I guess there’s a tradeoff between writing too early, wasting your and other people’s time, and writing too late and wasting opportunities to clear other people’s confusion earlier and have them work in the same direction.
And on the same note: was my comment about state networks understandable? What do you think about that? I’d appreciate if people who have sufficient background to in principle understand a given comment but who are unable to do so due to insufficiently clear or incomplete explanation spoke up about that fact.
Another point that may help: if you’re presenting a complex idea, you need to provide some motivation for the reader to try to understand it. In your mind, that idea is linked to many others and form a somewhat coherent whole. But if you just describe the idea in isolation as math, either in equations or in words, the reader has no idea why they should try to understand it, except that you think it might be important for them to understand it. Perhaps because you’re so good at thinking in math, you seriously underestimate the amount of effort involved when others try it.
I think that’s the main reason to write in longer form. If you try to describe ideas individually, you have to either waste a lot of time motivating each one separately and explain how it fits in with other ideas, or risk having nobody trying seriously to understand you. If you describe the system as a whole, you can skip a lot of that and achieve an economy of scale.
Yeah, and math is very helpful as an explanation tool, because people can reconstruct the abstract concepts written in formulas correctly on the first try, even if math seems unnecessary for a particular point. Illusion of transparency of informal explanation, which is even worse where you know that formal explanation can’t fail.
I guess there’s a tradeoff between writing too early, wasting your and other people’s time, and writing too late and wasting opportunities to clear other people’s confusion earlier and have them work in the same direction.
And on the same note: was my comment about state networks understandable? What do you think about that? I’d appreciate if people who have sufficient background to in principle understand a given comment but who are unable to do so due to insufficiently clear or incomplete explanation spoke up about that fact.
Another point that may help: if you’re presenting a complex idea, you need to provide some motivation for the reader to try to understand it. In your mind, that idea is linked to many others and form a somewhat coherent whole. But if you just describe the idea in isolation as math, either in equations or in words, the reader has no idea why they should try to understand it, except that you think it might be important for them to understand it. Perhaps because you’re so good at thinking in math, you seriously underestimate the amount of effort involved when others try it.
I think that’s the main reason to write in longer form. If you try to describe ideas individually, you have to either waste a lot of time motivating each one separately and explain how it fits in with other ideas, or risk having nobody trying seriously to understand you. If you describe the system as a whole, you can skip a lot of that and achieve an economy of scale.
Yeah, and math is very helpful as an explanation tool, because people can reconstruct the abstract concepts written in formulas correctly on the first try, even if math seems unnecessary for a particular point. Illusion of transparency of informal explanation, which is even worse where you know that formal explanation can’t fail.
I didn’t understand it on my first try. I’ll have another go at it later and let you know.