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thomblake comments on Open Thread: September 2011 - Less Wrong
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In general, honesty is the best policy. If you really were influenced to great things by HJPEV, explain it well and it should go over well. If the admissions folks are going to say "This well-written and inspiring essay is about fanfiction" and thus throw it in the garbage, it could just as well have been thrown away for the room's lighting or what they had for breakfast.
This is important. Deliberately choosing to write about fanfiction is a high-risk move, and so is high-status if you pull it off well! But you might just face-plant. (You don't try out unpracticed tricks in front of a girl you want to impress.)
Or to put it another way:
All else equal, 3<4.
Also, recognising a low-status character as a low-status character is an important part of 4. Trying to pretend it's high status ("the author is an AI researcher, it is the most reviewed fanfiction ever, it's better than Rowling's Harry Potter", etc) will usually backfire.
Honestly, I'd start by baldly and confidently acknowledging that characters from fanfiction about popular books are low-status, and that you are going to do your piece on him anyway.
As someone currently going through this process (I just wrote the same essay about Terry Pratchett's character Tiffany Aching), the impression I get is that it's very important to be unique: if your essay is the same as 200 others, it will be penalized as much as if it is poorly written. Using a rationalist fanfiction character, if you can write it well and have the guts to write it sincerely (but not too sincerely, or you'll signal naivete), is a good idea. If you don't want to deal with a fanfiction character, write about some other rationalist. Either way, don't mention lesswrong. And please don't write about Howard Roark. I enjoyed The Fountainhead, but it's worse signaling than fanfiction. You'll look like a shallow thinker who falls for propaganda, and most universities lean to the liberal end of the spectrum.
Important note: I'm applying to highly selective colleges with student bodies that think of themselves as contrarian or meta-contrarian. If you aren't, this advice may not apply.
I stand by my statement.
If the essay asked about "the fictional character that had the greatest impact on you" or something to that effect and that person is HJPEV, then that's what you should write about. Otherwise, you'd be lying, and apart from the general wrongness of lying, you're going to write better about something that's true.
I didn't disagree.
Thank you by the way. Your post convinced me to write about him and illuminated the best way to handle it.
If it's not too personal, I would be curious to see the final product.
If I like how it turns out and decide to stick with it I'll message it to you. I may not start for a while though.
Has anyone done a thorough social psychological game theoretic analysis of college admissions? Seems right up your alley, gwern.
I only play a deep thinker online, I don't think I could write such a thing in a way that isn't merely extensive plagiarism of, say, Steve Sailer.
(That said, reading over my comment, I missed an opportunity: I should have pointed out that the reason why 4>3 is because it is an expensive signal in the sense that attempting to do #4 but only achieving a #2 exposes one to considerable punishment whereas one doesn't run such a risk with#1 and #3, and expensive signals are, of course, the most credible signals.)
The other way to look at the situation is that the admissions folks are looking for a very specific essay. That essay requires you to identify yourself with a character from some postmodern South American novel (or possibly Elie Wiesel in "Night") and certainly has no place in it for fan fiction.
Nope. Admissions folks are looking to be entertained.
I think if you were to choose a character from a conventionally literary work, it should be something generally well-regarded in English departments, but which is very rarely assigned reading in high school. Maybe Middlemarch?