Sam Holstein
1 min readJul 18, 2019

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Oh my God, you AND Gorman both read this piece — it didn’t occur to me that tagging people in my story may cause them to read it! 😩 If I did, I might have worked harder on it, lol.

Yeah, I’ve noticed internet writing favors what’s ‘practical,’ like productivity advice or how-to’s because they’re more searchable by algorithms. Philosophy, comedy and fiction share this annoying quality of being conceptual, which algorithms choke on.

I don’t blame this on Medium. They’re subject to the same publishing pressures everyone else is, and while they can weight pressures on their algorithm differently, it’s still fundamentally the same type of algorithm. We’ve yet to invent an algorithm that can sort by profundity.

Which means it’s kind of on us as writers to figure it out ourselves. But that sounds like writing pre-internet-era, and that shit sucked, yo. It’s hard for me to believe we can’t do better than faulty algorithms and cognitive bias engineering.

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Sam Holstein
Sam Holstein

Written by Sam Holstein

Articles that teach you how to master your mind ☞ free stuff at www.samholstein.com

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