I have the sense that if you did shorten (some) books to a blog post, the result would contain all the important points, and most readers would miss or misunderstand them. All the less-relevant-to-the-core-idea bits in a book are often there to fill space, but ideally are there because different people will be receptive to (and will intuitively grasp) different examples, arguments, styles, and contexts. So really what you’d want are potentially dozens of blog posts that all say the same thing in different ways, but somehow target it so each person sees the one best suited to them. I don’t think this is a thing you can do, at least not with any available tools I’m aware of.
Yeah. Padded books are definitely a problem, but people benefit from having implications made explicit and enough examples to be able to cleanly picture things.
6 paragraph blog posts can, at best, help crystalize something you already knew. Conveying something novel with genuine inferential distance just takes a while.
So really what you’d want are potentially dozens of blog posts that all say the same thing in different ways, but somehow target it so each person sees the one best suited to them.
Here’s something I’ve been wishing would exist, for a sequence on health I hope to write at some point. (Maybe a tool or service for writing like this does exist, but I’m certainly not aware of it.)
There’s one big blog post, on, say, anatomy. At the top of the page, the reader is asked how they want to read it, and which parts of it they want to see. Then there are a bunch of filters which they can set to different levels, which then display the post in different ways.
Examples of filters:
content: “I’m afraid of spiders.”; “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”; “I don’t want to see NSFW content.”
expertise: “I’m familiar with this topic, so don’t show me the introductions meant for laypeople.”
learning style: “I want to memorize this topic, so show me spaced-repetition questions throughout the text.”
detail: “I don’t care about any corner cases, so hide all nitpicks and footnotes.”
use case: “I don’t care about idle theory, just show me actionable claims.”
epistemics: “I don’t care about your improbable speculations, just show me the universally-accepted facts.”
personality / accessibility: “I lack somatic awareness, so give me alternative ways to notice sensations of X.”; “I’m depressed / anxious, so please accomodate that.”
Then as an author, one would write this kind of post by tagging sentences and paragraphs with specific tags, which these various filters would filter on.
Or if it turned out that the method above was too annoying to actually write, a simpler version would be just to have a detail filter (“Do you want to read the short / medium / long version?”). Then as an author, one would just tag paragraphs by which level of detail they belong to (no tag / 1: main text; 2: some detail; 3: very detailed).
I have the sense that if you did shorten (some) books to a blog post, the result would contain all the important points, and most readers would miss or misunderstand them. All the less-relevant-to-the-core-idea bits in a book are often there to fill space, but ideally are there because different people will be receptive to (and will intuitively grasp) different examples, arguments, styles, and contexts. So really what you’d want are potentially dozens of blog posts that all say the same thing in different ways, but somehow target it so each person sees the one best suited to them. I don’t think this is a thing you can do, at least not with any available tools I’m aware of.
Yeah. Padded books are definitely a problem, but people benefit from having implications made explicit and enough examples to be able to cleanly picture things.
6 paragraph blog posts can, at best, help crystalize something you already knew. Conveying something novel with genuine inferential distance just takes a while.
Here’s something I’ve been wishing would exist, for a sequence on health I hope to write at some point. (Maybe a tool or service for writing like this does exist, but I’m certainly not aware of it.)
There’s one big blog post, on, say, anatomy. At the top of the page, the reader is asked how they want to read it, and which parts of it they want to see. Then there are a bunch of filters which they can set to different levels, which then display the post in different ways.
Examples of filters:
content: “I’m afraid of spiders.”; “I can’t stand the sight of blood.”; “I don’t want to see NSFW content.”
expertise: “I’m familiar with this topic, so don’t show me the introductions meant for laypeople.”
learning style: “I want to memorize this topic, so show me spaced-repetition questions throughout the text.”
detail: “I don’t care about any corner cases, so hide all nitpicks and footnotes.”
use case: “I don’t care about idle theory, just show me actionable claims.”
epistemics: “I don’t care about your improbable speculations, just show me the universally-accepted facts.”
personality / accessibility: “I lack somatic awareness, so give me alternative ways to notice sensations of X.”; “I’m depressed / anxious, so please accomodate that.”
Then as an author, one would write this kind of post by tagging sentences and paragraphs with specific tags, which these various filters would filter on.
Or if it turned out that the method above was too annoying to actually write, a simpler version would be just to have a detail filter (“Do you want to read the short / medium / long version?”). Then as an author, one would just tag paragraphs by which level of detail they belong to (no tag / 1: main text; 2: some detail; 3: very detailed).
This seems like the kind of thing Arbital attempted to implement, based on my experience reading the Bayes theorem stuff.