My Repugnant Conclusion

Consider the following two scenarios:

1. A writer has a choice: She can either bang out a piece of writing quickly, possibly with the help of AI, without any regard for form or quality; or, if she puts a great deal of mental energy into making the story great, the story will indeed turn out great. She decides to forego all shortcuts and write a great story.

2. Another, even better writer has stories in her that always turn out great. However, due to life commitments, she must delay the writing process. Her writing will not suffer as a result and the story she eventually writes will turn out great.

One may regard both scenarios to be fairly innocuous. Ah, but look more closely.

The writer in Scenario 1 has opted to put time and energy into crafting a story. What does that mean for the story she opted not to write? That story will never exist.

Now, let's look at the writer in Scenario 2. She as well has done the unwritten story a disservice, and therefore has done a disservice to humanity, having denied the readers of the world a great piece of work—for who knows what the piece would have turned out to be? It might have changed the world, begun a new artistic movement, or otherwise initiated some cataclysmic event in the world of literature. Perhaps a literary K2 event, setting the historical boundary precisely upon the date and time of the work’s creation. Literary achievements of all kinds would thenceforth be logged as having occurred before the work or after it.

Let’s review.

1. In both scenarios, a literary work would either exist or not exist.

2. In one case, the immediate result is a steaming heap of literary bird droppings, in the other, it's a work of greatness.

3. For a writer, it is better to write than not to write, as it is better for a work to exist than not to exist.

4. Therefore, the writers in both scenarios ought to produce their work immediately with no delays.

And so we arrive at my Repugnant Conclusion: For every ten billion great pieces of writing there is an even greater number of lousy ones, and it is better that these lousy stories exist than not exist.

This troubles me greatly as I sit down to write this newsletter.

This morning, I had a choice—to write or not to write. Obviously I chose the former. And now it appears that I should have waited. This is going to be a lousy piece of writing, a hastily composed parody of the philosopher Derek Parfit's ideas. I can see its stink rising into the air as I type. And yet, I find it is better for me to write than not to write. But is it right?

There is one way to avoid my Repugnant Conclusion, and that is to ensure that the average output of all writers is maximized for greatness.

This I can get behind.

We can foster a new appreciation for the craft through free education, free seminars, and algorithmically adjusting outcomes in the literary milieu by boosting the best pieces of writing (because, as we all know, the best way to learn good writing is by reading good writing).

But hang on…

Suppose we were to do this and succeed. For any given population of written works, most of which will be of extremely high quality, we would still wind up with some crapburgers, with others rising only slightly higher in quality than the worst of them. Are we to assume that the world is better off with these stories in existence?

What's more, we're then forced to assume that adding mass quantities of lousy stories to this population would benefit the whole, for the disparity would be less obvious than it would if we were to add great ones. And once more, we arrive at the Repugnant Conclusion.

So this morning I had a choice: Do I write or don't I?

Well, I've gone and done it, see. Here it is. The piece is now in existence.

World, I'm terribly sorry.