you power through it, you get invested - but you know that nothing will ever come out of it and in no way can you recommend it
https://howlongtoread.com/books/323872/Train-Dreams
Two days per book full time means one every 16 hours. Enough to read the full Foundation Trilogy with one hour to rest between books.
On a side note, I'm ashamed to share that I tested my reading speed, and while it was 264 WPM, my reading comprehension was 50%. That's why I read slower, and frequently re-read.
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
Out of spite I tried to measure my Spanish reading, 520 WPM and 100% comprehension. Very unfair since it's my native language and I can glance and skip instead of reading every word.
Hard to judge that based on just five questions though.
Edited to add: we must have followed different links though, mine only had three questions obviously.
Mine was a paragraph about small loans to poor populations, and had five questions.
Edited to add: hm. I just got 67%. I guess my college degree is a waste. Should have gone the humanities route instead.
Makes you wonder what else you're missing.
Oops.
Only a few percent of your judgements are ever tested (by surviving being optioned, produced and released) and, of the ones that are, at best you only get a small sampling of false positives over a sea of potential false negatives. I imagine he's incredibly interested in the fate of any titles he didn't recommend which end up being produced (perhaps by another studio). Having filled a similar role in a different industry with similar high-stakes 'unknowables', I thought a lot about this. It was pretty obvious what practically mattered was how much my output "felt right" to downstream decision-makers vs actually being right.
While my stakeholders were quite happy with my work, actually targeting such ephemeral and uncorrelated feedback felt unproductive and dumb. Eventually, I settled on making the evaluation process fully transparent and consistent. I ensured all objective criteria were documented and each subjective judgement had clear confidence intervals. This was more challenging than it sounds. In the end, it was still hard to know if I was really improving year to year. For that, I still had to rely on my own, mostly subjective, self-assessment but at least I had some objective tracking data to calibrate on. That at least helped me feel like I was executing with diligence and integrity. It also increased my confidence no one else in the industry was doing it any better.
There aren't a lot of professional careers which require skill and years of experience yet are flooded with so many false positives, false negatives, and "we'll never even knows". Domains where playing at a world-class level only takes being right 5% of the time - are just hard to reason about. It can feel like a sadistic casino where 97% of blackjack hands have no clear winner, yet sometimes hitting on 20 is the optimal call. But other times standing on 12 is the best strategy. But it's not entirely random. There are real signals. It's just hard to identify which are real, which are red noise and which are just mapped backward.
With so many false positives and false negatives it's easy to end up chasing black swans (random outlier events). Or to just settle for trying to please your boss, whose own track record is probably closer to astrology than strategy. My best meta-takeaway is to focus on thoroughly mapping the decision space, carefully track and map all the signals, even build a taxonomy of signal types if you can. Then relentlessly optimize the decision making process over the actual outcomes. Why? Because in such 'wicked' domains, sometimes the wrong decision process can still score winning results. And other times, an optimal decision process can yield a string of losses. Your job depends on figuring which is which before it's obvious to other expert players.
As for the book reader in the TFA, I suspect a lot of his value isn't in his a binary "go / no go" call. It's accurately mapping the strengths and weaknesses of a particular title and suggesting where to place it in the studio's current decision matrix. And, on a good day, maybe spotting non-obvious ways the property could be developed.
What surprises me is that he only reads about 50 more books a year than I do, and he does it full time.
"Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life" is a lie.
I occasionally watch a woodworking YouTube channel. The creator tells people if they start woodworking as a job they'll have to find a new hobby.
He’d be reading nearly 6/week, which is ~every day.
Sounds like one book per bank day, mon-fri, like many work schedules out there :) Would make sense considering the context too, doesn't sound like too much or too little.
This person could read for pleasure if they set the time for it. When I was coding all day, I didn't have the will to code for hobby at home, so maybe they had the time but not the drive.
Not for him though, he loves it.
An LLM may be able to synthesise results well each time, but there will be quite a difference between a synopsis written by an LLM and someone whose job it is to write synopses of books.
Huge difference in quality, and considering the clientele, they are willing to pay for that quality.
Being an LLM that "knows a bit of everything" doesn't necessarily give you access to know the audience expectations in this sort of environment. They are layers of fashion and social context which almost intrinsically embodied as a fringe of temporal currency and connection, not necessarily available in any training corpus.
An LLM could be stuck in some imposter/savant moat here, always making last year's references or possibly over or under selling the current expectation.