Curation and its side effects — The Autodidacts

I: Curators Skim<br>Curators and gatekeepers, because of the nature of their work, default to skimming. It's easy to be annoyed that the editor might only read the first page (or the first paragraph, or even the first sentence) of a story you spent days, months, or years writing. But most of the time, the editor only needs a few seconds to gauge the quality of the writing, and whether it’s a fit for their audience.<br>[ This interesting dynamic sunk in after reading The View from RSS, a behind-the-scenes view of curation by the glamorous and shockingly intelligent Caroline Crampton, who describes what it’s like to live underneath a pile of two thousand RSS feeds, possibly including this one. Full disclosure: I am plotting to use the ideas in this article to get featured by The Browser again, preferably without having to spend 6 months writing a 5,500-word essay to do so. ]<br>Songwriters have shortened the average length of the instrumental intro, to get to the catchy chorus hook while the goldfish are still listening. The usual story is that attention spans are declining. But is it the audience’s attention spans that are dictating this change? Or, is part of it a systemic bias for things that front-load the value, and are easily curatable?<br>In some cases, there’s an incentive for curators to share things they haven’t deeply read: speed. If their heuristics are accurate, skimming-only allows them to be the first curator to break good articles, increasing their status as taste-makers.<br>II: Skim Milking<br>I realized underdog independent bloggers could use curators’ skimming against them. In the spirit of Gwern’s hacker mindset essay, we could optimize our writing for these curators, by tailoring the parts that stand out to specifically catch curators' attention.<br>Then I realized: this is what the popular writers do. Have you noticed all the James Clear-like life advice writers with their bold text, catchy statements, and soundbites? Is it a coincidence that the most popular writers use bold text and write eminently-skimmable articles?<br>The tricky part is how to deliver the best value for the end-reader at the same time as fishing for curators.<br>Note: after I wrote this post, but before I published it, Dynomight wrote a longer and probably better post about formatting. I only skimmed it.<br>III: Applied Antimemetics<br>If, for some reason, we wanted an article not to go viral, ala Nadia Asparouhova's anti-memetic self-keeping secrets, we could deliberately emphasize the boring parts. The exact same content, with different emphasis, could make it so that curators who didn't read the whole thing would think it was a badly written, boring article. But readers who read the whole thing would realize that it wasn't, or even, that the parts that weren't in bold directly contradicted the parts that were in bold.<br>In the spirit of adventure, I could publish two versions of this essay. One of them would highlight the interesting parts, and attempt to optimize for the skimming curators and gatekeepers. The second version would only highlight the worst and boringest parts, and optimize for the readers who read the whole thing, and specifically try to prevent the curators from discovering it.<br>IV: Holes in the Sieve<br>Certain articles or books take a while to get rolling. Steinbeck comes to mind: an entire chapter about the weather. It seems these would be at risk of being passed over by a skimming curator.<br>And some types of material resist shallow engagement. They seem boring, or dumb, or empty when you blaze though them. But, sometimes, they’re not!<br>Once a week I go through my comparatively modest collection of ~151 RSS feeds (some of which are, in turn, curated collections of links), as well as a few aggregators, and select my week’s reading material. Like Caroline, “I’ve become very good over the years at allowing my eye to slide over everything, stopping when I see a headline or phrase that looks promising.” The first step of triage happens in my RSS reader. For noisy feeds, I only read the headline. Or, I skim the article. I open the articles that seem interesting, and I save the best to Pocket/Wallabag/Instapaper/Readeck.<br>Arguments for and against things, self-help, and hot takes are easy to skim, and get a decent sense of whether they will be interesting. These are what I will call “point based” writing. They have a point, and it’s either right or wrong, and it’s either relevant or irrelevant to my life, and it’s either well written or not.<br>But there are a few categories of things that can get triaged when they shouldn’t.<br>Buried nuggets. Often, 98% of the value I get from an essay is a single idea or piece of information, which I haven’t encountered before, buried somewhere obscure — often in a footnote. Real-life example from yesterday: a Dwarkesh Patel interview with Gwern Branwen crossed my screen. I skimmed it briefly, and triaged it as “modafinil mode” content (the hyper-intellectual...