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MichaelHoward comments on On Things that are Awesome - Less Wrong
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Has anyone any good possible explanations for this phenomenon?
Surely the explanation is just that things which are unusually good are unusual. You wouldn't expect someone to write a book as good as GEB every time they wrote a book, just as you wouldn't expect any given book to be as good as GEB (although I personally got more out of Le Ton Beau de Marot...)
The best stuff, from the top end of the bell curve, will have lots of factors going for it:
The general effect is called "regression toward the mean" .
Curiously, no one seems to agree on which are best, which suggests that people value very different aspects of his writing.
Shouldn't we then consider that the awesomeness mean to which authors (broadly) regress reflects less their talent/circumstances and more our own subjective experience?
Much of it is selection bias. Godel published very little and his two most significant results are 15 years apart. Kafka is all brilliant, all the time. In fact, with great writers who had long careers you often find their very best work scattered over decades.
Sometimes it's just a freak brilliant moment. I had an experience like this reading A Clockwork Orange and having it just blow my head off, then reading as much other Anthony Burgess as I could. The results were ... disappointing. (All his other novels suck. All of them. I looked.)