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"

This article succeeded spectacularly in making me want to know all there is to know about medieval Venice, that's for sure.

"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.

The actual story of how cod from Norway came to be a thing in the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia is pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Querini

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.

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."

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.

Expanding Gwern's well made point, just a little, is that writing of any length needs a thesis statement in the first paragraph or so.

Thesis statements are not a new techniques, and these days they are needed much more because there is so much to read. Many articles don't state their thesis at all or not for a long time.

I don't have time to read that far to find out if it's worthwhile to me. Unless you are Satoshi Nakamoto, I'm not going to read far to find out.

“Venice built a maritime empire from a city that couldn’t feed itself; so who fed it—and why didn’t its enemies simply starve it out?”

I love ancient history and would read a good book about the Venetian empire, but the sentence answers the final question. Venice was a maritime empire (it's capital on an island), that's why its enemies could not starve it out. All in on finding out who fed it.

Is this a good advice? Yes.

And what would happen if everyone followed it? Clickbait titles like "the third one will surprise you" and TikTok.