I didn’t really have the time to write up more explanation, so it was a choice between posting it as is or not posting it at all, and I went with posting it as is.
Makes sense. I think I could not tell how much I should be trying to understand this until I understood it. I probably would have chosen not to read it if I had known how long it would take and how important I thought it was (ex-post, not ex-ante). For posts where that’s likely to be true, I would push for not posting at all.
Another way you could see this: given my current state of knowledge about this post, I think I could spend ~15 minutes making it significantly easier to understand. The resulting post would have been one that I could have read more than 15 minutes faster, probably, for the same level of understanding.
I think it’s not worth making a post if you don’t get at least one person reading it in as much depth as I did; so you should at the very least be willing to trade off some of your time for an equal amount of time of that reader, and the benefit scales massively the more readers you have. The fact that this was not something you wanted to do feels like a fairly strong signal that it’s not worth posting since it will waste other people’s time.
(Of course, it might have taken you longer than 15 minutes to make the post easier to understand, or readers might usually not take a whole 15+ minutes more to understand a post without exposition, but I think the underlying point remains.)
Makes sense. I think I could not tell how much I should be trying to understand this until I understood it. I probably would have chosen not to read it if I had known how long it would take and how important I thought it was (ex-post, not ex-ante). For posts where that’s likely to be true, I would push for not posting at all.
Another way you could see this: given my current state of knowledge about this post, I think I could spend ~15 minutes making it significantly easier to understand. The resulting post would have been one that I could have read more than 15 minutes faster, probably, for the same level of understanding.
I think it’s not worth making a post if you don’t get at least one person reading it in as much depth as I did; so you should at the very least be willing to trade off some of your time for an equal amount of time of that reader, and the benefit scales massively the more readers you have. The fact that this was not something you wanted to do feels like a fairly strong signal that it’s not worth posting since it will waste other people’s time.
(Of course, it might have taken you longer than 15 minutes to make the post easier to understand, or readers might usually not take a whole 15+ minutes more to understand a post without exposition, but I think the underlying point remains.)