I like a lot of what Graham writes, but I fundamentally disagree with him on this one. Spoken language is the JIT compiler of information transferral. It’s spur-of-the-moment; it’s stream-of-consciousness; it gets the job done by stripping away a lot of nuance and complexity.
Written language is more subtle, more considered, more edited - he states himself that he writes then edits - in his case to make it more “spoken”. By doing this he is removing complexity in the interests of simplicity, and this may well fit with his goal for this work. It is not a general panacea.
I don’t disagree that sometimes it is more useful to have a simple introduction, leading to a more complex and better understanding of a subject before layering on the exceptions and subtleties - there is certainly a place for simplified knowledge transfer, our entire system of education is based on this “lies to children” approach.
What I do disagree with is that it’s a useful go-to rule. The world is inherently complex, and we deal with complexity by introducing layers of abstraction (more of the “lies to children” approach, but this time to ourselves). Not everyone needs to understand the quantum mechanical physics of a positive charge in order to understand that balloons will stick to your hair if rubbed against certain materials, but if you’re trying to explain that, then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed. Sometimes that abstraction is very thin, and the language used will reflect that; at other times, “it just does” is the way to go… party handbooks printed on balloon packets are different to undergraduate textbooks.
So written language, with all its capability for complexity, context, subtlety and nuance should be employed when that capability has a useful effect. That means understanding one’s audience and tailoring to suit, not just a blindly-applied rule to “write as you speak”.
I’ve outgrown a few bloggers. Spolsky still stings a bit. I really liked his early stuff and then my frowns got bigger and a lot more frequent.
The problem I found with blogging is that I only have about two year’s of things to say, and either I start scraping the bottom of the barrel or I had to take a long break and then circle back, reiterating 80% of what I already said but with new or better examples. If I was forced to have an audience for ten years I’d just be saying crazy shit all the time.
> If I was forced to have an audience for ten years I’d just be saying crazy shit all the time.
There is an alternative. Just blog without an audience. Don't keep any web server logs (or don't look at them). Delete the analytics.
The fact that someone theoretically could be reading my blog is enough motivation to write something understandable (rather than just scrawling some gibberish in a notebook), but whether that audience actually exists or not doesn't matter to me.
There's no inherent need to write regularly if you feel you have nothing new to say, is there?
There is an alternative. Just blog without an audience. Don't keep any web server logs (or don't look at them). Delete the analytics.
That depends on your individual preferences I guess. I think having an audience is at least an indication that you're succeeding at it. Otherwise you have a diary, not a blog.
> I think having an audience is at least an indication that you're succeeding at it.
If the goal is to get an audience, then having an audience is a success.
If the goal is primarily to crystallize your own understanding of things, write thoughts up in a coherent way, or something else which doesn't necessarily involve an audience, then you can have success without an audience.
> Otherwise you have a diary, not a blog.
If the blog is still there for people to see, it changes the kinds of things you write. I don't feel comfortable posting half-incomprehensible jumbled thoughts with partially worked examples, filled with mistakes on a blog, whereas I would feel comfortable writing that privately.
This does definitely depend on individual preferences and whether one can motivate themselves to write well without even the possibility of an audience. I can't.
At least in my experience, writing is a great medium for creative expression. It's a relatively permanent medium to express the fleeting now. I can look back in many years and remember and reflect on what I did and thought.
As long as you're not dependent on having an audience as a form of income, I'd think the blog is intended for the writer first and foremost, and having a readership is secondary/optional.
You are just circling the truth that ultimately we all really have one or two things to really say to the world. And that’s okay.
Refining the few themes that you have conviction for until the end of time is worthy. Hubris is if you think those few things now qualifies you for all things.
It helps if your topic of interest has endless fodder. Misanthropes know what I mean.
> I only have about two year’s of things to say, and either I start scraping the bottom of the barrel or I had to take a long break and then circle back, reiterating 80% of what I already said but with new or better examples
To add to your comment, it’s also been my experience that writing improves one’s speaking. So to the extent that one wishes to be more articulate in his oral communications, he should not write as he speaks.
> then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed.
Finding the right layer of abstraction is orthogonal to the write-speak axis. When speaking to my colleagues, I use technical jargon that no layman could understand. None of the topics are simple, or strongly abstracted. The issue of write vs. speak is more about the sentence structure, sentence length, and breadth of vocabulary.
But I generally agree that carefully crafted written language can capture and transport thoughts much, MUCH more effectively.
Slightly off topic: What's with HN and the word "orthogonal"?
I'm not a native English speaker, but I read a lot in English and it seems like the word is extremely common on HN compared to anywhere else.
Isn't usually "unrelated" a more descriptive and even a more precise word in most HN discussions? (The parent comment here does seem to make a point using axes, so maybe it is more appropriate here?)
Orthogonal does not mean unrelated. Take two vectors in the plane. Them being orthogonal means that they have a 90 degree angle between them, so if you know the direction of one of them, the direction of the other one is severely restricted to two choices. So these vectors are very much RELATED. It's just that they are related in a way that makes them maximally different in a certain sense.
So if you want to say that two things are maximally different in a certain sense, you use orthogonal. If you want to say that one thing has no influence whatsoever on what the other thing is, and the other way around, you use unrelated.
For example, if you randomly choose a point in the plane, then its x and y coordinates will be unrelated, but not orthogonal. The vectors [x 0] and [0 y] are not unrelated, but certainly orthogonal.
I understand that orthogonal and unrelated have different meanings. What I'm wondering is: Isn't "orthogonal" much more common on HN (18388 matches in search) than in other places?
I suspect that "orthogonal" is a word programmers fall in love with during some CS class and then overuse because it sounds sciency.
I think that orthogonal is a more visual word than unrelated. It invokes the image of axes pointing into different directions. I suspect many programmers just like this aspect of the word, while unrelated is somewhat bland, and also usually wrong.
Unrelated means two things are not related in any sense. Orthogonal means two things are unrelated with respect to a specific property.
Unrelated is more general, and less precise. Orthogonal restricts the "unrelatedness" to the specific property being discussed. It's also a very visual and intuitive word.
I don't see why what you're saying and what the blog post says are incompatible. I feel like Graham is not saying "simplify your thoughts," but rather "simplify your words." Think Up Goer 5 (https://xkcd.com/1133/) but maybe not as extreme.
What I understood from your comment is that for complex topics (like quantum mechanics), complex language is necessary. This section of the post clarifies Graham's thoughts on the matter:
> You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. When specialists in some abstruse topic talk to one another about ideas in their field, they don't use sentences any more complex than they do when talking about what to have for lunch. They use different words, certainly. But even those they use no more than necessary.
I kind of agree, although I don't know exactly whether I've studied things that y'all might consider "abstruse".
I don't think this proves the point you want it to. Up Goer 5 loses a ton of information for the sake of its stylistic schtick, and is borderline incomprehensible to people who don't already know the information it's attempting to convey. That's not a problem when you're doing it for comedic effect or for its own sake; it's a big problem when you decide that a devotion to simplistic language should trump actual communication in scenarios where the message matters.
Up Goer 5 is a fantastic example of why complex language is necessary. Even in a short example, it already defines clumsy replacements for the words it's trying to use, like "Sky Bag Air" (Hydrogen), "Funny Voice Air" (Helium) and "Breathing Type Air" (Oxygen). Other artificially-simple language projects, like the Simple English Wikipedia* or Toki Pona generally end up in the same place. You get the linguistic equivalent of copy-and-paste coding.
Sure, "don't use more complex language than necessary" sounds like advice, but anyone capable of working out the minimally complex language needed for any given topic likely doesn't need to be told this.
*A quick skim also suggests that in many places, the SEW just gives up on simple vocabulary and uses phrases like "time-independent Schrödinger equation".
Just so we're on the same page, I agree to the necessity for words like Hydrogen or Helium. And not gonna lie I get a kick out of using fancy words that in today's English-speaking world serve the dual purpose of implying that I'm part of the educated social elite (although I like to imagine this is not the reason why I like using them - I digress).
> but anyone capable of working out the minimally complex language needed for any given topic likely doesn't need to be told this.
This is where I (and I think Graham) disagree with you. In my opinion, this is very not easy. When I write - especially about complex topics - I feel more comfortable complicating my thoughts.
If you don't mind the anecdote, in middle and high school I thought I was hot shit because my classmates would struggle to write enough to meet the page limit and I would struggle to not go over it. As it turns out, this is not because I had more to say. It's because I would use twice the number of words to say it. But it was certainly complex prose that used fancy language - sometimes, I'd argue, parts were even well-written.
I do still think there is an aesthetic to language, but I've grown to believe that simple language possesses beauty too. I can appreciate now how famous writers like Hemingway could agonize for a day over a single sentence. Especially because I look at the four paragraphs I wrote in response and think to myself, "man I bet this is way more complicated and rambly than it needs to be."
Written language is more subtle, more considered, more edited - he states himself that he writes then edits - in his case to make it more “spoken”. By doing this he is removing complexity in the interests of simplicity, and this may well fit with his goal for this work. It is not a general panacea.
I don’t disagree that sometimes it is more useful to have a simple introduction, leading to a more complex and better understanding of a subject before layering on the exceptions and subtleties - there is certainly a place for simplified knowledge transfer, our entire system of education is based on this “lies to children” approach.
What I do disagree with is that it’s a useful go-to rule. The world is inherently complex, and we deal with complexity by introducing layers of abstraction (more of the “lies to children” approach, but this time to ourselves). Not everyone needs to understand the quantum mechanical physics of a positive charge in order to understand that balloons will stick to your hair if rubbed against certain materials, but if you’re trying to explain that, then you read the room and go with the layer of abstraction needed. Sometimes that abstraction is very thin, and the language used will reflect that; at other times, “it just does” is the way to go… party handbooks printed on balloon packets are different to undergraduate textbooks.
So written language, with all its capability for complexity, context, subtlety and nuance should be employed when that capability has a useful effect. That means understanding one’s audience and tailoring to suit, not just a blindly-applied rule to “write as you speak”.