Possibly there’s a chicken-and-egg problem. We’ve developed extensive methods, partly tacit, for structuring linear text—developed collectively over centuries, and individually through reading examples and gradually getting better at producing them.
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There's the fundamental constraint that our attention is limited ant time is linear, so you are always reading linear text; even when meandering in meaningness.com, one is still reading a sequence of texts. It seems it's inescapable
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to have to linearize our thoughts. One can provide itineraries or recommended sequences to venture through the domain, or else it's up to the reader to navigate a graph which can be daunting
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What I see as working better is linear plus varying width, so you can read the same but deeper, make each step of the journey simpler or more complex depending on how much you want to invest. (i.e. post X has 3 progressively more complex variants)
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Yes… but maybe making an explicit conceptual dependency graph (“you can only read this web page if you already understand X, Y, and Z; follow the links for those if you don’t”) is worth a try.
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Oh, cool, thank you!
Is there any sort of community consensus on how well this worked out?
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Badly! But idk why exactly, the view was that it failed relative to its goals but idk what the goals exactly were
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They had a very interesting postmortem, as it happens:
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Amusingly, I disagree with the founder! He clashed w Eliezer, who wanted to focus on specific content, do special-case stuff, perfect that. Alexei thinks they should have focused on getting more authors. Premature in my view: prove in the high-effort case, then generalize.
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It’s sad: in the end, we’re left with no clear insight about what the best-case problems were with that core idea of surfacing and navigating dependency chains.
Like: if someone else to try this, should they begin by simply copying Arbital’s requisites system and using a more appropriate author-centric design research process? What worked well? What failed? We have no idea! Really bums me out.
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I see that I have reinvented their wheel :(
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I’m reading it now… thank you, extremely interesting, and discouraging.
Given your bearishness on the whole space, I’m wondering why you have built, and are actively using, one yourself?
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My goals are very different. My writing system is about helping me think, not about creating a legible communications artifact. The challenges are quite different across the two domains! The classic hypertext problems aren’t so limiting in a writing-focused context.
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