I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I apologize for straddling the line on Norm One. I saw that it was heavily downvoted without comment, and that struck me as unhelpful.
Regarding the post itself, it wasn’t a matter of being unable to understand. It seemed likely to me that there were insights there, and that if I spent enough time on it I could pull them out. It was more about the other demands on my time, which I suspect isn’t a unique circumstance.
Regarding probability of mistake, I think that’s an unhelpful way of looking at it. IMO it’s not so much mistake, as ‘interface incompatibility’. A particular presentation style will be varying levels of compatible with different readers, with different message acceptance and error rates at different receivers. The total transmission of information is across the distribution. Minor changes to the presentation style sometimes have outsized effects on total information transfer. Words are hard.
The general point is that if your goal is information transfer, it’s less about ‘mistake’ than getting the best integrated product across the distribution. If you have a different goal (“just getting the words out” is common for me), then optimizing for delivery may be irrelevant.
I totally understand where you’re coming from, and I apologize for straddling the line on Norm One. I saw that it was heavily downvoted without comment, and that struck me as unhelpful.
Regarding the post itself, it wasn’t a matter of being unable to understand. It seemed likely to me that there were insights there, and that if I spent enough time on it I could pull them out. It was more about the other demands on my time, which I suspect isn’t a unique circumstance.
Regarding probability of mistake, I think that’s an unhelpful way of looking at it. IMO it’s not so much mistake, as ‘interface incompatibility’. A particular presentation style will be varying levels of compatible with different readers, with different message acceptance and error rates at different receivers. The total transmission of information is across the distribution. Minor changes to the presentation style sometimes have outsized effects on total information transfer. Words are hard.
The general point is that if your goal is information transfer, it’s less about ‘mistake’ than getting the best integrated product across the distribution. If you have a different goal (“just getting the words out” is common for me), then optimizing for delivery may be irrelevant.