The more incompressible you are, the more your reach will be indirect, via the few people who put in the work to read it One reason it’s possible for even no-reach beginners to feel genuine pity for Tom Friedman is that The World is Flat is pretty well summarized by its title
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At the other extreme, James Carse Finite and Infinite Games is almost incompressible *despite* being highly redundant and repetitive
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But the people who *have* put in the work to read Carse have all been way more deeply influenced by it. I’ve read both. I never cite World is Flat except as a joke. I cite or use Carse almost every other thing I write. Often in a foundational way.
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Shall we call this the Velvet Underground effect? https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/01/velvet/ …
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Inequalities: ubiquity is not endurance endurance is not influence influence is is not consequentiality
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Compressing does not lead to incompressibilty though. If you write a very good summary of a book it could still be further summarized as “like that other summary except with this 1 extra point”. Incompressibility requires differentiation by adding integral original elements.
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Editor hat on, that’s often a sign that you’re absorbing the dialogue but struggling to find a “seed” with which to achieve an originality-adding compression as output. Often that takes learning disrespect. Most common problem I see in academically trained bloggers.
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Took me ~3-4 years/200k words to learn to sufficiently disrespect the dialogues I was responding to without actually tuning it out. Fine line between arrogant ignorance of, and obsequiously worshipful immersion in, a discourse tradition
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Spider webs of references are increasingly useless. “I’m going to replace you with a short list of search terms”
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if your goals re: writing/reading are purely pragmatic, then lossless compression isn't important. but delirium makes conveying more esoteric knowledge possible.
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