Notes: Skills, Writing and Better Reddit

More random notes. Today's are about reading, writing and conversing.

Some Skills

Reading a 100 times

There is a skill that I call "Reading a 100 times".

This skill lets one read the same sentence, paragraph, or page many times over, and extract something new from it every time.

"Reading a 100 times" is critical to appreciate poetry, learn maths from mere definitions and proofs, or investigate koans.

If you have yet to train in this skill, you are missing out on the opportunity to enhance your learning possibilities.

People dislike "Reading a 100 times". It is not fun. It can also make one feel stupid, repeatedly bashing one's head against the same thing.

Staring at the Wall

"Reading a 100 times" is closely related to another skill I call "Staring at the wall". Staring at the wall is the ability to stare at a wall, stay still, and study it. Even the dumbest white wall offers a world of details to study: spots, cracks, cast shadows, the grain texture of the wallpaper, or brush strokes.

If staring at interior blank white walls feels hard, you can start with brick outside walls. There is a lot in there.

Staring at the wall is a great skill. It lets you develop aesthetics about any field, of your own volition, without needing to feel passionate about it ahead of time.

This skill makes connecting with people easier: I can easily pay attention to all they are interested in. And people, including their special interests, are much more interesting than walls.

It also makes it easier for me to learn new topics. Instead of only leveraging my intellect, I can quickly bring my aesthetic senses to the activity.

I expect people dislike "Staring at the wall" even more than "Reading a 100 times". But I rarely try to get people to Stare at the wall, so I need more data on that.

Taking Notes

Extremely often, someone will come to me for help, ask me about my opinion on some technical topic, and then proceed to take 0 notes for the entire conversation.

When this happens, I do not try to convey deep material; I will instead focus on vibes. For example, over a conversation, assuming my interlocutor is extremely interested, I expect they can at most remember the vibe, a major intuition, a couple of small facts, and a couple of fun stories. Suffice it to say that this is not enough for any non-trivial technical content.

Verba volant, scripta manent: words fly by, while writings remain. With our meat brains, we have a terrible memory. Why read, why listen, why even think, if one is to not take notes? To enjoy oneself, perhaps? But I assume people do not enjoy it when they ask me for a review or technical help.

Taking Notes is a crucial skill. It is also an integral component of reading comprehension.

And of course, Taking Notes is only half of the story. The other half is actually reviewing the notes, in order to learn from them.

The Pain of Writing

Fluff

When writing, I always find myself oscillating between two extremes.

On one end, I should make everything explicit, unfold all lines of reasoning, prepare all counter-counter-arguments, and make the reading experience as pleasant as possible.

On the other end, I should write as little as possible, trusting the reader's skills to benefit from a text written for them.

I prefer the latter. When reading, fluff is a pain: I need to check whether each line is relevant information, or just here to safeguard against potential problems. It makes my reading experience much slower.

Unfortunately, I have seen too many people struggle with taking notes and re-reading, among other things. As such, I have to write more than I would want to read as a reader.

If you, as a reader, find my content contains too much fluff, I would love to know.

Length Kills

Long text takes more time to read, and time is the thing we lack the most.

Long text is less quote-able and comment-able. I think commentary is truly important, and I might write more commentary in the future. But long and not self-contained texts make it hard to comment, as you can not just quote them in their entirety.

Long text is harder to integrate into notes. Ideally, writing should be easily copy-pastable into my notes.

Long text is much easier to forget. We can not remember much from even a single page of text. The more written, the more will be forgotten, and it will become even easier to forget the core content specifically.

Long texts become less about information and more about vibes. This can easily make you change your mind through arguments that you will not remember after the fact, leaving you with a vibe-based after-impression that feels more justified than it is.

My Ideal Essay

My Ideal Essay is minimal. Persuasion, convincing, and idiot-proofing distract.

To some extent, even arguments distract. I am much more interested in what people believe and why they believe what they believe, than in a case for why I should believe in what they believe.

My Ideal Essay can be playful. But in that case, playfulness should flow from the author's mind, instead of being part of a requirement to make a text so fun and stylish that readers don't become bored. Closer to poetry or banter than manic Tiktok and insight porn.

A Way

Redundancy

I have a Way to do things. Not The Way, just a Way.

My Way is simple. If you spend time with me, you can quickly start predicting what I will say or how I will act.

That is, if you spend time with me in real life. But in real life, you learn more about me. When asked to help, I am pretty blunt and demanding. I don't spoon-feed. I push people close to me out of their comfort zone, have them attempt things that they can't do, and answer questions they don't have the answer to. Usually, they do much better than what they expected. And they start pushing themselves alone, without me in the loop.

That is what I want. Instead of trying to make the world as good as possible, I try a lot to make the world in which I die tomorrow as good as possible. I would love to externalise all of my skills, experiences and knowledge. Make myself redundant.

Paradoxically, I have come to dislike expressing myself. The more I speak and act, the more people rely on me speaking and acting. And that, in irreplaceable ways. This goes counter to making myself redundant.

Trade-Offs

There is a theoretically optimal way to convey all that I know: using the smallest amount of words so that the greatest number of people get all that I have to offer. I could just share everything once and for all, be done with it, and then go on to chilling!

But I am not The Optimal Writer. My text is not Clear and Minimal. That is why, in the meantime, I write a lot, more than what is needed, and so much so that people come to rely on me to write more as opposed to them trying to infer My Way.

Such is life. For now, I must write more. So that later, I can write less.

Deep Conversation Software

Internet Forums

Internet Forums were great. They were platforms dedicated to long-form text conversations. I learnt a lot from interacting on forums.

They differed from modern social media in many ways. Their focus was on:

• Text. Not images, videos or music, but text.

• Long-form. Not 140 chars, not 280 chars, no feed, no scrolling. One thread. With long comments.

• Conversations. No influencers, news, publishing, likes or views. The true success of a thread was not in the number of likes (there were none!) or the number of views, but in the number of replies.

In philosophy, I would love a modern platform closer to Internet Forums than social media. Unfortunately, Internet Forums are old, hard to modify, and miss basic crucial features, like tree conversations.

Reddit Alternative

Reddit is the closest thing to this vision. It even has tree-like conversations (with comments within comments within comments).

Unfortunately, it fails in many ways. I need something that is…

Ergonomic. Threads, comments and UI elements should all be cleanly separated. Reading a long comment should look like reading a blog post as much as possible. There should be no wasted space, and everything should make sense.

On the other hand, Reddit is bloated. Look at this fucking screenshot. Infuriating.

The only core content, which should be a list of threads, is in the red rectangle. There is only space for a single thread. The rest are ads, stats, banners, irrelevant menus, and useless buttons. The space is used only 40% horizontally and 10% vertically. Only 5% of the screen features the core content: the list of threads.

Fast. All the text should load instantly. Links should be pre-loaded when you hover them. There should be no AI-induced slowdown.

On the other hand, Reddit is bloated, slow, has ads, and has lazily loaded comments.

Deep Threads Support. I want threads, sub-threads, a way to mark a sub-thread as "resolved", and a list of the unresolved sub-threads in a thread. Investigating a thread with many sub-threads on Reddit is hell.

Deep Comment Support. I should be able to comment on parts of the original post, string comments together, and form a review.

Summarising Workflow. As a conversation unfolds, more happens, and it is unclear to a new participant what happened. There should be at least one process to regularly summarise the status of a conversation. Possibly, there should be a "Summarise and restart" button on conversations that have more than 100 comments.

Private. I want to use it at work, or for personal stuff. I'd prefer if I had a private deployment option.

Let me know if anyone wants to do or help with this (I have a small prototype in-house)!

Conclusion

No conclusion, just some thoughts. Have a nice day!