What’s the point of writing
The idea that writing is still worthwhile in a crowded information ecosystem is often defended by the idea that writing has many distinct qualities, so reaching some point on the pareto frontier isn’t that hard. This makes search for quality hard, since there’s no michelin star equivalent for you, which makes writer-reader interactions little better than random sampling then deciding to move on. This is the actual important point, there’s no good search function, you just need to explore blindly. So you don’t need to be the best blogger, but just be above average in some area, (closer to the pareto frontier than not?). Idk what I’m saying. I wanted to make the point that just being above average isn’t good enough to be good in general if the ‘stopping quality’ encourages people to stop exploring and exploit you prematurely because it seems too convincing. Also you being the best source someone ever actually finds on a topic doesn’t mean you writing that made their life better, if they would’ve gone on to find something better.
- See information economics, that market design/markets in everything popular press book
- Is this analogous to the problem of a Spotify playlist, where you shouldn’t remove all below-average songs, partly because of uncertainty about a songs quality, but also because one’s preferences for songs change over time. Ask chatgpt what the name for this kind of thing is in Econ/compsci.
How do LLMs change this