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.
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.