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.

The hook was great, but article was mediocre. I glazed over at the mention of LLMs in the second paragraph, skimming the article through to the end didn't improve things.

If your readers now care, don't disappoint them...

I'm beginning to think that origin stories are an underrated way to find these angles. Like why exactly did you start thinking about this topic. I guess the recipe bloggers were on to this with their long rambles about where they first tried this dish (albeit it may have been for SEO too...)

Video edition:

1. First, make me care.

2. Then provide an indication (e.g. in the video description) giving the time in the video where the question starts to be answered.

If you make me somewhat care, but I have to binary search through your video to skip the rambling, I'm likely to back button out.

"When writing, your first job is this: First, make me care."

It really depends on who the audience is...

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.

This didn’t make me care

This seems like a cheap trick to hook someone into a blog post (ironically, Gwern seems to disregard this almost universally).

If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post.

Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead...

Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment.

Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...

A good writer should be able to write a catchy hook.

A wise person should be able to read text that is flavored like cardboard. In general, one thing I dislike about this moment, is the incredible emphasis we place on the first five seconds of everything because everyone is thinking about all the other things we could be doing.

But many things are great because of how they feel 20 years later. The first five seconds of playing a musical instrument is horrible, but 20 years later and it is sublime. Emacs, Vim, are both notoriously forbidding, and yet, they are wonderful tools. Some things can be massaged to meet both criteria (I can imagine some emacs configuration that made it less painful and surfaced its true power in the first five seconds maybe), but other things are hard by nature and derive their value from how we have to adapt to them instead of how well they are adapted to us. I feel like the AI era is going to just accelerate this trend where everything we interact with is a slick surface and many people will never experience depth.

Read boring shit.

10 reasons why clickbait is good for you:

1)