Writing as an activity lacks a notion of difficulty. Compare with math, where mathematicians have good consensus on some theorems being easy to prove and others being hard to prove or unproven. With writing non-fiction, we assume topics differ only in time needed, not difficulty
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We don't often say things like "this is a hard idea to write." Instead we attribute difficulty to the writer ("I'm not good enough") or level of preparation ("I'll need a lot more time to research this") or time ("this will take months").
No. Intrinsic difficulty is distinct.
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Some ideas would be hard even if you were 10x better, had all the prep done, and all the time in the world. They're just... hard. And would be hard even for the "best" suited writer. And some ideas are so hard, no single human can write them. And some defeat collectives too
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I've gotten better at estimating difficulty of a topic, separately from my own competence/preparation/time. But it's still not easy. A nail is vastly easier to make than a computer chip of the same weight. Some pairs of 1000 word ideas have same difficulty gap as a nail-to-chip.
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Also topic difficult is often confused with wrongness of underlying thesis. To use an earlier example, it is difficult to write about "The Problem With Whig Polyannish Economic Optimism" but that's not proof that there are no problems or that the problems are imaginary.
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Relationship to cryptography. It's easier to multiply two large primes than to factor the product into constituent primes.
Many contentious topics have this kind of difficulty asymmetry. A thesis being harder than the antithesis, where both are "great truths" a la Niels Bohr.
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Of course, if the thesis and antithesis differ in correctness as well as difficulty, you're in even murkier territory. If the two asymmetries align you get overwhelming ease in one direction. The tough case is the H. L. Mencken case: the false argument is easier to make.
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