea and supervising it, keeping it on the rails. It’s almost crazy to me that an idea is worthless, but an entire startup without an idea is seen as potential.

As far as the AI floodgates, the world changed almost overnight, and we are just going to have to adapt to everyone having a calculator in their pocket, and that being good at using it is a more important skill than arithmetic. I’m not sure I’ve seen a technology adaption go from 0 to whatever percent we are at quite like this. It’s barrier to entry is so low, free to use, easy to use, easy to plug into old workflows, and somewhat undetectable by those not in the know. It would be wise to accept this new reality and start valuing prompt and editing skills instead of dismissing what part people “aren’t doing on their own.”

[JohnFen]

I usually say "ideas are a dime a dozen."

What I mean by this is that so many people starting tech businesses get really hung up on "protecting their idea" so it won't be "stolen" by others. But what makes an idea valuable isn't the idea, it's the execution. These people are worrying too much about the wrong thing.

I don't mean that ideas are worthless. Everything we create starts with an idea.

[basch]

And this is where I disagree. The inability to execute on a good idea doesn’t mean that the idea creator isn’t the best person to shape the idea. The idea may be more than a one sentence pitch and instead an entire vision.

The one sentence summary of the idea may be a dime a dozen, but that’s only because the listener is discounting the rest of the idea as not having any value, or that the one sentence pitch is a common idea, and the rest of the vision is unique and special.

The team needs to be able to execute, not the individual. If an idea person is both good at creating a succession of ideas and discarding bad ideas, why shouldn’t that a) have worth and b) be respected enough that they are compensated for their talent. Don’t do for free…

I have a good 10+ fairly complex product ideas, that I don’t see envisioned elsewhere. If they are a dime a dozen, why don’t I see other people coming up with them? Are they bad ideas or are they unique ideas that maybe are special. Maybe we will never know. Maybe everyone who doesn’t have ideas wants to convince others their ideas are worthless so they give up and share them.

[JohnFen]

I don't think we actually disagree, honestly. I think we're just looking through different lenses.

> The idea may be more than a one sentence pitch and instead an entire vision.

Yes, the idea has to be fleshed out in order to be ready to start executing it.

I never meant to imply the idea creator wasn't the best person to do this, and I never meant to imply we were talking about an individual.

[basch]

I think the ideas are worthless and a dime a dozen without execution has created a dismissive attitude. Everyone needs to be an engineer or lender to contribute.

Why would an engineer want to pair with somebody and “do all the work”?

Part of executing is looking at what features or decisions similar failure made, and righting the ship on the next go around.

Where is the idea person college course? MBA? Some kind of strategy?

[renewiltord]

Sure, nurturing it to execution is a PM at the small scale and a CEO at the large scale. Ideas people are not competing with non-ideas people: they're competing with ideas people who can execute.

[satvikpendem]

It's rather that developers don't want to work for idea people because they usually are not Steve Jobs, who is the exception to the rule.

[basch]

And just like every profession there are idea people and people who think they are idea people. Unlike engineering, you can’t as easily make interview tests that pretend to be able to discern between those who are good at something and those that aren’t. Idea people are left to hitting a home run, succeeding and making a name for themselves. No one is going to hire a first timer into Chief Idea Officer.

Paul’s letter is a reason we don’t see more Jobs type people. Industry has been told to dismiss those who don’t do. Instead of finding a way to harness them.

Why isn’t the formula for a startup finding a Jobs and pairing them with a Woz? The idea that there are no more Jobs has almost become a self fulfilling mythology. Let’s see a bot write those two sentences on its own.

[fl0ps]

I wouldn't lay blame on Paul's letter specifically.

I'll make the bold clain that there's no industry simply bereft of idea people who have no other function. Mainly because industry has almost no tolerance for people who have a great idea but no understanding of how to go about implementing it, even if that "go about implementing" is mainly having the leadership skills necessary to harangue, terrify, goad, or gingerly coax people who can do the implemeting to act as a cohesive group towards a common goal.

It's unrealistic to think there's any market for the "hey, here's a great idea!" person to receive a check for their brilliant statement and walk into the sunset. There are probably a great many "idea people" who wish that were the case and perhaps feel the world is unfair for this lack. Perhaps those are the kinds of people that the 1-800-Uinvent (or whatever it was) marketing scams preyed upon. Maybe the same group that wants to be the Jobs without putting in the work to be the Woz?

[JohnFen]

> Why isn’t the formula for a startup finding a Jobs and pairing them with a Woz?

Maybe because there are very few Jobses and Wozes around? And those that are, are probably working on their own startup.

[satvikpendem]

> And just like every profession there are idea people and people who think they are idea people.

This line makes your argument unfalsifiable, as if I bring any example of bad idea people, you could just state that they're not actually idea people but just people who think they are.

> Idea people are left to hitting a home run, succeeding and making a name for themselves. No one is going to hire a first timer into Chief Idea Officer.

Well yeah, I wouldn't hire a developer who hasn't developed anything either.

[JohnFen]

Well, to be fair and not to take anything away from his impact, but I wouldn't ever have wanted to work for Steve Jobs. We would have been far too incompatible.

[unsupp0rted]

What does the value in writing mainly consist of?

Edit: currently this question is at -3, as though it’s obvious to everyone the difference between valuable writing and not valuable writing.

To me it’s a worthwhile question, particularly because the more precisely we answer it the more precisely ChatGPT will become able to produce valuable writing a couple releases from now.

[floren]

It's the way the story is told. If it was all about the idea, you'd just read the Wikipedia plot synopsis, say "ah what a great story that was, so glad I read it" and move on.

[slowmovintarget]

Jim Butcher had this argument with a bunch of fellow writers on a writing forum. The argument went back and forth. His side was that it was the execution that mattered. He said that a good writer could tell a successful story based on a terrible premise. It wasn't the idea that mattered, it was how the writer pulled it off.

The argument raged across the forum; idea - execution - idea - execution... until Jim threw down the gauntlet. "Fine. Give me your worst idea. No, give me your two worst ideas for a story, and I'll write one and show you." The forums churned for a bit and the other side came up with what they agreed were the two most hackneyed, clichéd ideas they could think of.

Pokémon, and the Lost Roman Legion.

Jim took those and wrote the Codex Alera series. Point, and New York Times Bestseller list spot: Butcher.

[floren]

Didn't he already do that same sort of thing with his Dresden Files series? I feel like Jim Butcher only writes books on a bet, based on terrible ideas.

[slowmovintarget]

He wrote Dresden Files in a way that his teacher suggested (not with the ideas) to show her how bad her way of writing was. He was wrong.

That's where he learned it was about execution.

The only idea he included, just to kind of rub things in was a "Talking Head" in Bob the Skull. He made a literal talking head that would explain things to Harry, which was a fiction writing "don't" that he purposely violated... to great effect.

She counseled him to take the things he loved--fantasy, and Robert Parker detective novels--and combine them. He had been dead set on making sword-and-sandal high fantasy. He followed her instructions on that, too, and we got Harry Dresden.

[blowski]

Anna Karenina.

It basically tells you the plot on the first page, and yet is 1000 pages of something incredible. It's like being able to see inside someone else's mind - not being told what they're thinking, but being able to feel the emotions as they do.

[snerbles]

> read the Wikipedia plot synopsis, say "ah what a great story that was, so glad I read it"

I have unironically done this for movies/books/games/media I've elected not to consume but otherwise desired to know for cultural context.

[floren]

I'll cop to the same thing, but neither you nor I would claim that knowing "rosebud was the sled" is equivalent to watching Citizen Kane.

[medvezhenok]

One thing that's missed is that much of the impact of the writing depends on the reader's capacity to grok it.

Many people read at the superficial level, and the takeaway from a book for them might be equivalent to the spark-notes version. Even between readers who are level matched, there are vast individual differences. Some readers can be aphantasiacs (no ability to visualize) and others - hyperphantasiacs. A person can have vastly different experiences from reading the same text depending on how developed their visualization skills (cognitive versus emotional, visual vs abstract, etc).

[medvezhenok]

It really depends on the type of writing. Romance vs Non-fiction vs Academic all have different values.

In my opinion, the breakdown is somewhat like:

Romance is presumably (Story x Style)

Non-fiction is (Story x Accuracy x Clarity)

Academic is probably (Novelty x Clarity x Impact)

[renewiltord]

Thoughts, emotions, and sensations are serialized to text to transmit to others.

Inherently, the serialization is lossy and the deserialization is also lossy.

Good writing can have:

- high compression ratio: many things transmitted rapidly

- higher fidelity: original thought is serialized in a way recoverable by sufficient available deserializers

- novelty

Of course, this is a serde problem, so people try to name each of these things in different ways: deserializers that have the ability to extract more information from serialized content are called connoisseurs, for instance. Frequently this is because the serialized content relies on pre-computed results stored in the deserializer memory, sometimes called "allusions".

I will leave you with two examples of text expressed in different ways. The Remains of The Day is a book that follows a man's journey of self-discovery after he has spent much of his life in service, having missed many opportunities due to his devotion to that service. I urge you to read the book, compare it with that text, and see if I was accurate or did service to it.

Second: I sometimes do things that seem unlike the image of me that I retain. Something makes me do them. Why is that?

That is one way to express what Captain Ahab says in Moby Dick:

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?

[slowmovintarget]

Execution, meaning, and polish.

[oneoff786]

So… what if the AI does better on those things

[dsr_]

Then the AI will be worth more. Right now the AI is worth negative value.

[MBCook]

That’s not so bad.

The big problem is the people who don’t care and are just generating and submitting 1000 stories in the hopes one makes $10 because it’s basically free to them.

They only care it gets accepted. Outside of that they don’t care one bit what the story is about or how good it is.

[pixl97]

Eh, I have my doubts that's actually what this is. Of course this is just a guess as we don't have the information.

See, per the article they are paying $.12 per word. Much like those spam sites that copy SO and put up ads on the site and get a few pennies per click, I'm guessing this is somewhat the same. Because there was a potential payout someone(s) realized you could bot farm this to make a few bucks.

[dsr_]

Except you can't, because magazines are already used to receiving large quantities of low-quality submissions. It's called the slush pile. Much of editing consists of sorting through the slush pile looking for gems.

This just vastly increased the size of the slush pile. Spamming, basically.

Nobody made any money from this.

[JohnFen]

A wise man once clued me in about getting published in print. He said that publishers have a problem -- they own a very expensive printing press that costs a fortune whether it's printing something or not. So they're always desperate for material to feed the beast with.

The reason it seems like it's difficult to get published is that they also have another problem -- they are inundated with crap submissions. "Crap" doesn't even mean bad writing, it includes pieces that aren't suitable for the particular publication -- wrong writing style/tone, wrong audience, etc.

The trick to getting published is to understand the publisher's problem and help them solve it. You do this by paying attention to what they publish, noting the style/tone, length, topics, etc., and give them something that fits and is high quality. They'll love you to death.

Once I really internalized that, I found it was pretty easy to get published.

Online publishing changes the economics a bit, but even there, publishers have limited resources and the same rules still apply.

[em-bee]

Once I really internalized that, I found it was pretty easy to get published.

yes, but then you only write what publishers want and not what your creativity drives you to write. i am not sure that letting publishers be gatekeepers is a good thing.

this is a hard problem though. and i don't know what is the right answer.

[JohnFen]

That's not precisely true. What you do is find the right publication for what you want to write. There's a HUGE variety to choose from. The odds are that there's one somewhere who is on the same page as you.

But it is also true that it's a business, and if you want to be published (and don't want to self-publish), then you'll have to do business-related work in addition to creative work. Or, if you're lucky or successful, have a literary agent who will do it for you (for a price).

[pmontra]

> this is a hard problem though. and i don't know what is the right answer.

The hard problem is always the same, how to be happy making what we like. Sometimes the solution involves making a reasonable amount of money.

> then you only write what publishers want

Most software developers write only what their customers / bosses want and not what they would like to write. That allows them to pay their bills and live their lives. Local optima, often easy to reach.

[xwdv]

What a glorious era, where all humans can now be made more equal. Even the weakest minds can create artwork and stories that rival the most talented individuals.

Why hasn’t AI come to the field of mathematics yet??

[fl0ps]

I'll just leave this here... :https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03166-w