I feel like Eliezer’s dialogues are good, but in trying to thoroughly hammer in some point they eventually start feeling like they’re repeating themselves and not getting anywhere. I suspect that some heuristic like “after finishing the dialogue, shorten it by a third” might be a net improvement (at least for people like me; it could be that others actually need the repetition, though even they are less likely to finish a piece that’s too long).
I’m a pretty big fan of the “Have someone say back what they understood you to mean, and clarify further” as a way to draw the concept boundary clearly. Learning commonly takes the form of someone giving an explanation, the learner using that concept to solve a problem, then the teacher explaining what mistake they’ve made, and iterating on this. It’s hard to create that experience in non-fiction (typically readers do not do the “pause for a minute and figure out how you would solve this”), and I currently think this sort of dialogue might be the best way in written form to cause readers to have the experience of “Yes, this makes sense and is what I believe” and then explaining why it’s false—because they’re reading the second character and agreeing with them.
From my experience, reading things like this was incredibly useful:
amber: Because as the truly great paranoid knows, what seems like a ridiculously improbable way for the adversary to attack sometimes turns out to not be so ridiculous after all.
coral: Again, that’s a not-exactly-right way of putting it.
I feel that Eliezer’s dialogue are optimized for “one-pass reading”, when someone reads an article once and moves along to other contents. To convey certain ideas, or better yet, certain modes of thinking, they necessarily need to be very long, very repetitive, grasping the same concept from different directions.
On the other hand, I prefer much more direct and concise articles that one can re-read at will, grasping a smidge of concept at every pass. This is though a very unpopular format to be consumed on social media, so I guess that, as long as the format is intentional, this is the reason.
I feel like Eliezer’s dialogues are good, but in trying to thoroughly hammer in some point they eventually start feeling like they’re repeating themselves and not getting anywhere. I suspect that some heuristic like “after finishing the dialogue, shorten it by a third” might be a net improvement (at least for people like me; it could be that others actually need the repetition, though even they are less likely to finish a piece that’s too long).
I’m a pretty big fan of the “Have someone say back what they understood you to mean, and clarify further” as a way to draw the concept boundary clearly. Learning commonly takes the form of someone giving an explanation, the learner using that concept to solve a problem, then the teacher explaining what mistake they’ve made, and iterating on this. It’s hard to create that experience in non-fiction (typically readers do not do the “pause for a minute and figure out how you would solve this”), and I currently think this sort of dialogue might be the best way in written form to cause readers to have the experience of “Yes, this makes sense and is what I believe” and then explaining why it’s false—because they’re reading the second character and agreeing with them.
From my experience, reading things like this was incredibly useful:
I feel that Eliezer’s dialogue are optimized for “one-pass reading”, when someone reads an article once and moves along to other contents. To convey certain ideas, or better yet, certain modes of thinking, they necessarily need to be very long, very repetitive, grasping the same concept from different directions.
On the other hand, I prefer much more direct and concise articles that one can re-read at will, grasping a smidge of concept at every pass. This is though a very unpopular format to be consumed on social media, so I guess that, as long as the format is intentional, this is the reason.
Familiar. I guess you have studied math.