Writer feedback partially unrelated to these changes: I find myself getting increasingly sold on the roam-style tree-structured writing format. Basically, if you’ve ever written code, you know why we need indentation sometimes. Sometimes a large number of things pertain to one previous thing, or they’re grouped together in some way, and then there is often further nesting inside of that, and more nesting inside that, but it’s important that the reader can easily see how it’s all structured from an overview. And that’s just how concepts generally are. I’m going to argue that we need tree-structuring in prose just as much as we need it in code or in proofs.
Though I’m not sure. Disclaimer: This all only started when people started getting into Roam, so it’s hard to say whether this is going to work out yet.
So this argument might not be convincing. Regardless, I think this is something we should talk about.
So, in conventional prose, you’d use naming and the occasional repetition to linearize a tree structure into a flat series of paragraphs, but if you’ve made anything halfway complex you start to realize it’s sort of unnatural to do it that way, it makes everything more verbose, it means you have to cut anything you don’t know how to flow in there elegantly, and it makes the overarching structure of the concept less visible.
Tree-structuring also seems like a somewhat more reasonable UX for footnotes, for the web. A nested section could be expanded in-line, instead of taking you to this place where all the footnotes are gathered together which is… not a coherent way to group that information (footnotes usually have nothing to do with other footnotes). Expanding a collapsed section is effectively the same as clicking a footnote, but with more reasonable spacial grouping.
We nest whenever part of the text should be optional.
A traditional writer might say, “that should be exceedingly rare: Everything in the text should be important, none of it should be optional”. I think that is kinda paternalist hubris, in a way. You don’t know what the reader knows or doesn’t know, you don’t know quite what they need to hear or what they should be allowed to easily skip. If your text has very little structure, if it’s been collapsed down to a linear presentation, they’re not going to be able to skip any of it, they just have to read it all. Unless you’re limiting yourself to saying only the most contrarian or esoteric or entertaining stuff (and those sorts of writers sure do disproportionately flourish, in our scenes), but that’s not always what people need.
It’s beneficial if we can allow some form of interactivity and let the reader decide whether a piece of text is for them. Right now people are too passive. When you tell them something they already know they just not along finding satisfaction in agreement. They should be bored. They should follow their boredom. They should be looking for something better to do. They should be asking for clear indications as to whether they can skip this paragraph, but traditional writing formats couldn’t fit those in, so they don’t know to ask for it.
But linearized series’ of paragraphs really are what people are used to, right now. I suspect that most people would effectively not be able to read tree-structured texts. For instance, you need to have the habit of, on reaching the end of a branch, looking back up the stack to remember its nearest parent context, before proceeding to the next one, or else it just wont make sense. You should develop that habit. It’s a good habit to have when you’re trying to traverse a complex conceptual structure. Most people don’t have it. Even people who have it from programming or reading proofs or reading legal documents, it might not occur to them to apply it to reading prose.
An example of a document written this way would be the Venture Granters design. My impression is that very few people really read it. Though I’m not sure how whether that was due to the tree structuring or just because I wasn’t at the point where I could justify the complexity succinctly, relative to regular retroactive public goods funding, at the time of writing.
Agreed, new ways of ordering thoughts online is an awesome opportunity on LessWrong!
Foot notes: I’d say we already have quite a strong Roam-style organization in the hover pop-ups of LessWrong post links but as you say, it would be very nice to have a version of that for foot-notes, given their disparate nature.
Collapsible boxes: Having “fact boxes” as expandable interactive elements seems like a very good idea as well and relatively cheap to implement. I recommend looking at e.g. Hugo XML syntax for these things (XML is a pain, you can probably figure a better writing UX out).
Interactive documents: I’m more for the Obsidian thought representation but the hierarchy in Roam is quite relevant for communicating thoughts to others. I think a strong representation of this is quite relevant and might be an in-line, minimalist, recursive “collapsible box” as described above.
Ah, yeah link previews are good. I guess the problem with LW’s ones that they’re difficult to find out about on mobile, the user has to figure out to click and hold, then close the browser popup. I prefer gwern’s way, where clicking a link on mobile will only open the preview, and you have to click again to traverse the link. Others have complained about that, though.
Writer feedback partially unrelated to these changes: I find myself getting increasingly sold on the roam-style tree-structured writing format. Basically, if you’ve ever written code, you know why we need indentation sometimes. Sometimes a large number of things pertain to one previous thing, or they’re grouped together in some way, and then there is often further nesting inside of that, and more nesting inside that, but it’s important that the reader can easily see how it’s all structured from an overview.
And that’s just how concepts generally are. I’m going to argue that we need tree-structuring in prose just as much as we need it in code or in proofs.
Though I’m not sure. Disclaimer: This all only started when people started getting into Roam, so it’s hard to say whether this is going to work out yet.
So this argument might not be convincing. Regardless, I think this is something we should talk about.
So, in conventional prose, you’d use naming and the occasional repetition to linearize a tree structure into a flat series of paragraphs, but if you’ve made anything halfway complex you start to realize it’s sort of unnatural to do it that way, it makes everything more verbose, it means you have to cut anything you don’t know how to flow in there elegantly, and it makes the overarching structure of the concept less visible.
Tree-structuring also seems like a somewhat more reasonable UX for footnotes, for the web. A nested section could be expanded in-line, instead of taking you to this place where all the footnotes are gathered together which is… not a coherent way to group that information (footnotes usually have nothing to do with other footnotes). Expanding a collapsed section is effectively the same as clicking a footnote, but with more reasonable spacial grouping.
We nest whenever part of the text should be optional.
A traditional writer might say, “that should be exceedingly rare: Everything in the text should be important, none of it should be optional”. I think that is kinda paternalist hubris, in a way. You don’t know what the reader knows or doesn’t know, you don’t know quite what they need to hear or what they should be allowed to easily skip. If your text has very little structure, if it’s been collapsed down to a linear presentation, they’re not going to be able to skip any of it, they just have to read it all. Unless you’re limiting yourself to saying only the most contrarian or esoteric or entertaining stuff (and those sorts of writers sure do disproportionately flourish, in our scenes), but that’s not always what people need.
It’s beneficial if we can allow some form of interactivity and let the reader decide whether a piece of text is for them. Right now people are too passive. When you tell them something they already know they just not along finding satisfaction in agreement. They should be bored. They should follow their boredom. They should be looking for something better to do. They should be asking for clear indications as to whether they can skip this paragraph, but traditional writing formats couldn’t fit those in, so they don’t know to ask for it.
But linearized series’ of paragraphs really are what people are used to, right now. I suspect that most people would effectively not be able to read tree-structured texts. For instance, you need to have the habit of, on reaching the end of a branch, looking back up the stack to remember its nearest parent context, before proceeding to the next one, or else it just wont make sense. You should develop that habit. It’s a good habit to have when you’re trying to traverse a complex conceptual structure. Most people don’t have it. Even people who have it from programming or reading proofs or reading legal documents, it might not occur to them to apply it to reading prose.
An example of a document written this way would be the Venture Granters design. My impression is that very few people really read it. Though I’m not sure how whether that was due to the tree structuring or just because I wasn’t at the point where I could justify the complexity succinctly, relative to regular retroactive public goods funding, at the time of writing.
Agreed, new ways of ordering thoughts online is an awesome opportunity on LessWrong!
Foot notes: I’d say we already have quite a strong Roam-style organization in the hover pop-ups of LessWrong post links but as you say, it would be very nice to have a version of that for foot-notes, given their disparate nature.
Collapsible boxes: Having “fact boxes” as expandable interactive elements seems like a very good idea as well and relatively cheap to implement. I recommend looking at e.g. Hugo XML syntax for these things (XML is a pain, you can probably figure a better writing UX out).
Interactive documents: I’m more for the Obsidian thought representation but the hierarchy in Roam is quite relevant for communicating thoughts to others. I think a strong representation of this is quite relevant and might be an in-line, minimalist, recursive “collapsible box” as described above.
Ah, yeah link previews are good. I guess the problem with LW’s ones that they’re difficult to find out about on mobile, the user has to figure out to click and hold, then close the browser popup. I prefer gwern’s way, where clicking a link on mobile will only open the preview, and you have to click again to traverse the link. Others have complained about that, though.
I mostly use it from the computer so that missed me but it seems like a very good idea as well!