Chapter 7, as you may recall if you read the first draft, is both the “cybernetics chapter” and the “tie everything together” chapter. Originally it was largely based on the twoposts where I first worked out these ideas, but as I’ve been revising, I discovered that it contained both a lot of extraneous material and didn’t have quite the right focus for where it sits in the book. These were both problems I knew about when I wrote the first draft, and now in the revisions I have to solve them.
As a result, it’s been a slog to find the right way to present these ideas. I’ve tried maybe 5 different approaches. It takes time to develop them out enough to see if they work. I’m hopeful that the 6th approach will be the final one, but it’s not done yet, so no promises.
Medium
Hey, did you know I used to run a blog on Medium called Map and Territory? It originally started as a group blog for some folks in the LessWrong 1.0 diaspora, but the group aspect quickly collapsed after LessWrong 2.0 launched, so then it was just me. (All my posts from it are now mirrored on LessWrong since I trust it more than Medium in the long run.)
Anyway, every few months somebody, usually this guy, references my most popular post from the Map and Territory days. It’s titled “Doxa, Episteme, and Gnosis”, and it still gets about 100 new reads a week all these years later. I’ve tried a couple times to write new versions of it, but they never do as well.
The “Many Ways of Knowing” post from two weeks ago was the most recent evolution of this post, though this time excerpted from the book. I like it, and I think it fits well in the book, but it still doesn’t quite capture the magic of the original.
The original succeeds in part, I think, because I was naive. I presented a simple—and in fact over-simplified—model of knowledge. It’s accessible in a way that later revisions aren’t because it’s “worse”, and I suspect it’s helped by putting three Greek words in the title, which I am pretty sure helps with SEO from students trying to find out what these words mean.
Anyway, this is all to say I got some more posts lined up, and hopefully I’ll at some point be naive enough to write another banger.
It’s been a busy month of writing.
Chapter 7, as you may recall if you read the first draft, is both the “cybernetics chapter” and the “tie everything together” chapter. Originally it was largely based on the two posts where I first worked out these ideas, but as I’ve been revising, I discovered that it contained both a lot of extraneous material and didn’t have quite the right focus for where it sits in the book. These were both problems I knew about when I wrote the first draft, and now in the revisions I have to solve them.
As a result, it’s been a slog to find the right way to present these ideas. I’ve tried maybe 5 different approaches. It takes time to develop them out enough to see if they work. I’m hopeful that the 6th approach will be the final one, but it’s not done yet, so no promises.
Medium
Hey, did you know I used to run a blog on Medium called Map and Territory? It originally started as a group blog for some folks in the LessWrong 1.0 diaspora, but the group aspect quickly collapsed after LessWrong 2.0 launched, so then it was just me. (All my posts from it are now mirrored on LessWrong since I trust it more than Medium in the long run.)
Anyway, every few months somebody, usually this guy, references my most popular post from the Map and Territory days. It’s titled “Doxa, Episteme, and Gnosis”, and it still gets about 100 new reads a week all these years later. I’ve tried a couple times to write new versions of it, but they never do as well.
The “Many Ways of Knowing” post from two weeks ago was the most recent evolution of this post, though this time excerpted from the book. I like it, and I think it fits well in the book, but it still doesn’t quite capture the magic of the original.
The original succeeds in part, I think, because I was naive. I presented a simple—and in fact over-simplified—model of knowledge. It’s accessible in a way that later revisions aren’t because it’s “worse”, and I suspect it’s helped by putting three Greek words in the title, which I am pretty sure helps with SEO from students trying to find out what these words mean.
Anyway, this is all to say I got some more posts lined up, and hopefully I’ll at some point be naive enough to write another banger.