Unfortunately, long posts are also bad at crossing inferential distances. One reason is that if a post is long people will have forgotten the first half of the post by the time they reach the end. And the longer a post gets the more likely it is people will focus on a small detail instead of the bigger picture. Not to mention that it’s more difficult and time-consuming to write long posts, so quality will suffer.
Bite-sized posts that have only one thing people should take away from it are much less likely to be misunderstood. And they can still can still teach people something or change the reader’s mind, if only by a little bit. And if there is a missing dependency (e.g. how does a quantum circuit inspector work?) then that can be the subject of another bite-sized post.
You can of course persuade people by throwing lots of text at them. For instance long form sales copy converts insanely well, but there’s some dark-side epistemology going on there. Ultimately people have to stop, think, and process all the inferential steps between A and B. There’s no way around that, so you can’t bridge a big gap in a single long post.
As for the rest I think it’s mostly a matter of good writing. Use simple words instead of complex ones. Avoid adjectives and passive voice. Prefer short sentences. Make it clear what you’re arguing and why. And keep it terse and to the point.
Unfortunately, long posts are also bad at crossing inferential distances. One reason is that if a post is long people will have forgotten the first half of the post by the time they reach the end. And the longer a post gets the more likely it is people will focus on a small detail instead of the bigger picture. Not to mention that it’s more difficult and time-consuming to write long posts, so quality will suffer.
Bite-sized posts that have only one thing people should take away from it are much less likely to be misunderstood. And they can still can still teach people something or change the reader’s mind, if only by a little bit. And if there is a missing dependency (e.g. how does a quantum circuit inspector work?) then that can be the subject of another bite-sized post.
You can of course persuade people by throwing lots of text at them. For instance long form sales copy converts insanely well, but there’s some dark-side epistemology going on there. Ultimately people have to stop, think, and process all the inferential steps between A and B. There’s no way around that, so you can’t bridge a big gap in a single long post.
As for the rest I think it’s mostly a matter of good writing. Use simple words instead of complex ones. Avoid adjectives and passive voice. Prefer short sentences. Make it clear what you’re arguing and why. And keep it terse and to the point.
The synthesis obviously is writing sequences of terse posts. If you need to explain a quantum circuit inspector, do so in its own post.