7 ms·

Heretical Things Statistics Tell Us About Fiction

90 points by Petiver 9y ago

EpsilonWrangler 9y ago
I don't know if this was taken into account, but in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, "terminus" was very much a proper noun, being the name of the very planet where most of the plot takes place. I wonder if he named it that because he liked the word so much, or if the word became his "favourite" after using it that way? It would be cool to see how author's usages of these words changed over time.
sverige 9y ago
Applying statistics to works of fiction is mildly interesting, much as applying geometry to paintings. But after you tell me all about your statistical analysis of Faulkner's prose or how the Golden Mean is distorted in Van Gogh's paintings, you still haven't touched the thing that makes the works of Faulkner and Van Gogh much more interesting than those of their less-known contemporaries. That's why it is called "art" and not "science."
- whatshisface 9y ago
  I've always wanted to conduct an experiment where we put some higshcoolers who wanted to major in art history in isolation (except for sterilized food and some math textbooks slipped under the door) and had them reconstruct the periods and choose important artists from scratch. How much of the canon would turn out the same?
  - bbctol 9y ago
    Similar to the plot of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
    - ivanbakel 9y ago
      I wouldn't agree. Menard is about authorship of a rewritten identical work - the GP was talking about people selecting works to potentially produce a different canon, and there's no question of an author.
      - bbctol 9y ago
        Right... but it's similar.
  - kartan 9y ago
    At "How the Mona Lisa became so overrated" from Vox, you can see a unique circusntance that made the picture legendary beyond its initial merit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2wy7Fp2fqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2wy7Fp2fqw
    - cafard 9y ago
      Well maybe, but see http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm#leonardo http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm#leonar... from 1873.
  - bradleyjg 9y ago
    Reminds me a little of the thousander maths in Stephenson's Anathem.
    - fredley 9y ago
      Reminds me of the Auditors in Pratchett's Thief of Time.
  - gwern 9y ago
    You'll be amused to know that similar experiments have been run for music: 2006: "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market" http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p... Salganik & Watts 2009 "Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets" http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf 2008: "Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/
- BaronSamedi 9y ago
  Sure but that doesn't mean we can't understand why some works of art resonate with us. The computational folkloristics field has found some very interesting patterns (see for instance http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu). In "Religion Explained" Pascal Boyer describes why certain myths resonate with us and others do not.
Animats 9y ago
The movie industry, unfortunately, has this figured out. The classic guide was "Screenplay" (1979) by Syd Field, which lays out a fairly rigid structure for movies. Then, in 2005, Blake Snyder published "Save the Cat", which is a rigid guide to what has to happen in each set of pages in a screenplay. Here's the summary on one page.[1] This pattern is so effective that almost every big-budget movie from Hollywood now follows it. Very closely.[2] So closely that audiences expect it. Hollywood got a design pattern that works, and they're sticking with it. [1] https://goodinaroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Blake-Snyders-Beat-Sheet.pdf https://goodinaroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Blake-Sny... [2] http://www.savethecat.com/beat-sheets-alpha http://www.savethecat.com/beat-sheets-alpha
- b_ttercup 9y ago
  Glossing through save the cat- it doesn't seem like a restrictive guide, but rather a set of reasonable narrative components, like stating the theme and having a narrative catalyst. Frankly this seems fine, if not beneficial. I would be more concerned about the formulas that drive your average Michael Bay quality film or second-by-second construction of trailers.
  - Animats 9y ago
    The key new idea in Save the Cat is that both dramatic elements and pacing are standarized. Save the Cat tells you on what page of a screenplay the various elements should appear. Screen time allocation is rigid.
    - grantsch 9y ago
      Yeah... and that's not really accurate.
- kgwgk 9y ago
  Looking for patterns in storytelling is a popular thing to do, see for example "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Campbell (1949) or "The Uses of Enchantment" by Bettelheim (1976).
- 9y ago
seniorsassycat 9y ago
On authors favorite words: "The words must be used in half an author’s books, at least once per hundred thousand words; they can’t be proper nouns... Isaac Asimov prefers 'terminus,'" "terminus" is the proper name of a location in Asimov's Foundation series. Did Ben Blatt's analysis fail to account for common words used as proper nouns, or does Asimov use terminus outside the Foundation series?
- __s 9y ago
  Apparently the word has to appear in half their books. I don't know if he took the whole of Asimov's 900+ books
  - ashark 9y ago
    Wikipedia puts him at 40 novels, enough short stories for maybe 40 short to mid-sized collections (382 stories), 280 non-fic books, and 146 as editor or annotator, which surely don't count. 504 books included edited/annotated. If one were only using fiction and excluding duplicates (I'm sure there were collections of short stories of his which were mostly or entirely repeats from earlier collections) then that's maybe 80 volumes of unique material (I'm sure there were tons of dupes in various story collections), tops. They'd easily fit in 40-50 fairly ordinary vols. I bet if you were willing to put multiple "books" in one (a lot of his juvenilia are really short) and probably 10-15 LOA-style volumes. Not that that's a small amount of fiction to have written, but even including the non-fic it's nowhere near 900.
    - __s 9y ago
      Yes, seems my off-the-cuff memory's is counting an individual short story as a book & even then doubled the value http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html
- nitrogen 9y ago
  Another dead comment made a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678
sn9 9y ago
I'm curious to see how someone like Neal Stephenson would be identified. His writing style seems to change to fit the times and persons he writes about.

90 points by Petiver 9y ago

I don't know if this was taken into account, but in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, "terminus" was very much a proper noun, being the name of the very planet where most of the plot takes place. I wonder if he named it that because he liked the word so much, or if the word became his "favourite" after using it that way? It would be cool to see how author's usages of these words changed over time.

sverige 9y ago

Applying statistics to works of fiction is mildly interesting, much as applying geometry to paintings. But after you tell me all about your statistical analysis of Faulkner's prose or how the Golden Mean is distorted in Van Gogh's paintings, you still haven't touched the thing that makes the works of Faulkner and Van Gogh much more interesting than those of their less-known contemporaries. That's why it is called "art" and not "science."

whatshisface 9y ago
I've always wanted to conduct an experiment where we put some higshcoolers who wanted to major in art history in isolation (except for sterilized food and some math textbooks slipped under the door) and had them reconstruct the periods and choose important artists from scratch. How much of the canon would turn out the same?
- bbctol 9y ago
  Similar to the plot of "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...
  - ivanbakel 9y ago
    I wouldn't agree. Menard is about authorship of a rewritten identical work - the GP was talking about people selecting works to potentially produce a different canon, and there's no question of an author.
    - bbctol 9y ago
      Right... but it's similar.
- kartan 9y ago
  At "How the Mona Lisa became so overrated" from Vox, you can see a unique circusntance that made the picture legendary beyond its initial merit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2wy7Fp2fqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2wy7Fp2fqw
  - cafard 9y ago
    Well maybe, but see http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm#leonardo http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm#leonar... from 1873.
- bradleyjg 9y ago
  Reminds me a little of the thousander maths in Stephenson's Anathem.
  - fredley 9y ago
    Reminds me of the Auditors in Pratchett's Thief of Time.
- gwern 9y ago
  You'll be amused to know that similar experiments have been run for music: 2006: "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market" http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.p... Salganik & Watts 2009 "Web-Based Experiments for the Study of Collective Social Dynamics in Cultural Markets" http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf http://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_watts09.pdf 2008: "Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3785310/
BaronSamedi 9y ago
Sure but that doesn't mean we can't understand why some works of art resonate with us. The computational folkloristics field has found some very interesting patterns (see for instance http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu). In "Religion Explained" Pascal Boyer describes why certain myths resonate with us and others do not.

Animats 9y ago

The movie industry, unfortunately, has this figured out. The classic guide was "Screenplay" (1979) by Syd Field, which lays out a fairly rigid structure for movies. Then, in 2005, Blake Snyder published "Save the Cat", which is a rigid guide to what has to happen in each set of pages in a screenplay. Here's the summary on one page.[1] This pattern is so effective that almost every big-budget movie from Hollywood now follows it. Very closely.[2] So closely that audiences expect it. Hollywood got a design pattern that works, and they're sticking with it. [1] https://goodinaroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Blake-Snyders-Beat-Sheet.pdf https://goodinaroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Blake-Sny... [2] http://www.savethecat.com/beat-sheets-alpha http://www.savethecat.com/beat-sheets-alpha

b_ttercup 9y ago
Glossing through save the cat- it doesn't seem like a restrictive guide, but rather a set of reasonable narrative components, like stating the theme and having a narrative catalyst. Frankly this seems fine, if not beneficial. I would be more concerned about the formulas that drive your average Michael Bay quality film or second-by-second construction of trailers.
- Animats 9y ago
  The key new idea in Save the Cat is that both dramatic elements and pacing are standarized. Save the Cat tells you on what page of a screenplay the various elements should appear. Screen time allocation is rigid.
  - grantsch 9y ago
    Yeah... and that's not really accurate.
kgwgk 9y ago
Looking for patterns in storytelling is a popular thing to do, see for example "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Campbell (1949) or "The Uses of Enchantment" by Bettelheim (1976).
9y ago

seniorsassycat 9y ago

On authors favorite words: "The words must be used in half an author’s books, at least once per hundred thousand words; they can’t be proper nouns... Isaac Asimov prefers 'terminus,'" "terminus" is the proper name of a location in Asimov's Foundation series. Did Ben Blatt's analysis fail to account for common words used as proper nouns, or does Asimov use terminus outside the Foundation series?

__s 9y ago
Apparently the word has to appear in half their books. I don't know if he took the whole of Asimov's 900+ books
- ashark 9y ago
  Wikipedia puts him at 40 novels, enough short stories for maybe 40 short to mid-sized collections (382 stories), 280 non-fic books, and 146 as editor or annotator, which surely don't count. 504 books included edited/annotated. If one were only using fiction and excluding duplicates (I'm sure there were collections of short stories of his which were mostly or entirely repeats from earlier collections) then that's maybe 80 volumes of unique material (I'm sure there were tons of dupes in various story collections), tops. They'd easily fit in 40-50 fairly ordinary vols. I bet if you were willing to put multiple "books" in one (a lot of his juvenilia are really short) and probably 10-15 LOA-style volumes. Not that that's a small amount of fiction to have written, but even including the non-fic it's nowhere near 900.
  - __s 9y ago
    Yes, seems my off-the-cuff memory's is counting an individual short story as a book & even then doubled the value http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html
nitrogen 9y ago
Another dead comment made a similar point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14886678

sn9 9y ago

I'm curious to see how someone like Neal Stephenson would be identified. His writing style seems to change to fit the times and persons he writes about.