I definitely think I could get something in Quillette, but I haven’t really had the connections to do so until recently. This one would have been great to give to them:
…but the easy criticism of it is that I’m not at all, in any way, a sociobiologist. I’m a civil engineer who writes shit on Medium because there are no gatekeepers, and I don’t have to worry about ideological retribution from an angry HR person at my company. I spoke with them about reposting prior articles, and they said they want original stuff.
I’ve got a couple of good ideas I’m throwing around for stuff that could fit there, and I’m not shy about it. I thought I was going to do this one:
…but it was too derivative, and it had a very narrow profoundness window.
The Profoundness Window is something I want to write about at some point, though. There’s a linear spectrum into which any idea falls, which goes (crazy)>(profound)>(banal), and every reader has a different spectrum. So the idea that “Facebook is finely crafted to create situations which cause friends or relatives to hate each other” will sound crazy to some people, profound to others, and completely obvious to yet more people.
If I pitch that idea to most of my former FB friends, they’d think it’s crazy. If I pitch it to the Slate Star Codex subreddit, they’d think it’s boringly obvious. So what’s the window of people who would find it profound?
The trick with writing I think, is to hit a topic that has the widest spread on that window. Whatever I get to Q has got to have a wide band.
