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CronoDAS comments on Negative and Positive Selection - Less Wrong
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That'd be a much harder question to answer; my talent is specialized toward figuring out the shape of the right theorem to be proved, not the actual proof which is where most modern math concentrates its prestige. (This is an objectively verifiable form of mathematical talent; it means that sometimes Marcello would prove something and I would look at it and say, "That doesn't look right" and at least half the time there'd be a mistake.) I feel insecure about not being an expert in the tools by which most modern mathematicians measure basic competence; I can also apparently make "well, if that's your problem, try transforming it this way" suggestions to someone doing graduate mathematical research at Yale that are accepted as brilliant. I confidently depose that, even taking unusual talents into account, I am not in the literal top tier of mathematical potential - if I can explain basic Bayes better than anyone or was first to state the Lob problem or invented TDT, those outputs drew on at least some non-mathematical high-percentile sections of my brain (explanatory ability in the first case, or what's somewhat vaguely referred to as "philosophical" talent in the other two). I'm also reasonably confident that, given a hundred modern mathematicians, an average of zero will pick the right problem to solve.
I think I'm comfortable at this point with saying that I'm in the top 99+% of writers - I've been picking up "real" books and trying to read them and finding that they seem visibly badly-written to me now that I've written HPMOR. Though I'm still not in the literal top tier; there are basic things in writing that I still don't do too well, despite being outstanding in others, and my new level of skill is just enough to start noticing that Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett are doing things way the hell above me.
I once got this feeling reading Stephen R. Donaldson's The Runes of the Earth - that this was a level of writing that was way beyond what I could see myself reaching. Oddly, I didn't get this feeling when reading Terry Pratchett, even though I still think that Terry Pratchett is probably a better writer than, say, Shakespeare.
And I don't know what people see in American Gods - I've read over one hundred books I think were better. And I mean that literally; if I spent a day doing it, I could actually go through my bookshelves and write down a list of one hundred and one books I liked more. I couldn't do that for most of Terry Pratchett's novels.
I also tried American Gods for a while and found that its charm was mostly lost on me - maybe I didn't get far enough in. Good Omens, on the other hand...
Understand, I always knew that Good Omens was a great book and that I wasn't yet writing that well; it's only now that I'm staring at a Neil Gaiman short story, thinking, "I can tell that he's doing something outstandingly right here that I'm not doing, but it's hard to say exactly what..."
Gaiman frequently doesn't grab me, though I think "A Study in Emerald" is brilliant.
I wish American Gods had been written by someone who understood and liked America better. Why was the computer god a marketing monster rather than a programmer? Or a computer? And I know it's not fair to blame a writer for not writing a different book, but I'd like to see a version of the idea with the guts to engage with actual American religions.
American Gods is pretty evenly written; if it didn't grab you in the first fifty pages or so it was probably never going to. (I say this as someone who fell in love with it and considers it among my favorite of his work.)
I blame the SeinfeldIsUnfunny effect. I've seen GodsNeedPrayerBadly done so many other times that it seemed like a cliche.
Personally, I disliked that trope even before I'd seen it enough times for it to seem cliche, but I count American Gods among my favorites of Gaiman's work in spite of it.
Perhaps. It was far from being my introduction to that trope, but I found it worth reading for something other than the originality of that particular idea. Still, different people like different things in their art.
Oddly, I don't like Gaiman much at all on his own, and I don't like large doses of Pratchett either, but I loved Good Omens - they balanced each other's weaknesses.
Not at all like this
Oh wow, I have the exact opposite reaction; I love both Gaiman and Pratchett separately, but dislike Good Omens-- they undercut each other's strengths.
I tend to describe it as: "They have a similar worldview, but Gaiman is dark, whereas Pratchett is light. When you put them together the result is a rather bland gray."
I've read many, many books I liked more than many books which I would consider "better" in a general sense. From the context of the discussion, I'd think "were better" was the meaning you meant. Alternatively, maybe you don't experience such a discrepancy between what you like and what you believe is "good writing"?
A book can be well written and still be bad because of other flaws. Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was very well written in a technical sense, but the story itself was boring as hell and Hawthorne's skill couldn't save it.