I found it really ironic that the author started with something attention-grabbing about a topic completely unrelated to his point, but then made a series of such mundane statements to begin his own writing that I didn't care enough to go past his first screen. He didn't make me care about why I should make people care.

What I find extremely off-putting and overused is the pattern of making you care about an article by saying something about the person being interviewed, usually related to the interview itself. Think "he was a balding man[...] drinking his matcha latte[...]" It's always something which has zero bearing on the situation in question.

Whenever I see this, I immediately turn to cmd-a + cmd-c + `pbpaste | llm 'summarize this'`

I felt like the movie Marty Supreme completely failed to make me care about the main character until the final act where the filmmakers had to pull out all the big easy stops to force me to care about him. A third of the way in to the movie I was wondering if it was going to be explained at any point why I should be interested in this guy or care about his difficult and fairly unremarkable personality. A lot of the time it seems as if creatives assume that if you’re watching/reading/engaging with their movie/book/artwork then you already care enough to care.

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.

So LLMs can't do that? Every LLM-written historical or pseoudo-historical (i.e. made up) thing that comes up in my Facebook feed does start with a "hook" like that. Doesn't make them great articles but obviously you can prompt them to do it.

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.

I’m from Venice and it’s heartwarming to see someone from a different country/culture so into the history of Venice <3

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.

For the last 30 years I've decided that the best stuff (most engaging books, stories, experiences in life) require investment. It gets worse (you go through some pain while exercising) before it gets better. That's essentially a definition of a good life to me - finding the things worth sacrificing resources and getting the payoff.

So 'first make me care' to me is a manifest of Gen Z - tiktok - brainrot approach. From my perspective you miss most of the really good stuff by cultivating this approach. I.e. my favorite books - Tai Pan, Noble House; tv series - Better Call Saul! - require you to go through so much of initial boredom. It's also the same discussion as 'learn to code vs only do AI Slop' or 'learn math and algos vs only import functions from libs and never check what's inside'.

*Exceptions apply, ofc. There are things that hook you and progressively ad depth, but it's really rare. I.e. Arcane tv show is both easy to access and quite deep.

Edit: ...so I can imagine math teacher that first tell you what are some amazing uses of derivatives and integrals - PIDs, SGD, better estimation, wave functions, generalized description of problems, accessing interesting physics etc. And after that they make you grind. I think it would be quite great. But it is so rare, that you have to make a leap of faith and assume most of the good stuff is boring initially.

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.