Want:
• Scrape popular self-referential blogs (, LessWrong sequences, , maybe ?)
• For each, construct dependency graph: what old posts do new posts reference? Simplify by hand
Find guiding abstractions. May suggest entry points for new readers
Conversation
Completely unsurprisingly if you've read a bunch of , but if you just count the number of self-referential links on then "A Big Little Idea Called Legibility" comes out on top by far!
Haven't done dependency graph yet which may be more interesting. Raw counts:
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Well, here is a few hour attempt at visualizing 's blog post dependency graph:
• Note how central the legibility post is! Even Gervais Principle pales in comparison.
• Orange is , blue is . As you might expect, they don't cite each other much!
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would love to fork that example and have a go at drawing the blog post citation graph
would be swell if were to publish the script and/or dataset in a github repo 🗃 💡
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The code to generate the dataset is a total kludge of ruby scripts, but I actually just generated a better CSV of in-blog references which you can use: gist.github.com/backus/fc62897 (cc you may also enjoy just exploring that table).
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I bet you'd be better off just starting from scratch. I'd love to learn from what you make. Things I wanted:
• Less lag + no chaotic initial render
• Detect subnetwork clusters, separate more
• Nicer labeling. Avoid text overlap?
Imagine you see much more due to better taste
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Stretch goals/ideas I was curious about:
• See what happens if we treat "rust age" (2007 - 2012) as separate author from (2012 - 2018)
• Play w/, detect, visualize "chains" of citations? Ex: Maybe legibility node should be even bigger if posts that cite it are freq cited?
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Nuance. A terminology citation is a different beast than a prereq citation. Not sure how to tell those apart structurally. If I were less sloppy I’d be linking “legibility” citations mostly to glossary except for ones where I actually extend Scott (eg GP3, ‘status illegibility’)


