Note that Pareto optimality is again relevant to choosing examples/explanations: different examples will make sense to different people. Just offering very different examples from what others have written before is a good way to reach the Pareto frontier.
I think that this is an important point. Personally, I didn’t realize it until I read Non-Expert Explanation.
The way I think about it, the clarity of an explanation is a 2-place word. It doesn’t make sense to say that an explanation is clear. You have to say that it is clear to Alice. Or clear to Bob. What is clear to one person might not be clear to another person.
In the language of pareto frontiers, I suppose you could say that one axis is “clearness to Alice” and another “clearness to Bob”, etc. And even if you do poorly on the other axes of “clearness to Carol”, “clearness to Dave”, etc., it could still be a pareto frontier if you can’t do better along eg. “clearness to Carol” without trading off how well you’re doing on eg. “clearness to Alice”. There’s no opportunity to do better along one axis without doing worse along another. You wrote the best article out there that targets Alice and Bob.
All of this is of course related to what was said in the <Topic> For <Audience> section as well.
It may also be worth noting that being on the pareto frontier doesn’t necessarily make it a good post. Eg if you write a post that is incredibly good at explaining calculus to John Doe, but terrible at explaining it to everyone else in the world, and John Doe has no interest in calculus, that post would be at the pareto frontier, but would also be silly to write.
Also, if John Doe is interested in calculus, but never finds your post, then it will also be a silly post to write. In general, the ability of writing to produce value is bottlenecked by our ability to get the right piece of writing to the right person at the right time.
It’s also relevant to worry about externalities and information asymmetries.
Persistent frustrations with social media originate from posts that are at the Pareto frontier, having traded a lot of nuance and accuracy off in exchange for fun and signaling. Such posts do this because the writer gets more clicks and shares by writing posts like this. This is “good” for the individual readers and sharers in the moment, if we believe their behavior reflects their preferences, but it may be bad for society as a whole if we’d prefer our friends to focus more on accuracy and nuance.
Readers may use signals of credibility when they pursue nuance and accuracy in order to judge the accuracy of a text. They optimize, therefore, for credibility, because they can’t directly optimize for accuracy. Perhaps they also want accessibility. If you then write a post optimized for credibility and accessibility, but the post isn’t accurate, then you can be at the Pareto frontier while also doing the reader a disservice.
That being said, the basic concept here seems right to me. Being at the Pareto frontier is correlated with creating value for the reader, and a search for such correlates of value is helpful.
I think that this is an important point. Personally, I didn’t realize it until I read Non-Expert Explanation.
The way I think about it, the clarity of an explanation is a 2-place word. It doesn’t make sense to say that an explanation is clear. You have to say that it is clear to Alice. Or clear to Bob. What is clear to one person might not be clear to another person.
In the language of pareto frontiers, I suppose you could say that one axis is “clearness to Alice” and another “clearness to Bob”, etc. And even if you do poorly on the other axes of “clearness to Carol”, “clearness to Dave”, etc., it could still be a pareto frontier if you can’t do better along eg. “clearness to Carol” without trading off how well you’re doing on eg. “clearness to Alice”. There’s no opportunity to do better along one axis without doing worse along another. You wrote the best article out there that targets Alice and Bob.
All of this is of course related to what was said in the <Topic> For <Audience> section as well.
It may also be worth noting that being on the pareto frontier doesn’t necessarily make it a good post. Eg if you write a post that is incredibly good at explaining calculus to John Doe, but terrible at explaining it to everyone else in the world, and John Doe has no interest in calculus, that post would be at the pareto frontier, but would also be silly to write.
Also, if John Doe is interested in calculus, but never finds your post, then it will also be a silly post to write. In general, the ability of writing to produce value is bottlenecked by our ability to get the right piece of writing to the right person at the right time.
It’s also relevant to worry about externalities and information asymmetries.
Persistent frustrations with social media originate from posts that are at the Pareto frontier, having traded a lot of nuance and accuracy off in exchange for fun and signaling. Such posts do this because the writer gets more clicks and shares by writing posts like this. This is “good” for the individual readers and sharers in the moment, if we believe their behavior reflects their preferences, but it may be bad for society as a whole if we’d prefer our friends to focus more on accuracy and nuance.
Readers may use signals of credibility when they pursue nuance and accuracy in order to judge the accuracy of a text. They optimize, therefore, for credibility, because they can’t directly optimize for accuracy. Perhaps they also want accessibility. If you then write a post optimized for credibility and accessibility, but the post isn’t accurate, then you can be at the Pareto frontier while also doing the reader a disservice.
That being said, the basic concept here seems right to me. Being at the Pareto frontier is correlated with creating value for the reader, and a search for such correlates of value is helpful.