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!
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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.
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Replying to @DRMacIver @mattoflambda
This is good advice. I think I often try too hard to be entertaining.
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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.
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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.
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Not that I'm in any way bitter about the market forces / academia gap you understand. It's not like I've spent the last 5 years of my life on work that falls in that gap or anything.
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(I'm slightly overstating the case - if you do this sufficiently well you can *make* the subject have broad appeal, but it's a high risk move and there is low hanging fruit. So sometimes these things do well because someone did them for intrinsic reasons and finds an audience)
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Let us cross our fingers!
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