Don’t know about the other readers, but here’s what I had hoped for from your series:
New exercises, and amendments to Betty Edwards’s exercises. It has to be very detailed and specific: explaining even one exercise with Betty Edwards level of detail, speaking only about the “how” without touching the “why”, should take you a whole post or more. This is the important part. Half-ass it, and everything else is useless.
Explanations why the exercises work. Might be interesting in a just-so-story kind of way, though people like me would just skip them.
Tie-ins with general rationality skills. Useless filler that actually hurts the overall message. Throw it out.
Okay. I definitely think the detailed-observation-exercise-post needed to come before this one.
Something that concerns me is that I’m not sure I actually have anything to say about Betty Edwards’ material that’s any different from what’s originally in the book. They’re important exercises, and I think there are other exercises that she DOESN’T go into that need to be emphasized, but an article about them specifically would essentially be the same content, just rewritten in my own words. Which I think is legal, but still has me a little worried.
An eventual article I want to do would be a write-up of the actual workshops I’ve been doing, and what results have been occurring, which would give it a context similar to this article.
rationality-tie-ins
Most of the sections that do that are talking about something I think is genuinely important. Is it just the extra-verbage of “oh, by the way, insert less wrong buzz word” that you’re concerned about, or do you feel that the accompanying paragraphs feel like filler?
I actually liked the introduction to Observing Reality, but I did independently worry that the references to Sunk Cost, Anchoring and Wisdom of Crowds in this article were a bit ham-fisted.
I confess to a secret ulterior motive, which was to be able to link smart aspiring artists (but not yet aspiring rationalists) to this series and lay the seeds for greater interest in rational thinking. This wasn’t my primary motive, just an additional goal I was trying to work in if possible. But I realize this is an incredibly dangerous secondary motive—if the result is a bunch of shoehorned in buzzwords that just detract from the result, that’s bad.
I was fairly happy with how the earlier articles dealt with the issue, but if multiple people had the same reaction I’ll recalibrate.
Only the wisdom of the crowds reference stuck out to me—I thought sunk cost was a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up, and anchoring wasn’t just reasonable but actually useful, in that I hadn’t really thought of drawing in that way before.
Don’t know about the other readers, but here’s what I had hoped for from your series:
New exercises, and amendments to Betty Edwards’s exercises. It has to be very detailed and specific: explaining even one exercise with Betty Edwards level of detail, speaking only about the “how” without touching the “why”, should take you a whole post or more. This is the important part. Half-ass it, and everything else is useless.
Explanations why the exercises work. Might be interesting in a just-so-story kind of way, though people like me would just skip them.
Tie-ins with general rationality skills. Useless filler that actually hurts the overall message. Throw it out.
Okay. I definitely think the detailed-observation-exercise-post needed to come before this one.
Something that concerns me is that I’m not sure I actually have anything to say about Betty Edwards’ material that’s any different from what’s originally in the book. They’re important exercises, and I think there are other exercises that she DOESN’T go into that need to be emphasized, but an article about them specifically would essentially be the same content, just rewritten in my own words. Which I think is legal, but still has me a little worried.
An eventual article I want to do would be a write-up of the actual workshops I’ve been doing, and what results have been occurring, which would give it a context similar to this article.
Most of the sections that do that are talking about something I think is genuinely important. Is it just the extra-verbage of “oh, by the way, insert less wrong buzz word” that you’re concerned about, or do you feel that the accompanying paragraphs feel like filler?
Yeah, it’s the extra verbiage, like the reference to map and territory at the start of “Observing Reality”.
I actually liked the introduction to Observing Reality, but I did independently worry that the references to Sunk Cost, Anchoring and Wisdom of Crowds in this article were a bit ham-fisted.
I confess to a secret ulterior motive, which was to be able to link smart aspiring artists (but not yet aspiring rationalists) to this series and lay the seeds for greater interest in rational thinking. This wasn’t my primary motive, just an additional goal I was trying to work in if possible. But I realize this is an incredibly dangerous secondary motive—if the result is a bunch of shoehorned in buzzwords that just detract from the result, that’s bad.
I was fairly happy with how the earlier articles dealt with the issue, but if multiple people had the same reaction I’ll recalibrate.
Only the wisdom of the crowds reference stuck out to me—I thought sunk cost was a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up, and anchoring wasn’t just reasonable but actually useful, in that I hadn’t really thought of drawing in that way before.