I wanted to calibrate myself for how ridiculous it is to ask someone to read the sequences. For example, the King James Bible is 788,280 words. So asking someone to read the sequences is quantitively similar to asking them to read 1.16 bibles.
Even Christians won’t read the Bible cover to cover. And they believe the Bible is the word of God, contains all the most important wisdom in existence, and even a magical formula for making them live in paradise...forever! Infinite expected utility: Not enough to make someone read a bible.
We’re lucky our target audience is more literate and that our text is way more interesting (and not as morally bankrupt) to read… but still. The number of people willing to read a giant philosophical text the size of the bible based on something like a friend’s recommendation is… not so big.
I’d add that the bible ranges from dull to unparseable at points, and is generally a much harder read than the sequences if you want to actually understand what you’re reading, but your point is a good one. We do need to boil the sequences down to something more accessible.
On of the things I’m thinking of doing with the parser is to make a sequences reader: It will start by giving you access to all the articles that have no internal dependencies, and as you read more articles, it will open up further new articles that are now accessible. It won’t make the sequences any shorter to read, but the idea is that this should help manage the ‘tab explosion’ effect that people have been reporting.
I read a Gideon Bible cover-to-cover once when I was stuck in a hotel room for two weeks without my laptop, but I’m neither Christian nor typical. And I’ll admit I skimmed a few chapters starting somewhere around II Corinthians.
“Read the Bible” isn’t bad advice for anyone that intends to spend a lot of time talking about religion in English, really. It won’t give you any moral insight worth speaking of, and on its own it won’t give you a deep understanding of Christian doctrine as it’s taught in practice, but detailed knowledge of what the Bible actually says and does not say is remarkably useful both in understanding the religion’s evolution and in self-defense against the kind of person that likes to throw chapter and verse at you.
On the other hand, that does presuppose a certain fairly well-established level of expected usefulness. From a lay perspective, the Sequences don’t have that.
I wanted to calibrate myself for how ridiculous it is to ask someone to read the sequences. For example, the King James Bible is 788,280 words. So asking someone to read the sequences is quantitively similar to asking them to read 1.16 bibles.
Even Christians won’t read the Bible cover to cover. And they believe the Bible is the word of God, contains all the most important wisdom in existence, and even a magical formula for making them live in paradise...forever! Infinite expected utility: Not enough to make someone read a bible.
We’re lucky our target audience is more literate and that our text is way more interesting (and not as morally bankrupt) to read… but still. The number of people willing to read a giant philosophical text the size of the bible based on something like a friend’s recommendation is… not so big.
I’d add that the bible ranges from dull to unparseable at points, and is generally a much harder read than the sequences if you want to actually understand what you’re reading, but your point is a good one. We do need to boil the sequences down to something more accessible.
On of the things I’m thinking of doing with the parser is to make a sequences reader: It will start by giving you access to all the articles that have no internal dependencies, and as you read more articles, it will open up further new articles that are now accessible. It won’t make the sequences any shorter to read, but the idea is that this should help manage the ‘tab explosion’ effect that people have been reporting.
This is a great idea.
Perhaps we should be saying “skim the sequences”.
I read a Gideon Bible cover-to-cover once when I was stuck in a hotel room for two weeks without my laptop, but I’m neither Christian nor typical. And I’ll admit I skimmed a few chapters starting somewhere around II Corinthians.
“Read the Bible” isn’t bad advice for anyone that intends to spend a lot of time talking about religion in English, really. It won’t give you any moral insight worth speaking of, and on its own it won’t give you a deep understanding of Christian doctrine as it’s taught in practice, but detailed knowledge of what the Bible actually says and does not say is remarkably useful both in understanding the religion’s evolution and in self-defense against the kind of person that likes to throw chapter and verse at you.
On the other hand, that does presuppose a certain fairly well-established level of expected usefulness. From a lay perspective, the Sequences don’t have that.