But isn't that circular? If the ranking algorithm used by the mods tends to devalue articles like this because they don't trust the user base to comment intelligently, doesn't that alter the culture of this site to make that more true?
I'm not sure what big_toast meant, but we do trust the user base to comment intelligently (which sometimes works and sometimes not), and we don't devalue articles like this.
We do tend to devalue titles like this, or more likely change them to something more substantive (preferably using a representative phrase from the article body), but I'm worried that if I did that here we would get howls of protest, since YC is part of the story.
I'm sure you're sick of comments about moderation, but I will say, this makes me more sympathetic to the position you're in.
It's an interesting dilemma. Many very respected publications use provocative titles because of the attention economy. And I'm sure you have good data that provocative titles lead to drive-by comments and flame wars.
But I don't think big_toast was entirely wrong that there is a side effect of sometimes burying articles that are by their nature provocative. And how do you distinguish a flame war over a title from a flame war over content? That's not a leading question. I don't know.
For us the litmus test isn't the title, it's whether the article itself can support a substantive discussion on HN. If yes, then we'll rewrite the provocative title to something else, as I mentioned. Ironically this often gives the author more of a voice because (1) the headline was often written by somebody else, and (2) we're pretty diligent about searching in the article itself for a representative phrase that can serve as a good title.
If, on the other hand, the title is provocative and the article does not seem like it can support a substantive discussion on HN, we downweight the submission. There are other reasons why we might do that too—for example, if HN had a recent thread about the same topic.
How do we tell whether an article can support a substantive discussion on HN? We guess. Moderation is guesswork. We have a lot of experience so our guesses are pretty good, but we still get it wrong sometimes.
In the current case, the title is baity while the article clearly passes the 'substantive' test, so the standard thing would have been to edit the title. I didn't do that because, when the story intersects with YC or a YC-funded startup, we make a point of moderating less than we normally do.
I know I'm repeating myself but it's pretty random which readers see which comments, and redundancy defends against message loss!
I suspect that they are perfectly capable of clicking an archive link or better yet logging in as they are already a subscriber. Maybe, like me, they enjoy reading the physical magazine.
It's got to be one of the most unusual biographies of a living person that I've ever come across. Nearly every sentence is a head-turner. If you made it up no one would believe you
This review is just a plot synopsis. There are no quotes from the book to give me a sense of the quality of the writing. The review feels targeted at somebody who is already bought into the premise, not somebody from the outside who wants to know if "There Is No Antimemetics Division" is a good book or not. In that sense, it totally fails as a book review.
I have never read a review and got a true notion of whether the prose is good or not. Is that really why you read reviews? I thought this was a great review because it very concisely described what is an unorthodox book. If you want to see if the prose is any good, read the book. It is a good book by the way.
Yes, I read reviews to learn if a book is good or not. Quotes from the book that are carefully selected often help to showcase what the author is capable of, on top of a clear description of their writing style. I want the reviewer to sell me on what moved them.
That is different than whether or not the reviewer was compelled by the ideas in the book. If the reviewer is a good writer, then I've learned something. Then, I know that somebody who is a good writer thought the ideas in a book were interesting, which by the transitive property, implies the author being reviewed is also a good writer. In this case, I don't think the reviewer is a very interesting writer, so I'm not convinced that they are a good judge of interesting writing.
That's interesting, here's a perspective from a different type of reader. I tend to read very old books, usually non-fiction, so 'reviews' are usually wikipedia articles, or references by other authors (the more references the more a classic it is).
usually it's the context around the book what people write about, where it was written, who wrote it, what was going on in their life. But if it's older perhaps not much is known, so the older it is increasingly it becomes at when it was read, where it was conserved, what it means to those who read it. If it's sufficiently old, there's several phases of 'rediscoveries' of the book, and the actual contents itself start losing importance as the book becomes more about past readers and how they influenced subsequent writing.
It would never occur to you to decide whether to read Luca Pacioli's accounting treatise based on some passages describing how you should keep your daily book, or whether to read Deuteronomy based on the headcount of some obscure tribe from old middle east, like there's no banger it's more about inmersion, and there isn't one way to absorb and interpret the content, because we are so far away from its writing, that the connection between the writer and reader is very faint.
So this feels normal to me, and the comparision felt funny, so I once again I found myself writing a hacker news comment
I say this with no malice, but you are weird. Being weird is cool! Reading nothing but historical manuscripts is rad! But the historical lens and the literary lens, as you yourself stated, are totally different.
Though, honestly, it would be fun to read reviews of ancient texts that are written like modern literary reviews. I guess we do get that, but only for new translations of the Odyssey or Beowulf or whatever. Those essays often dive into both the translation and the text in its original language (if the reviewer is fluent enough).
It sounds like you're describing a summary (which does not deal with quality) rather than a review (which necessarily deals with quality). The posted writing seems to fall somewhere in between.
> If you want to see if the prose is any good, read the book.
I don't read complete plot summaries of books that I ever plan to read. That's why I look for "reviews." The only reason it's hard to write a review is because you can't give away the plot, but you have to give a sense of the appeal and the quality of the book. Otherwise, it's just a summary.
I can't know what books are available on the market through introspection. The only way I can know about them is through being informed. I don't want to read a complete plot summary of a book I have yet to read. If the only way I can find out about the existence of books is by having the plot spoiled, that's not optimal.
edit: Also, tbh, if a book's plot is good, I don't need you to tell it to me. The person who came up with the plot already carefully came up with the way they wanted to tell it to me. Not sure why you think you can do better if you think the book is good. If the book is awful to read but the plot is interesting, feel free.
> It is a good book by the way.
The reason this doesn't work as a review is because I don't know you, and I don't know what you like. If you can say this in a way in which it doesn't matter whether I know you or what you like, and give away the least plot possible to accomplish this, you've written what most people are looking for in a review.
Agreed, and plot itself doesn't make a good book either. Some have very interesting plots but terrible prose and pacing while others are vice versa. Therefore a "review" that is merely a plot summary actually says nothing of the quality of the work.
If you say to just read the book then what's even the point of writing a review? I could say the same about any book which renders the advice meaningless.
The review is also heavily LLM-inflected, to the point of being distracting.
GPTZero gives it a 100% chance of being AI generated, and I've found that these tools may give false negatives from a well-prompted model, but false positives are rare.
If you are looking to tune your intuition for AI-written text, here's an interesting list of their quirks (ironically provided as a Claude skill for removing those quirks from emitted text):
According to that site, Robert Kennedy's speech on the night Martin Luther King was killed[1] was almost entirely the product of GenAI, as were both of Obama's inaugural addresses[1][2].
By this logic, I'd venture a guess that "AI" was also responsible for some of Shakespeare's most famous lines.
I've noticed this too online and on YouTube, where "reviewers" conflate a plot summary with an actual review of the pros and cons and often deeper analysis of a work. These days I need to go to specific subreddits to get true reviews beyond surface level details, such as at r/TrueFilm.
Uh, Steven Spielberg is all over E.T. For one thing, he storyboarded the big special effects sequences. He collaborated closely on the screenplay because it was drawn from his own childhood experiences. He was the final say in casting. His relationship with editor Michael Kahn is famously collaborative.
I think comparing your telling an LLM what to do and Steven Spielberg directing a movie just shows a total lack of understanding of how movies are made, and also inflates your own sense of your self.
> Uh, Steven Spielberg is all over E.T. For one thing, he storyboarded the big special effects sequences. He collaborated closely on the screenplay because it was drawn from his own childhood experiences. He was the final say in casting. His relationship with editor Michael Kahn is famously collaborative.
That's all meta. Trivia. Decisions he made or feedback he gave, that while influencing the final product cannot be observed in the final product (e.g. show me the actual Spielberg-drawn storyboard in the film; It doesn't exist, because the storyboard turned into a sequence of shots made by the cinematographer, instructing the camerawoman to point the camera at the actors lit by the gaffers, or into a work breakdown strucutre then followed by the SFX team painstakingly drawing it frame by frame). No one but Spielberg could say "That part was me, this part was Kahn's." I can't find any of that out just by watching the movie. When I engage with a piece of media, I presume the author is dead. What is in the media is canon, and what's not in it isn't. The behind the scenes, or the director's biography, or the interviews aren't part of the art. Art shouldn't rely on "Oh it's good, or even better than you thought it was once you know this cool fact or that wild story from production."
Star Wars isn't good only because George Lucas was a genius, or because they spent a lot of time on the models and tried a cool new text intro sequence, or because of any of the other novel effects. Lots of movies spend a lot of time in production, with a lot of experts and a lot of novel ideas, and still fail. Star Wars is good because the finished movie is good. We credit Star Wars generally as being George Lucas' brainchild, but if you know the backstory, it's only good because he had good editors to reign him in. But that's meta. Nobody knew that in 1977. They just knew they enjoyed the movie and it said "written and directed by George Lucas."
When I watch the movie I don't see the storyboard, or the redlines in the screenplay, or the casting notes, or the conversations and discussions with Kahn. All I know from the movie is the credits, and the credits don't say "Written by Melissa Mathison (with close collaboration by Spielberg based on his childhood experience)". Those are, from a lay viewer's POV, 'facts not in evidence.'
E.T. was a single example. I'm comfortable claiming my argument applies to all directors of all films, and all forms of art that are created by more than one person. Another example: "Over The Edge" and "Off The Wall", two books about deaths in US national parks. They each have two authors. Only one author co-wrote both of them. To whom do I credit my love for those books? Only to Ghiglieri, since I can see the consistent tone between them? That would be unfair to Myers and Farabee. Only to Myers and Farabee, because they're the park rangers that witnessed a number of the emergencies and deaths? That would be unfair to Ghiglieri. What about the editors, who surely worked hard to make books that are basically a list of stories about death interesting as a cohesive narrative. My only option is to credit all the authors, and everyone else involved, equally, and not try to break down paragraphs between "this author wrote this one, and that author wrote that one." They didn't distinguish, so I can't either. [1]
I'm all over my essay. I drafted and organized the original outline. I've made substantial changes to the order of paragraphs and what and how the arguments are built and developed based on my personal experiences. I am the final say for whose quotes are included and which ones are cut. My relationship with myself is famously collaborative (famous among my family and friends).
None of that matters to the reader. Whether I wrote it myself or with a friend, or used a ghostwriter, or used an LLM, the audience is going to credit or blame it on the name at the top. My papers in college weren't graded based on whether I spent 300 hours on them and revised them 20 times, or whether it was I or my classmate who coined that pithy line I then used throughout, or because I used niche knowledge about the subject I knew before taking the class. That's trivia. They were graded on the final single copy I submitted. I got once chance.
The only difference between an essay of mine being written by a ghostwriter I hired and an LLM is that the LLM output is always going to sound like an LLM. They are identical in that neither of them are "me". The ghostwriter will sound either like the ghostwriter or like the ghostwriter trying to write like me. But whether I hired a ghostwriter and published their work under my name, or if I used an LLM and the audience didn't notice, at the end of the day they'll credit or blame me entirely, because my name is at the top, no different as if I'd written the entire thing from scratch. I have no excuses except for the final product.
For this essay specifically, If I ever did release it or publish it, it would be under my real name. Firstly because I've never liked being "anonymous" online (I feel I never act or write like myself unless I'm speaking under my own name; opposite of most in my experience), and second because I would want the reader to know that there's a human they can credit or blame for it. I guess for me that's the tradeoff. When anonymous I won't use LLMs, because my ethos comes from being (and sounding) like a human being who merely doesn't want to share their name. Under my real name, however, I feel more comfortable saying "directed and edited by [real name], drafted by [llm]," because then the reader can decide if the ethos associated with my real name and affilations is strong enough to justify reading a logos and pathos that the human freely admits is not entirely from their own fleshy brain.
[1] They do, actually, at times. When one of the authors was directly involved in one of the stories and is recounting their personal experience, they will write "I (Myers)..." or "I (Farabee).." Aside from that they do not say who wrote what, or who influenced who.
Actually, unless they are self-published, most "new-age self-help" books are pretty thoughtfully edited. They are persuasive writing, whose goal is to convince you to believe in a framework that is not supported by evidence. Dismissing them for being incoherent is actually a mistake, in that it shows a lack of understanding of their appeal.
Though, I must admit, I'm not sure exactly what you meant by "new-age self-help" books, so I took a guess.
I'm starting to fear that LLMs are especially popular with people who can't call a doctor's office to make an appointment or tell a waiter they brought the wrong food. I struggle with those things, but I know that it's better to push myself outside of my comfort zone.
Are LLMs mainly a tool for people with atrophying social skills who want all interaction to happen via a text prompt that always responds in the most soothing way? I can't think of another reason to replace human therapy with an LLM.
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