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Meaningness's profile
David Chapman
David Chapman
David Chapman
@Meaningness

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David Chapman

@Meaningness

Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.

meaningness.com/about-my-sites
Joined September 2010

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    1. David R. MacIver‏ @DRMacIver 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @mattoflambda

      Yeah, that makes sense. I'm not sure it works as a theory for the popularity of this blog post though - I think this is more "things that lots of people know but have never previously realised that they don't know how to articulate"

      2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
    2. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda

      Yes, “clear concise articulations of things people have already grasped intuitively” seems like a major category of win. (That’s kind of the Lifehacker formula, I think? I’ve never read it.)

      2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
    3. David R. MacIver‏ @DRMacIver 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @mattoflambda

      Yeah, indeed. And I'm not sure RE lifehacker. Certainly plausible! I also don't really read it, though I think I've occasionally read posts that have come up in google searches.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    4. David R. MacIver‏ @DRMacIver 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @DRMacIver @Meaningness @mattoflambda

      Oh and yeah a fairly dry didactic style seems to do surprisingly well in terms of popularity. "Here let me teach you something" is probably a refreshing change from the rest of the internet.

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
    5. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda

      Yes my two most-viewed posts (Kegan; history of meditation) are both extremely dull. I guess if I cared more about stats I’d write more textbook-style summaries of obscure topics that I know well. I deliberately de-academicized my writing for the web; perhaps that was mistaken!

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
    6. David R. MacIver‏ @DRMacIver 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @mattoflambda

      I think a plainer style of language than is widely used in academia is useful on the web, but yeah I think in terms of what actually works for people I think actually explaining things clearly comes across as a breath of fresh air.

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
    7. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda

      This is good advice. I think I often try too hard to be entertaining.

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
    8. David R. MacIver‏ @DRMacIver 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @mattoflambda

      It's not advice I'm especially good at following TBH. It's something that happens more naturally when I don't actually want to write the thing I'm writing and am just doing it because I feel like I should (or am being paid to do it), which is amusingly perverse.

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
    9. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda

      Well that fits my experience. The most successful posts were ones I wrote thinking “I really don’t want to take the time for this, it’s long and boring, but to write what I *actually* want to write, I need to summarize this field because no one has done so before.”

      2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
    10. David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @DRMacIver @mattoflambda

      I suppose this augurs well for my current book project. The part I actually want to write is about meta-rationality but that’s <30% of the text. The rest recapitulates all the reasons rationalism failed, and then a jargon-free summary of ethnomethodology; both tiresome but needed

      1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
      David Chapman‏ @Meaningness 17 Jun 2019
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      Replying to @Meaningness @DRMacIver @mattoflambda

      I can’t understand why no one ever bothered to explain clearly why rationalism doesn’t work, although it’s been thoroughly understood since before I was born. I resent having to do work that ought to have finished in 1957. I hope I get a few million years off purgatory for this.

      10:49 AM - 17 Jun 2019
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        2. David R. MacIver‏ @DRMacIver 17 Jun 2019
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          Replying to @Meaningness @mattoflambda

          Because there are no systems set up that incentivize clear explanations of niche topics. Academia is set up to make it worth your while to be obscure in order to sound clever, the market is set up to reward things with broad appeal. This is only worth doing for intrinsic reasons.

          2 replies 2 retweets 15 likes
        3. David R. MacIver‏ @DRMacIver 17 Jun 2019
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          Replying to @DRMacIver @Meaningness @mattoflambda

          Thinking about it some more it's actually worse than this: academia actively trains people to write badly (some people escape, but it's an uphill struggle) so most of the people able to write such a thing would have to unlearn a career worth of writing habits

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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