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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3397 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 13, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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That isn't exceptional. For example, Asimov was an extremely prolific writer - probably the most prolific out of well-known ones, and wrote for over 40 years - and yet the stuff he's most remembered for now are the things he wrote in the 1950s - robots, Foundation, etc. It's not to say the rest of his writings were bad or completely ignored - they enjoyed their success, but they weren't the best.

Indeed. Einstein never wrote anything as good as his annus mirabilis papers. Orson Scott Card never won both the Hugo and the Nebula award again in the same year after Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Scott Alexander never regained his magic after he moved to Substack.

From "On Things that are Awesome" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

(2) I can think of many places where I disagree with statements emitted by Douglas Hofstadter and Greg Egan, and even one or two places where I would want to pencil in a correction to Jaynes (his interpretation of quantum mechanics being the most obvious). In fact, when my brain says “Greg Egan” it is really referring to two novels, Permutation City and Quarantine, which overshadow all his other works in my book. And when my brain says “Hofstadter” it is referring to Gödel, Escher, Bach with a small side order of some essays in Metamagical Themas. For most people their truly awesome work is usually only a slice of their total output, from some particular years (I find that scary as hell, by the way).

(3) Once you realize that you’re only admiring someone’s peak work, you also realize that the work is not the person: I don’t actually know Hofstadter, or Greg Egan, or E. T. Jaynes. I have no idea what they are (were) like in their personal lives, or whether their daily deeds had any trace of the awesome that is in their books. If you start thinking that a person is supposed to be as universally and consistently awesome as their best work, so that every word from their lips is supposed to be as good as the best book they ever wrote, that’s probably some kind of failure mode. This is not to try to moderate or diminish the awesomeness: for their best work is that awesome, and so there must have been a moment of their life, a time-slice out of their worldline, which was also that awesome. But what the symbol “Douglas Hofstadter” stands for, in my mind, is not all his works, or all his life.

Oh I'm aware. I was just under the impression that The Stand was widely considered King's masterpiece, as opposed to IT.

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