Being clear about what your blog posts are about lets people who are interested in what you have to say find your writing more easily. The more paragraphs you spend getting to the point, the bigger the odds they’ll lose patience and click on something else before you’ve presented your thesis.

A modern classic in sci-fi.

Following the first hyperlink in the main text of an English Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually leads to the Philosophy article. In February 2016, this was true for 97% of all articles on Wikipedia, an increase from 94.52% in 2011. The remaining articles lead to an article without any outgoing wikilinks, to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_philosophy_phenomenon

Cooties Simulator 2009™

Explore motifs from Hamilton, Wicked, and Les Misérables.

This is exactly why I refuted Paul Graham’s “Good Writing” post. Zombie facts poison discourse.

A nice linguistic principle, even absent of the post’s content:

we don’t have much conscious awareness of a lot of the patterns in our own speech, let alone much insight into the reasons for them

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. […] I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.

This thought feels dangerous and is arguably wrong. He later says that this isn’t quite right, but it still feels like a bad (and arguably bit dishonest) thing to lead your essay with.

So it’s not quite right to say that better sounding writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge.

This is significantly better, but still reads as naïve. If anything, I feel like well-written stuff can make it really hard to challenge the assumptions of an argument, which in a way is its own hell. I think Graham is right to point out that clumsy writing reflects wrong ideas, and that getting rid of those errors can help you fix the ideas, but I feel like in some way, because of how the argument is framed, that this essay is self-refuting.

Excellent programmer who’s now pivoted to writing and book publishing.

doing a reverse mary sue self-insert where you make up an oc and give them all of your worst personality traits

When the research being promoted is about sex-differences, the soundbite/clickbait approach involves leading with some attention-grabbing statement about men and women that basically accords with most people’s preconceptions. The message is that Science has now confirmed the accuracy of a commonplace gender stereotype.

In the past decade or so, Disney/Pixar movies have undergone a really interesting change.

Forester is a tool for authoring, exploring, and sharing scientific and mathematical hypertexts. It is your lab notebook, your journal, your blackboard, and the home of your lecture notes.

An intensely fascinating tool which has been finding more and more use among the mathematics community.

see also: https://sr.ht/~jonsterling/forester/

If you are a scientist, an engineer, a philosopher, an anthropologist, or an academic of any stripe, thinking and understanding is your job.

Technical content can be as pristine as a crystal clear mountain pond, but if no one can find it, they’ll drink out of a muddy puddle instead.

Gotta get people to Pokémón go to the polls.

do you want to train yourself to be an editor of LLM-generated text? Or do you want to learn how to think more clearly and express yourself better through the medium of writing?