For example, if you were writing a scientific paper and going for extreme terseness you would give the data then stop. There’d be no abstract, no explanation of previous work and surrounding context, and no guiding towards conclusions. It would be an incredibly inefficient way to convey knowledge.
Another example is computer programs. Programmers try to avoid repeating themselves, but not to the point where they attempt to hit the Kolmogorov complexity (code so unreadable it’s unprovably correct!) or omit all tests (which are by definition redundant).
A more personal example is a post I made recently: Building your own Quantum Fourier Transform. I did not explain how to use the little quantum circuit inspector in enough detail, and so all the feedback was “I don’t get it”. I try to always keep in mind that saying things like “a superposition assigns a weighting to all the classical states” just doesn’t translate, you have to break it down every time, but I didn’t pay attention to that nagging doubt.
Unfortunately, long posts are also bad at crossing inferential distances. One reason is that if a post is long people will have forgotten the first half of the post by the time they reach the end. And the longer a post gets the more likely it is people will focus on a small detail instead of the bigger picture. Not to mention that it’s more difficult and time-consuming to write long posts, so quality will suffer.
Bite-sized posts that have only one thing people should take away from it are much less likely to be misunderstood. And they can still can still teach people something or change the reader’s mind, if only by a little bit. And if there is a missing dependency (e.g. how does a quantum circuit inspector work?) then that can be the subject of another bite-sized post.
You can of course persuade people by throwing lots of text at them. For instance long form sales copy converts insanely well, but there’s some dark-side epistemology going on there. Ultimately people have to stop, think, and process all the inferential steps between A and B. There’s no way around that, so you can’t bridge a big gap in a single long post.
As for the rest I think it’s mostly a matter of good writing. Use simple words instead of complex ones. Avoid adjectives and passive voice. Prefer short sentences. Make it clear what you’re arguing and why. And keep it terse and to the point.
Clearly there’s a balance to be struck here: You want your posts to include everything that’s necessary for your audience to understand it, but no more. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, as they say. And clearly, the more technical a post is, the greater the risk that it won’t be understood.
However, when it comes to your example of scientific papers, I definitely do feel that some academicians should be more concise! For economics papers, often about 80% of the paper is simply repetition of what other people wrote, sometimes solely to show that the author did their research. Maybe 5% is original input, and the rest is repetition (again, less so for technical papers). Philosophers tend to be even worse!
Scholarship is a virtue, and placing what you did in the wider context is a very important part of pushing science forward (civilization could advance faster if people were more aware of other stuff out there—how many times have people reinvented graphical models?)
Signal to noise depends on the quality of the author—there are plenty of dense papers in academia, in all disciplines.
Short posts are bad at crossing inferential distances. They limit your readers to those who already know, or almost know, what you’re talking about. (Also see: Explainers Shoot High. Aim Low!)
For example, if you were writing a scientific paper and going for extreme terseness you would give the data then stop. There’d be no abstract, no explanation of previous work and surrounding context, and no guiding towards conclusions. It would be an incredibly inefficient way to convey knowledge.
Another example is computer programs. Programmers try to avoid repeating themselves, but not to the point where they attempt to hit the Kolmogorov complexity (code so unreadable it’s unprovably correct!) or omit all tests (which are by definition redundant).
A more personal example is a post I made recently: Building your own Quantum Fourier Transform. I did not explain how to use the little quantum circuit inspector in enough detail, and so all the feedback was “I don’t get it”. I try to always keep in mind that saying things like “a superposition assigns a weighting to all the classical states” just doesn’t translate, you have to break it down every time, but I didn’t pay attention to that nagging doubt.
Unfortunately, long posts are also bad at crossing inferential distances. One reason is that if a post is long people will have forgotten the first half of the post by the time they reach the end. And the longer a post gets the more likely it is people will focus on a small detail instead of the bigger picture. Not to mention that it’s more difficult and time-consuming to write long posts, so quality will suffer.
Bite-sized posts that have only one thing people should take away from it are much less likely to be misunderstood. And they can still can still teach people something or change the reader’s mind, if only by a little bit. And if there is a missing dependency (e.g. how does a quantum circuit inspector work?) then that can be the subject of another bite-sized post.
You can of course persuade people by throwing lots of text at them. For instance long form sales copy converts insanely well, but there’s some dark-side epistemology going on there. Ultimately people have to stop, think, and process all the inferential steps between A and B. There’s no way around that, so you can’t bridge a big gap in a single long post.
As for the rest I think it’s mostly a matter of good writing. Use simple words instead of complex ones. Avoid adjectives and passive voice. Prefer short sentences. Make it clear what you’re arguing and why. And keep it terse and to the point.
The synthesis obviously is writing sequences of terse posts. If you need to explain a quantum circuit inspector, do so in its own post.
Clearly there’s a balance to be struck here: You want your posts to include everything that’s necessary for your audience to understand it, but no more. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, as they say. And clearly, the more technical a post is, the greater the risk that it won’t be understood.
However, when it comes to your example of scientific papers, I definitely do feel that some academicians should be more concise! For economics papers, often about 80% of the paper is simply repetition of what other people wrote, sometimes solely to show that the author did their research. Maybe 5% is original input, and the rest is repetition (again, less so for technical papers). Philosophers tend to be even worse!
Scholarship is a virtue, and placing what you did in the wider context is a very important part of pushing science forward (civilization could advance faster if people were more aware of other stuff out there—how many times have people reinvented graphical models?)
Signal to noise depends on the quality of the author—there are plenty of dense papers in academia, in all disciplines.