aqsalose
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aqsalose has not written any posts yet.
Thanks for pointing that out; maybe one important part that I left implicit is the feedback coming from domain experts (such as the staff of a major publishing house).
The dichotomy is not that simple.
For example, in many areas of math it is of tremendous benefit to be able to internally visualize (with your "mind's eye") complicated structures and how they 'move' in relation to each other. Whether it's a skill or a ability, I've noticed some striking similarities to the internal visualizing skill needed in drawing:
To believably characterize a human figure in movement on a still paper that does not have ability to represent movement, it's helpful to see underneath the skin, to visualize all the muscles and bones and what they do when the figure moves. To draw a face, how the different muscles and bones and tissues are... (read more)
Now most people who do that will end up terrible writers. But when someone like Eliezer does it, the results are spectacular.
You could have found a more convincing example.
The objective metrics of quality of literature are hard to come by, but HPMOR does suffer from quite many, many stereotypical sins of fanfic / bad genre writing and makes a tiresome read. (One that I found especially grating and made me finally drop the story altogether could be described as "my main character is not OP because I set up these plainly arbitrary obstacles as a 'balance' ". Please, no. There's more to writing enjoyable, interesting characters in meaningful stories than... (read more)
I believe that a network independent bloggers [0] who are not tied to a single forum centered on discussing E.Y.'s writing would be an improvement: Intellectually more versatile and thus healthy; can avoid echo-chamber effects. I wasn't active on LW at the time pf peak activity, but I've understood that one of the objectives of LW was that "rationality" (whatever is meant by the word) would spread outside a single corner of the internet.
However, the problem is finding all those interesting, rationality-adjacent bloggers: if there's no any central place where you can find those people and their contributions, it's not a network: it's just random unfindable people.
[0] Or FB / etc writers, but I have preference for public, open web.