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Philip Goetz's avatar

Style matters in fiction, but only to editors and writers. I've been studying fan-fiction this past year, and I can say confidently that most readers do not give a damn about style, or even grammar. Content rules with readers. There are plenty of fan-fictions written with excellent style, and they are not especially popular. But you don't need to study fan-fiction to realize that; just check the bestseller lists.

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dmytryl's avatar

I seem to be missing some misconception here. Do you think it is logically impossible that people would predict the outcome of a blind musical competition better based on the video only than the audio only, or what?

> "They guessed worse when they had both audio and video. "

Before you unleash the hindsight based pseudo-scientific method on this data, think a little about this passage. It does imply that individuals are in fact judging primarily based on the audio when video is available.

People have idiosyncratic preferences for specific styles of playing, that's the thing, the jury averages this out, but one person is stuck picking the player that matches their preference the best. Unless they don't even hear the player, I guess.

edit: indeed, let's consider world championship level chess competitions. I would assume that in theory* people would predict outcome of those better based on a video from first 10 moves, showing just the player's faces, than based on the first 10 moves, showing just the pieces (the moves would reasonably be 100% perfect as far as anyone tested could tell); that wouldn't necessarily imply that chess is some sort of game where people look at each other's faces and the uglier looking resigns.*in practice I doubt it'd be possible to get sample size large enough.

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