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.

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

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.

read about what gordon lish has to say about opening a story: https://www.tetmancallis.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/The-...

“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.

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.

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.

That’s basically what tv shows do every time. The pilot is great/awesome then the 10 episodes are boring and the very last one get exciting enough for you to wait the second season.

Best example: the walking dead season tv shows.

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.