i’m sorry not to be engaging with the content of the post here; hopefully others have that covered. but i just wanna say, man this is so well written! at the sentence and paragraph level especially, i find it inspiring. it makes me wanna write more like i’m drunk and dgaf, though i doubt that exact thing would actually suffice to allow me to hit a similar stylistic target.
(the rest of this comment is gonna be largely for me and my own development, but maybe you’ll like reading it anyway.)
i think you do a bunch of stuff that current me is too chicken to try. skimming quickly through, here are a few phrases that stand out as “I’m too chicken for that”:
”There’s no data for Antarctica because all the people there are penguins.”
“To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them.”
“Lots of trials where vegetable oils look great were also excluded.”
the middle quote strikes me as a paradigmatic example of what happens when you take all the most standard writing advice i know of and apply it without tripping over your own damn feet. “To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them.” even though i love reading it, when i imagine writing it, i feel so scared of everything i’m leaving out, as though the complexities of the world will haunt me for as long as that sentence is available to other people’s eyes. “what about removing the pits? what about combining the paste with water? what about how maybe there are other methods of making olive oil that i don’t know about? when i made buckwheat flour, i didn’t even have to do the ‘press’ part, but it still took me hours; am i really gonna compress something like that into six words?”
why can’t i write “all the people there are penguins”? because there are in fact a few humans in antarctica, and also even if we exclude the humans there are at minimum whatever people the penguins eat, so on multiple counts it’s literally false. but clearly i prefer the world where you write “because all the people are penguins”, and i’m pretty darn sure i would also like to be able to write “all the people are penguins”.
why can’t i write “trials where vegetable oils look great”? for almost the same reason as the penguins thing: i have some kind of stick up my butt about excessive precision and literality. “there’s no such thing as something that looks great, without some kind of perspective or reference from from whichor for which it looks great.”
seems like i have an interesting internal disagreement that hews close to the foundations of my beliefs about good writing. thanks for helping me pinpoint it. also, having examined these particular examples, i’m seriously wondering whether being drunk really would be a tremendous improvement for me along this axis.
I would dissuade no one from writing drunk, and I’m confident that you too can say that people are penguins! But I’m sorry to report that personally I don’t do it by drinking but rather writing a much longer version with all those kinds of clarifications included and then obsessively editing it down.
i’m sorry not to be engaging with the content of the post here; hopefully others have that covered. but i just wanna say, man this is so well written! at the sentence and paragraph level especially, i find it inspiring. it makes me wanna write more like i’m drunk and dgaf, though i doubt that exact thing would actually suffice to allow me to hit a similar stylistic target.
(the rest of this comment is gonna be largely for me and my own development, but maybe you’ll like reading it anyway.)
i think you do a bunch of stuff that current me is too chicken to try. skimming quickly through, here are a few phrases that stand out as “I’m too chicken for that”:
”There’s no data for Antarctica because all the people there are penguins.”
“To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them.”
“Lots of trials where vegetable oils look great were also excluded.”
the middle quote strikes me as a paradigmatic example of what happens when you take all the most standard writing advice i know of and apply it without tripping over your own damn feet. “To make olive oil, you grind some olives and press them.” even though i love reading it, when i imagine writing it, i feel so scared of everything i’m leaving out, as though the complexities of the world will haunt me for as long as that sentence is available to other people’s eyes. “what about removing the pits? what about combining the paste with water? what about how maybe there are other methods of making olive oil that i don’t know about? when i made buckwheat flour, i didn’t even have to do the ‘press’ part, but it still took me hours; am i really gonna compress something like that into six words?”
why can’t i write “all the people there are penguins”? because there are in fact a few humans in antarctica, and also even if we exclude the humans there are at minimum whatever people the penguins eat, so on multiple counts it’s literally false. but clearly i prefer the world where you write “because all the people are penguins”, and i’m pretty darn sure i would also like to be able to write “all the people are penguins”.
why can’t i write “trials where vegetable oils look great”? for almost the same reason as the penguins thing: i have some kind of stick up my butt about excessive precision and literality. “there’s no such thing as something that looks great, without some kind of perspective or reference from from which or for which it looks great.”
seems like i have an interesting internal disagreement that hews close to the foundations of my beliefs about good writing. thanks for helping me pinpoint it. also, having examined these particular examples, i’m seriously wondering whether being drunk really would be a tremendous improvement for me along this axis.
I would dissuade no one from writing drunk, and I’m confident that you too can say that people are penguins! But I’m sorry to report that personally I don’t do it by drinking but rather writing a much longer version with all those kinds of clarifications included and then obsessively editing it down.
You might appreciate the perspective in the short post Statistical models & the irrelevance of rare exceptions. (I previously commented something similar on a post by Duncan.)