Dan Luu

I'm trying to put together a specific "small idea" talk and it's hard to explain clearly. One single example, which would be a preface in a blog post or 1 of 8 examples in a book chapter, takes 10min to work through, half of the talk time. Talks are a very low bandwidth medium.

In 99% of "big idea" talks I see that try to explain why you should do something, the "why" is woefully underdetermined and you can use the same style of reasoning to justify the opposite thing. This isn't to say these can't work, there are some that work.

Gary's talked (mentioned above) is arguably a "big idea" talk and it works. But Gary is careful to frame "big" topics in a way that they can be explained adequately in a short talk. IMO, this is rare and most talks in this class end up being a horoscope.

A talk saying "remove unnecessary complexity and embrace simplicity" is not so different than the daily horoscope column, which reads "recent turning points in your life have taught you flexibility, and now you need to put those lessons to work"

One pet hypothesis of mine is that we _need_ conflicting or ambiguous advice. In Go (the game), an enormous amount of advice takes the form of proverbs or patterns that are only applicable some of the time.

There are people who try to distill those proverbs to laws that can be applied without any ambiguity. I believe those attempts fail, or only capture things that are uninteresting.

The way to progress is to develop pattern matching skill, so that you can sense what the appropriate proverb/pattern to apply in a given situation.

I'm not arguing against clarity or simplification. Just that I think that *some* of the vague talks are worthwhile.