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Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

Where is the paradox?

In this town there are two kind of people. Those who write their biographies themselves and those who use the help of the town Ghostwriter. Who writes the Ghostwriter biography?

Thanks for phrasing it this way!

The Ghostwriter, but he is of no help.

10,000 monkeys with typewriters!

Now we have 70B LLM models.

Russell himself said that construction isn't a version of his paradox, and it depends on there being only one ghostwriter in addition to depending on claims nobody made.

So I don't know what the author actually intended. The train of thought in the article never gets particularly close to anything that resembles a paradox.

Those two categories are vague and non-exhaustive (and non-exclusive). Also, if the Ghostwriter writes his biography himself (entirely), in most senses of the word, that doesn't mean he "helped" himself to do it. So, no paradox at all there, and certainly not a Russellian one.

This piece does seem incomplete, starting off with a big grammar issue

> [...], so much so that when it turned out that one of the books had “at least 95 separate passages” of plagiarism, including “long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of giraffes.”

"so much so that when ..." what?!

meta commentary?

> "so much so that when ..."

This is a common enough turn of phrase, at least in my corner of the world. What's your problem with it?

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/sentences/english/so-much-...

The conclusion is missing. Normally the formula is:

"So much so that when {occurrence} {outcome}"

This has the occurrence (the inclusion of the topic) but not the consequent outcome - seems like some anecdote about that author not recollecting the clearly memorable topic got mangled.

There's a missing word later in the piece as well.

Yes exactly, thank you!

> There's a missing word later in the piece as well

You mean where the author, Andrew Gelman, "What I wanted to share today is a fascinating story from a magazine article about the affair, where the author, Joel Stein, 'Nearly all experts and celebrities use ghostwriters,' and then links to an amusing magazine article from 2009," and just completely skips over the verb?

I think that part was done by the ghostwriter.

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