I very much enjoyed this article. Please bear that in mind as you read the following critique, which is meant not as a dismissal but as (I hope) the start of a conversation on this topic.
"something is objectively interesting when it violates an expectancy..."
Perhaps, but this definition -- clever though it is -- relies on a degree of subjectivity not terribly far removed from the original definition you cited (e.g., "arousing or holding attention"). Because your definition depends on the reader's expectations, and different readers will have different expectations -- not to mention different weights assigned to those expectations -- then we still can't reach true objectivity in "interesting" content.
"Good writing makes us see something differently. Great writing makes us see everything differently."
Again, this definition is slightly problematic. It assigns too much value to novelty -- which, in turn, depends very heavily on what any given reader might bring to the table. I would suggest we strive for a definition of good writing that is not so heavily dependent on the mindset and other qualities of the reader.
IMO, you were building toward a very reasonable and logical framework in your assessment of novelty + information + insight. (I would add "clarity" to your framework, FWIW). But I think you leapt to a somewhat unsupported conclusion. Not all great writing is profound. To be sure, some of it is (though its profundity depends on the reader's expectations or experience). But there is certainly great writing that shatters no expectations; conversely, there is bad writing that does so. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is brilliantly written, but it doesn't exert a profound and life-altering influence on most readers' worldviews. On the flipside, The Secret is horrendously written, but it has had a major and indellibile influence on the lives of many of its readers -- sad though that may be.
"Because your definition depends on the reader's expectations, and different readers will have different expectations -- not to mention different weights assigned to those expectations -- then we still can't reach true objectivity in 'interesting' content."
The value of this definition is that it lets us objectively predict what someone will find subjectively interesting. And although this may sound kind of useless at first glance, I think it's actually highly actionable and lets us build a lot of cool things.
"Not all great writing is profound."
What I'm primarily talking about is writing that creates value by communicating ideas. The reason why H2G2 is cool is because the writing itself is really clever. This is a lot of fun, but definitely outside the scope of what I'm talking about. Eventually I'll probably revise this to make a note of stuff like that.
Also, if you liked this there is another essay on my blog that's entirely about what makes something insightful:
This essay is basically set theory applied to literature, although there are actually some really intriguing differences between my theory and set theory. (E.g. one way of being insightful is by pointing out when X is not mutually exclusive with Y, which doesn't really have any analog in math.) People seem to have more trouble with this essay than the other one, though it might be partly because I published them out of order.
> Because your definition depends on the reader's expectations, and different readers will have different expectations [...] then we still can't reach true objectivity in "interesting" content.
I took a course in Classical Rhetoric a couple years ago (it was terribly worth it), and in the first classes we learnt that at least since Aristotle this has been at the core of this art: the very definition of a good discourse is, that which is entirely crafted with its audience in mind.
Two caveats:
FIRST, as we grow used to certain schemata of how to perceive reality (that is, as these schemata become radical to our way of thinking), anything which is radically different from them, while it may still draw attention, is most likely going to evoke repulsion.
This is a little bit veiled in the text because the author uses vision of a physical event as an analogy to the reception of a discourse. If you see a train crossing a wall, there's no denying it, so it'll draw your attention in a sporty manner. If you catch (still vision) your best (male) friend kissing another guy, and he never told you he was into that, there will be many ways you can wrap your head around it — to the point where gay males report feeling repulsion and betrayal when they find out their "straight buddy" was gay behind their backs! [1]
Finally, if you hear someone propose an idea that is completely orthogonal (if not entirely opposite) to how you think, all else being equal, you're likely to experience anything from confusion to repulsion. Because in order to be interested in what is seemingly incongruous with your beliefs, you have to suspend them at least a little, and disbelief can usually only be suspended willingly.
SECOND, it is interesting to turn the idea in its head and ask yourself "but what if I want to spike the interest of the 'every man', what if I wish my audience to be as wide as humanity?" You can't craft all kinds of discourse at this level, but you'll find that there are certain things which spike interest in us all (and conversely, you'll find that we share at least very similar beliefs about a host of things). This concept is named "universal audience" and discussed with great brilliance in a book by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, called in English The New Rhetoric, which I much recommend.
[1] Disclaimer: I'm using this example because it was discussed over a glass of beer in the bar, yesterday, and to my surprise, everyone at the table had one such story to share; my group of friends being what you may otherwise call diverse and accepting. No, I don't have a link, but I hope there are/will be studies about this.
"This concept is named 'universal audience' and discussed with great brilliance in a book by Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, called in English The New Rhetoric, which I much recommend."
Thanks for the reference, I'll check this out. There are definitely certain things that are always universally interesting to people, e.g. new ways their children could be in danger. The cool thing about the Internet though is that we can do things like, say, download 1M+ comments tagged 'interesting' on Slashdot and look for patterns that other people have missed.
This is also basically the way I created and validated this framework, e.g. every 'insightful' comment on Slashdot either fit into this framework, or else the framework had to be changed, or else I had to decide it wasn't really insightful. If I ever wanted to turn this into a PhD dissertation or something then I would actually do this transparently at a very large scale, so that people could easily see for themselves that it's actually a very robust and actionable model.
"What makes something interesting?" His answer is "novelty", since that's the basis of Baillargeon's experiment. Note that this is not exhaustive as other things appear to be interesting to audiences, such as sex and violence. Also, any method of satisfying a currently unmet need will hold our interest, as an oasis in the desert. We can cast novelty in these terms by saying we are insatiably curious. I agree it has survival value, provided it doesn't kill us a la the cat).
> So why does humor exist? Because it’s our checksum on reality.
Dan Dennett would call it "debugging" [1]. It is interesting to see that in our society we're so inundated with humour that sometimes pointing at something mundane or downright horrible and calling it humour (or laughing at it) is enough to make it humorous indeed (meta-humorous? I don't like that prefix) [2].
But I think the analysis falls short here, because it forgoes addressing the subject of horror. Not repulsion [3], but horror. We entertain horror like we entertain humour. They're both triggered by novelty or breakage [4], they both seem to incite the same checksum/debugging attitude from the audience, they evoke passionate reactions... and yet we perceive them as absolutely opposite to each other.
(One of these days I was being philosophical about why that might be — why humour and horror, while being so similar, are perceived as such opposites — and someone recommended to me a book called Biology of Horror which apparently sets off from that point. I haven't read it. Just passing along the recommendation.)
> Thus, the reason why humor subjectively feels good is probably because when others laugh at your jokes it shows that they respect you as a person and agree with your ideas.
There are studies [5] which indicate that humour even has a role in sexual selection, which to me feels like taking the points made in this article to the extreme. One might among other things measure social fitness in a potential partner by their shared sense of humour: that's amazing.
"something is objectively interesting when it violates an expectancy..."
Perhaps, but this definition -- clever though it is -- relies on a degree of subjectivity not terribly far removed from the original definition you cited (e.g., "arousing or holding attention"). Because your definition depends on the reader's expectations, and different readers will have different expectations -- not to mention different weights assigned to those expectations -- then we still can't reach true objectivity in "interesting" content.
"Good writing makes us see something differently. Great writing makes us see everything differently."
Again, this definition is slightly problematic. It assigns too much value to novelty -- which, in turn, depends very heavily on what any given reader might bring to the table. I would suggest we strive for a definition of good writing that is not so heavily dependent on the mindset and other qualities of the reader.
IMO, you were building toward a very reasonable and logical framework in your assessment of novelty + information + insight. (I would add "clarity" to your framework, FWIW). But I think you leapt to a somewhat unsupported conclusion. Not all great writing is profound. To be sure, some of it is (though its profundity depends on the reader's expectations or experience). But there is certainly great writing that shatters no expectations; conversely, there is bad writing that does so. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is brilliantly written, but it doesn't exert a profound and life-altering influence on most readers' worldviews. On the flipside, The Secret is horrendously written, but it has had a major and indellibile influence on the lives of many of its readers -- sad though that may be.