Massive props for completing the project, as well as following it up with this postmortem.
There’s a weird problem (which I don’t think you were directly approaching, but which I think is relevant) which is that people will often say “we need to have a version of the Sequences that doesn’t have all the weird Eliezer-isms”. And I think the weird Eliezerisms are similar to the Godel Escher Bachisms, and that what they do is grab some random subsection of the population and strongly appeal to them enough to make them take the thing seriously.
I touched on this a few posts ago, but I think what this series was missing was some kind of weird lifelonglearner-isms that turn off some people but are captivating enough that some people go “woah, this is cool and worth delving into.”
Cool, that definitely makes sense! I think I ended up biasing towards “giving information cleanly” and this sort of framing made me think less about “how can I embed this series with the sort of things that are idiosynchratic to me?”
And this of course ties back into things about having a more distinctive writing style / how that leads people in.
Massive props for completing the project, as well as following it up with this postmortem.
There’s a weird problem (which I don’t think you were directly approaching, but which I think is relevant) which is that people will often say “we need to have a version of the Sequences that doesn’t have all the weird Eliezer-isms”. And I think the weird Eliezerisms are similar to the Godel Escher Bachisms, and that what they do is grab some random subsection of the population and strongly appeal to them enough to make them take the thing seriously.
I touched on this a few posts ago, but I think what this series was missing was some kind of weird lifelonglearner-isms that turn off some people but are captivating enough that some people go “woah, this is cool and worth delving into.”
Cool, that definitely makes sense! I think I ended up biasing towards “giving information cleanly” and this sort of framing made me think less about “how can I embed this series with the sort of things that are idiosynchratic to me?”
And this of course ties back into things about having a more distinctive writing style / how that leads people in.