Perils of pop philosophy
juliansanchez.com
juliansanchez.com
"On the other hand, I look at the online public sphere and too often tend to find myself thinking: “Discourse at this level can’t possibly accomplish anything beyond giving people some simulation of justification for what they wanted to believe in the first place.” This is, needless to say, not a problem limited to philosophy."
I set my expectation for piece of writing based on the format. I know I won't get the full details of an issue reading someone's essay; I expect the gist. It's implicit in the format.
But my responsibility is to read in between the lines and fill in the necessary details when obvious. If someone says, "Men just care about sex", I know they don't really mean it black and white.
On the other hand, I expect more from a scientific journal. But if I really want to know something, I'll experiment personally. And even that has pitfalls.
(Who am I kidding, we call it the intertubes, of course not.)
I would suggest the following to the author:
- break up your article into sub-sections with clear sub-headings
- avoid long series of paragraphs of similar length. Look at your article on the page and make sure that the white space flows in a way so that the text doesn't seem intimidating
- summarise your points at the end, in bold.
Just because an idea is hard to communicate doesn't give you an excuse to not even try.
It's late here so that's probably a little grumpier sounding that it's meant to be. Just slightly gobsmacked by the wording is all.
Edit: I just re-read this and it does sound pretty snarky and I don't want to come across as a troll or a nuisance, but really, read both the perils of pop philosophy article and the blog and you'll see where I'm coming from.
I would argue that the reason the subjects appear straightforward is because I spent the time to make them so. Making your application viral, or starting up with a friend, are both complex topics with many issues, side-issues, loops, tangents, etc.
I'm not saying that whatever this guy is trying to talk about isn't more complicated. Perhaps it is. I'll never know, since I can't be bothered to read something that's so badly presented. However, the fact is he's made no effort whatsoever to make his ideas intelligible to others, other than jotting down his thoughts and posting them online. That's a lazy attitude.
I'd say we need more people who make a conscious effort to present complex information in a simple way, and fewer of those who feel that the world owes it to their brilliance to either make the effort to decipher their ramblings or keep their little minds occupied with simpler thoughts.
PS: http://danieltenner.com is my new blog, stated in February. Yes, I should update it more, but running my start-up does take up most of my time. Before that I ran http://inter-sections.net, for about a year and a half.
Also, the linked article isn't that complex once you get past the first paragraph. It's actually about discussing domain specific complex topics, and the first paragraph acts an example. From then on it's written pretty clearly and the ideas are layed out well. But at the end of the day it's more a thought / concern the guy had than an article.
It's not that the domain experts are all snooty and don't want to condescend to explain things properly. It's that they have to make a choice about explaining things to those that are familiar with the domain - in which case they can be fairly concise and get whatever idea it is across with a minimal signal to noise ratio - or they can try for an explanation that anyone could understand - which might take more than a feasible amount of time, and carries a risk that the core idea that got them motivated enough to explain things in the first place would be lost amongst all the new information.
With that in mind, using a highly domain specific first paragraph as an example seems to be a highly effective way of a communicating the idea - if it was at the end, or in the middle and the reader was told it was an example then people would have skipped or skimmed it. The stakes wouldn't be high enough. You don't know that because you didn't read the article - kind of amusing since you subsequently accused the author of having a lazy attitude :)
Anyhow, it seems liked you were offering advice between authors of similarly complex works which is what caused some cognitive dissonance in me. Maybe you've written equally complex works before, but it feels to me that if you haven't then you can't know if your advice scales to the higher complexity description.
I would argue that most of your subjects are reasonably straightforward but perhaps discussed less clearly elsewhere. I didn't see any data or graphs showing lost opportunity costs and probabilities of succes in the "College vs Startup" entry for instance - which for my money would make it more of a complex subject, radically more useful while still being easily explainable. As it is pretty much anyone could have written it - perhaps with a different style - but it doesn't seem like it's coming from a domain expert.
The merchant account article is the exception amongst them, I'm sure that's very useful for the people who are looking at getting a merchant account.
Maybe we just have different levels for what we count as complex, which is fine.