I really think you have an interesting idea here, but you really need to trim down your article to make it easier to find. Personal anecdotes are fine, as are side notes, but you don’t need anywhere near as much of these in your post as you have now.
That’s a good point, thanks for the feedback. I wasn’t sure about how much history to include, but wanted to give some background for the ideas which come later. I think that if the ideas were presented out of the blue, without any context for where they came from, they might seem a little incredible. But yeah, less history may have been better.
The history finishes pretty early in the next post, so hopefully that’s a little better in this regard.
Here’s some more specific advice, which I’ve also heard wrt academic writing: we do not want to hear about the exact process of discovery, what we want is the key insights at each point. In this case, you’ve got several paragraphs about reading/watching material, taking notes, revising notes, thinking about notes and material, and so forth, none of which are particularly relevant to what you actually got out of them.
For example, these paragraphs:
As I went through the 20-hour program I typed up about 90 pages of notes. The presentation was full of perspectives I’d never thought of, outlining a way to approach life that was not only highly attractive on all levels, but excitingly feasible. There were many paraphrased points I put in the notes, as well as direct quotations that were too good to omit. I very often paused the videos to reflect on what was said, jotting down analyses of how a point related to my own experiences, what it would imply, or how I could use it.
I would come back to these notes often, and I always found them both inspiring and illustrative. After reading them I would be significantly more confident and comfortable, sometimes dramatically so. But I would repeatedly forget about the perspectives over time, and get the same boost again when I went back to the material; clearly, something wasn’t sticking.
Could just as easily have been written as:
The 20-hour program was full of perspectives I’d never thought of, outlining a way to approach life that was not only highly attractive, but seemed excitingly feasible. But there was a problem: while reading the notes I’d taken on the program made me significantly more confident and comfortable, I would repeatedly forget about the perspectives over time until I came back to read them again. Clearly, something wasn’t sticking.
Good advice, and a nice shortening of those paragraphs. In this case though I think that the original presentation, while it certainly could be improved, has some restrictions and beneficial aspects which may present a reason to do things differently.
As for presenting the key insights at each point, unfortunately the insights actually gained at the time aren’t very helpful to present. They were useful, but they’ve since been improved and refactored a number of times before reaching their current state. I think it would be distracting and unhelpful to present earlier and less refined versions of the actual conclusions; besides distracting from later versions of the ideas, the earlier ideas were also just messier and harder to understand.
The post could also be more succinct by omitting details about the process of discovery, but this seems relevant for assessing the likely use and validity of the ideas (presented later). This is like the difference between a scientific article that mentions something like “a study was conducted” and one that mentions “a meta-analysis of studies in the past year, with a total sample size of 2,493.” If true, the latter description provides more information for the reader to use in assessing the results.
This is like the difference between a scientific article that mentions something like “a study was conducted” and one that mentions “a meta-analysis of studies in the past year, with a total sample size of 2,493.” If true, the latter description provides more information for the reader to use in assessing the results.
I’m afraid I’m not seeing the relevance of that particular analogy, because your story is still firmly in anecdote-land—when you say you tried really hard to apply all these insights, I believe you within the context of the story, and the extra detail isn’t of the type that I can use to draw any useful conclusions. If a meta-analysis is of 10 studies vs 50, that means something to me and tells me something about how robust its conclusions are, but what should it mean for you to have taken 90 pages of notes rather than 20? I don’t know anything about your note-taking habits, so it’s just a meaningless number to me (eg. two classmates who I work closely with routinely turn in assignments that are more than twice as long as mine despite containing exactly the same content). Does the fact that you often paused the video to reflect on what was said a sign that you’re a deep and insightful thinker, a sign that you’re slow and can’t process information efficiently, a sign that you’re easily distracted, a sign that the information in the video was either extremely dense or extremely poorly explained, or something else entirely? Since I don’t know you, I can’t say, and that’s what moves the ‘process of discovery’ material from ‘useful for assessing the validity of your ideas’ to ‘extra stuff that creates a giant wall of text’.
As for the key insights you had at each point, I didn’t mean so much for you to present the intermediate insights you had at each point (because that’s clearly not the thrust of these posts), but rather to work out what the core part of each stage of your journey was and present those as clearly as possible, only putting in as much detail as is necessary to carry those central points.
It’s certainly a much fuzzier form of evidence than commonly presented in scientific studies and meta-studies, but from a Bayesian standpoint the details of the process are not completely uncorrelated from other things, so they present at least some amount of evidence. Given, that evidence may be slight.
BTW, regarding:
Does the fact that you often paused the video to reflect on what was said a sign that you’re a deep and insightful thinker, a sign that you’re slow and can’t process information efficiently, a sign that you’re easily distracted, a sign that the information in the video was either extremely dense or extremely poorly explained, or something else entirely?
My own opinion is that this is evidence of (and due to) the density of the material, as well as the quantity of thinking done and my level of interest. (I would agree that it’s not much evidence for quality of thinking done.)
My own opinion is that this is evidence of (and due to) the density of the material, as well as the quantity of thinking done and my level of interest. (I would agree that it’s not much evidence for quality of thinking done.)
Yeah, I was deliberately being uncharitable for the purpose of making the point. And I agree that at least some of the details contribute evidence that there was insight to be found, I just disagree with you on which and how much of that detail does so.
As for the key insights you had at each point, I didn’t mean so much for you to present the intermediate insights you had at each point (because that’s clearly not the thrust of these posts), but rather to work out what the core part of each stage of your journey was and present those as clearly as possible, only putting in as much detail as is necessary to carry those central points.
This is good advice though. I don’t think I’m going go back and make large revisions to the post (could change my mind on that), but if I were writing it again for the first time I would probably cut down the amount of detail.
I appreciate the move to Discussion. It looks like there are good ideas here, but it’s not polished enough for my standards of Main.
(Maybe I should write a post about the expectations for posts in Main vs. Discussion. Such a post would only be one person’s take on a very meta issue, so obviously it would go in Discussion.)
Having explicit guidelines is definitely good, Unfortunately, the sort of people who post straight to Main are unlikely to ever read the guidelines. This calls for a technical solution (e.g. all but meetup posts must be promoted to Main (manually or upon reaching some upvote threshold), not posted there directly, maybe with a few exceptions for admins and SIAI staff).
Maybe, but if you don’t like it, I doubt that’s the biggest reason, unless what you like in a post is very different from what most LW readers prefer. Most of not all of my LW posts have been “blog-y”, and many of them were upvoted quite a lot.
Uhh… you do know LW is a blog, right? True, it’s a community blog, and true, its posts tend to be more formal and structured (like an article) than posts on most blogs, but nonetheless LW is a blog and it is perfectly all right for a post to be more blog-y, or personal, as long as it successfully communicates its point.
I should have been more specific. This reads like a personal blog post, intended to be read by people who know and care about the author personally — at least as acquaintances or blog-followers — who already trust the author’s judgments and consider themselves as having significant affinity or similarity to the author.
When read in the context of LW, it comes off poorly — as if the author assumes that his personal experiences are diagnostic of the human condition. Others have commented that it reads like a testimonial or sales-pitch; to me, in the LW context it reads more like an instance of the typical-mind fallacy. (Not that the two are necessarily all that distinct …)
While it seems to touch on a number of topics that have aroused interest in the past on LW, it’s not the sort of piece that I think is worth encouraging here.
As for the typical-mind fallacy, this usually isn’t a problem for me. I’m going to make a mistake now and then, but my models of the differences between people and what causes those differences are, if nothing else, highly tested and highly invested in. I haven’t only been working to understand myself.
As for including details of my personal experiences, the experiences of one person seem at least to be more relevant information for the reader than the experiences of no people.
While it seems to touch on a number of topics that have aroused interest in the past on LW, it’s not the sort of piece that I think is worth encouraging here.
This seems like a good reason to object to a post.
...and here is the “community curating” right now. If the article (or blog post, if you will) was successfully communicating its point, these comments would not be taking place. It is a useful article as is, but fewer unrelated personal life details would help keep it off of people’s tl;dr list.
I think of it like an inventor drawing a new device on a napkin—would his friend at the table be justified using that napkin to mop up his spilled pasta sauce? After all, it is just a napkin, and that’s what napkins are for.
The blog format is the napkin, and the articles are the drawings. Now that the drawings are on it, it’s no longer just a napkin.
ETA: As a friend pointed out, the developed study and knowledge of human psychology is kind of an elephant in the room here. Why would something novel and useful be produced by a small number of people outside academia?
Because doing better than the people inside academia is, in this field, not a high bar to reach.
This post feels like a sales pitch to me: low on content, big on “create happy feelings about X.” (in this case, X being PUA) I’ll try to reserve judgement on future posts along this line, but the transition of a personal testimonial on rationality (to relate to members, if it is a pitch) to a personal testimonial on PUA (the idea to be sold, again, if it is a pitch) sets off my “set up” alarms.
That seems like a good reason for alarm bells to go off.
That’s an interesting thing you pointed out—I can now see really clearly how much this post fits the form you describe, which I very much failed to think of before.
FWIW (if this were a sales pitch, would I just say the same thing?) it seems that I’ve seen a few new things about human psychology, and I wanted to emphasize the giants on whose shoulders I’m standing, as it were. [edit: removed endorsement of someone who’s since tanked their reputation.]
As for PUA in general, I’m actually only a little familiar with other material. Much of it seems kind of deceptive, but if people improve their lives with it and use it for good purposes, I support that. [in the 6 years since writing, just about anything good has stopped calling itself PUA. Mark Manson—who does not identify with PUA—well represents my past and current views.]
Which isn’t to say that selling something is bad per se: many things require being sold to one degree or another. I just tend to be wary of speech that seems generated to persuade with as little content as possible.
I really think you have an interesting idea here, but you really need to trim down your article to make it easier to find. Personal anecdotes are fine, as are side notes, but you don’t need anywhere near as much of these in your post as you have now.
That’s a good point, thanks for the feedback. I wasn’t sure about how much history to include, but wanted to give some background for the ideas which come later. I think that if the ideas were presented out of the blue, without any context for where they came from, they might seem a little incredible. But yeah, less history may have been better.
The history finishes pretty early in the next post, so hopefully that’s a little better in this regard.
Here’s some more specific advice, which I’ve also heard wrt academic writing: we do not want to hear about the exact process of discovery, what we want is the key insights at each point. In this case, you’ve got several paragraphs about reading/watching material, taking notes, revising notes, thinking about notes and material, and so forth, none of which are particularly relevant to what you actually got out of them.
For example, these paragraphs:
Could just as easily have been written as:
Good advice, and a nice shortening of those paragraphs. In this case though I think that the original presentation, while it certainly could be improved, has some restrictions and beneficial aspects which may present a reason to do things differently.
As for presenting the key insights at each point, unfortunately the insights actually gained at the time aren’t very helpful to present. They were useful, but they’ve since been improved and refactored a number of times before reaching their current state. I think it would be distracting and unhelpful to present earlier and less refined versions of the actual conclusions; besides distracting from later versions of the ideas, the earlier ideas were also just messier and harder to understand.
The post could also be more succinct by omitting details about the process of discovery, but this seems relevant for assessing the likely use and validity of the ideas (presented later). This is like the difference between a scientific article that mentions something like “a study was conducted” and one that mentions “a meta-analysis of studies in the past year, with a total sample size of 2,493.” If true, the latter description provides more information for the reader to use in assessing the results.
I’m afraid I’m not seeing the relevance of that particular analogy, because your story is still firmly in anecdote-land—when you say you tried really hard to apply all these insights, I believe you within the context of the story, and the extra detail isn’t of the type that I can use to draw any useful conclusions. If a meta-analysis is of 10 studies vs 50, that means something to me and tells me something about how robust its conclusions are, but what should it mean for you to have taken 90 pages of notes rather than 20? I don’t know anything about your note-taking habits, so it’s just a meaningless number to me (eg. two classmates who I work closely with routinely turn in assignments that are more than twice as long as mine despite containing exactly the same content). Does the fact that you often paused the video to reflect on what was said a sign that you’re a deep and insightful thinker, a sign that you’re slow and can’t process information efficiently, a sign that you’re easily distracted, a sign that the information in the video was either extremely dense or extremely poorly explained, or something else entirely? Since I don’t know you, I can’t say, and that’s what moves the ‘process of discovery’ material from ‘useful for assessing the validity of your ideas’ to ‘extra stuff that creates a giant wall of text’.
As for the key insights you had at each point, I didn’t mean so much for you to present the intermediate insights you had at each point (because that’s clearly not the thrust of these posts), but rather to work out what the core part of each stage of your journey was and present those as clearly as possible, only putting in as much detail as is necessary to carry those central points.
It’s certainly a much fuzzier form of evidence than commonly presented in scientific studies and meta-studies, but from a Bayesian standpoint the details of the process are not completely uncorrelated from other things, so they present at least some amount of evidence. Given, that evidence may be slight.
BTW, regarding:
My own opinion is that this is evidence of (and due to) the density of the material, as well as the quantity of thinking done and my level of interest. (I would agree that it’s not much evidence for quality of thinking done.)
Yeah, I was deliberately being uncharitable for the purpose of making the point. And I agree that at least some of the details contribute evidence that there was insight to be found, I just disagree with you on which and how much of that detail does so.
This is good advice though. I don’t think I’m going go back and make large revisions to the post (could change my mind on that), but if I were writing it again for the first time I would probably cut down the amount of detail.
I appreciate the move to Discussion. It looks like there are good ideas here, but it’s not polished enough for my standards of Main.
(Maybe I should write a post about the expectations for posts in Main vs. Discussion. Such a post would only be one person’s take on a very meta issue, so obviously it would go in Discussion.)
Having explicit guidelines is definitely good, Unfortunately, the sort of people who post straight to Main are unlikely to ever read the guidelines. This calls for a technical solution (e.g. all but meetup posts must be promoted to Main (manually or upon reaching some upvote threshold), not posted there directly, maybe with a few exceptions for admins and SIAI staff).
This reads like a blog post, not a LW article.
Maybe, but if you don’t like it, I doubt that’s the biggest reason, unless what you like in a post is very different from what most LW readers prefer. Most of not all of my LW posts have been “blog-y”, and many of them were upvoted quite a lot.
Uhh… you do know LW is a blog, right? True, it’s a community blog, and true, its posts tend to be more formal and structured (like an article) than posts on most blogs, but nonetheless LW is a blog and it is perfectly all right for a post to be more blog-y, or personal, as long as it successfully communicates its point.
I should have been more specific. This reads like a personal blog post, intended to be read by people who know and care about the author personally — at least as acquaintances or blog-followers — who already trust the author’s judgments and consider themselves as having significant affinity or similarity to the author.
When read in the context of LW, it comes off poorly — as if the author assumes that his personal experiences are diagnostic of the human condition. Others have commented that it reads like a testimonial or sales-pitch; to me, in the LW context it reads more like an instance of the typical-mind fallacy. (Not that the two are necessarily all that distinct …)
While it seems to touch on a number of topics that have aroused interest in the past on LW, it’s not the sort of piece that I think is worth encouraging here.
As for the typical-mind fallacy, this usually isn’t a problem for me. I’m going to make a mistake now and then, but my models of the differences between people and what causes those differences are, if nothing else, highly tested and highly invested in. I haven’t only been working to understand myself.
As for including details of my personal experiences, the experiences of one person seem at least to be more relevant information for the reader than the experiences of no people.
This seems like a good reason to object to a post.
...and here is the “community curating” right now. If the article (or blog post, if you will) was successfully communicating its point, these comments would not be taking place. It is a useful article as is, but fewer unrelated personal life details would help keep it off of people’s tl;dr list.
I think of it like an inventor drawing a new device on a napkin—would his friend at the table be justified using that napkin to mop up his spilled pasta sauce? After all, it is just a napkin, and that’s what napkins are for. The blog format is the napkin, and the articles are the drawings. Now that the drawings are on it, it’s no longer just a napkin.
Because doing better than the people inside academia is, in this field, not a high bar to reach.
This post feels like a sales pitch to me: low on content, big on “create happy feelings about X.” (in this case, X being PUA) I’ll try to reserve judgement on future posts along this line, but the transition of a personal testimonial on rationality (to relate to members, if it is a pitch) to a personal testimonial on PUA (the idea to be sold, again, if it is a pitch) sets off my “set up” alarms.
That seems like a good reason for alarm bells to go off.
That’s an interesting thing you pointed out—I can now see really clearly how much this post fits the form you describe, which I very much failed to think of before.
FWIW (if this were a sales pitch, would I just say the same thing?) it seems that I’ve seen a few new things about human psychology, and I wanted to emphasize the giants on whose shoulders I’m standing, as it were. [edit: removed endorsement of someone who’s since tanked their reputation.]
As for PUA in general, I’m actually only a little familiar with other material. Much of it seems kind of deceptive, but if people improve their lives with it and use it for good purposes, I support that. [in the 6 years since writing, just about anything good has stopped calling itself PUA. Mark Manson—who does not identify with PUA—well represents my past and current views.]
In general, once the question of whether or not you are selling something is in play, it becomes an “I suppose you could just raise your right hand.” situation.
Which isn’t to say that selling something is bad per se: many things require being sold to one degree or another. I just tend to be wary of speech that seems generated to persuade with as little content as possible.
True