Thanks for taking the time to write this comment philh.
So firstly I want to flag that this observation is consistent with the world you assert, where Shekinah’s writing and the associated commentary suggest things in a way that makes it hard to read them and maintain a grip on what is and isn’t asserted, what is and isn’t true, and similar things that it’s important to keep a grip on.
Yup this is a good paraphrase of what I meant.
In that world, declining to link those things is… well, I don’t love it; I prefer not to be protected from myself.
Yup. Well I try to write in a way that conveys a point as straightforwardly as possible, and I judged that linking to the medium post would hinder that goal. I may have been wrong about this but I wouldn’t say that I was trying to protect the reader from themselves (and I agree that trying to protect readers from themselves when writing on the internet is rarely helpful).
[Meta: I’m now going to try to compare this to some imperfectly analogous situations and I want to flag that using imperfect analogies in the context of accusations of sexual assault is kind of dangerous because the non-rhyming aspects of the analogies can appear kind of flippant or rude if taken to be rhyming aspects.]
Analogy: I wrote a while ago about optimization. The post had a lot of connections with dynamical systems. I didn’t link much or discuss much the connections with dynamical systems, beyond a general nod in the direction, because I judged that it didn’t help to illuminate the topic very much. By doing so I wouldn’t say that I was protecting the reader from themselves, but I was making a judgement about how to present the thing in a straightforward way. Now one might say that dynamical systems was the most important thing to link because the whole content of my own post was building on top of that foundation. But just as with my non-linking to Shekinah’s article, I mentioned the existence of the dynamical systems literature in my post, and anybody who wanted to look it up could easily find the relevant content via a google search. I had the sense that linking it explicitly would suggest that the reader ought to either understand the main concepts at the other end of the link or else not expect to understand my own post, neither of which was true w.r.t. dynamical systems in that post or w.r.t. Shekinah’s article in this post.
[Am intending to reply more to your further points. Thank you again for taking the time to go into this.]
I had the sense that linking it explicitly would suggest that the reader ought to either understand the main concepts at the other end of the link or else not expect to understand my own post, neither of which was true w.r.t. dynamical systems in that post or w.r.t. Shekinah’s article in this post.
Hm. This feels like a different reason than you gave before though?
That is, I think I understand the reason “I didn’t link them because … it’s very hard to read them and stay sane.” And I think I understand the reason (paraphrased) “I didn’t link them because they aren’t prerequisites and I didn’t want the reader to think they were”. But I don’t think they’re the same reason, and it appears to me that you’ve switched from one to the other.
Yeah right. I actually spent quite a while considering this exact point (whether to link it) when writing the post. I was basically convinced that if I did link it, many people would jump straight to that link after reading the first ~paragraph of my post, then would return to read my post holding the huge number of triggering issues raised in Shekinah’s post, and ultimately I’d fail to convey the basic thing I wanted to convey. Then I considered “yes but maybe it’s still necessary to link it if my post won’t make any sense without reading that other post” but I decided that it wasn’t really a necessary prerequisite, so ultimately I didn’t link it.
In the dynamical systems example, it’s not just that it’s not a necessary prerequisite, but that if you go to the wikipedia page for dynamical systems and just start learning from scratch about dynamical systems with the intention to do it quickly and then return to the previous post, then you’ll end up kind of frustrated at the hugeness of the topic because it’s not really something you can learn in a short time, and then you’ll return to the post about optimization in a state of mind that is already bubbling with oodles of concepts that will make the simple point of the optimization essay not easy to digest. That’s my sense of it, and this is the way that this example is similar to the not-linking to Shekinah’s post.
Thanks for taking the time to write this comment philh.
Yup this is a good paraphrase of what I meant.
Yup. Well I try to write in a way that conveys a point as straightforwardly as possible, and I judged that linking to the medium post would hinder that goal. I may have been wrong about this but I wouldn’t say that I was trying to protect the reader from themselves (and I agree that trying to protect readers from themselves when writing on the internet is rarely helpful).
[Meta: I’m now going to try to compare this to some imperfectly analogous situations and I want to flag that using imperfect analogies in the context of accusations of sexual assault is kind of dangerous because the non-rhyming aspects of the analogies can appear kind of flippant or rude if taken to be rhyming aspects.]
Analogy: I wrote a while ago about optimization. The post had a lot of connections with dynamical systems. I didn’t link much or discuss much the connections with dynamical systems, beyond a general nod in the direction, because I judged that it didn’t help to illuminate the topic very much. By doing so I wouldn’t say that I was protecting the reader from themselves, but I was making a judgement about how to present the thing in a straightforward way. Now one might say that dynamical systems was the most important thing to link because the whole content of my own post was building on top of that foundation. But just as with my non-linking to Shekinah’s article, I mentioned the existence of the dynamical systems literature in my post, and anybody who wanted to look it up could easily find the relevant content via a google search. I had the sense that linking it explicitly would suggest that the reader ought to either understand the main concepts at the other end of the link or else not expect to understand my own post, neither of which was true w.r.t. dynamical systems in that post or w.r.t. Shekinah’s article in this post.
[Am intending to reply more to your further points. Thank you again for taking the time to go into this.]
Hm. This feels like a different reason than you gave before though?
That is, I think I understand the reason “I didn’t link them because … it’s very hard to read them and stay sane.” And I think I understand the reason (paraphrased) “I didn’t link them because they aren’t prerequisites and I didn’t want the reader to think they were”. But I don’t think they’re the same reason, and it appears to me that you’ve switched from one to the other.
Yeah right. I actually spent quite a while considering this exact point (whether to link it) when writing the post. I was basically convinced that if I did link it, many people would jump straight to that link after reading the first ~paragraph of my post, then would return to read my post holding the huge number of triggering issues raised in Shekinah’s post, and ultimately I’d fail to convey the basic thing I wanted to convey. Then I considered “yes but maybe it’s still necessary to link it if my post won’t make any sense without reading that other post” but I decided that it wasn’t really a necessary prerequisite, so ultimately I didn’t link it.
In the dynamical systems example, it’s not just that it’s not a necessary prerequisite, but that if you go to the wikipedia page for dynamical systems and just start learning from scratch about dynamical systems with the intention to do it quickly and then return to the previous post, then you’ll end up kind of frustrated at the hugeness of the topic because it’s not really something you can learn in a short time, and then you’ll return to the post about optimization in a state of mind that is already bubbling with oodles of concepts that will make the simple point of the optimization essay not easy to digest. That’s my sense of it, and this is the way that this example is similar to the not-linking to Shekinah’s post.