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I think this is a mistake unless your audience already knows and trusts you. The world is full of people saying surprising things, and almost all of them are ma

by dkarl 3y ago

I think this is a mistake unless your audience already knows and trusts you. The world is full of people saying surprising things, and almost all of them are making it up, either accidentally or on purpose. The people who discover surprising things are usually akin to Darwin and Einstein, people who master current, conventional knowledge well enough to spot new patterns (Darwin) or find creative, productive ways to stress the old knowledge (Einstein.) You don't have to be on the level of Darwin or Einstein to discover something new, but you should show your homework enough to convince people that your surprising take might be grounded in knowledge and not in ignorance. You will naturally cover this ground in the process of establishing context for your discovery, and in showing that your new observation is poorly explained by existing conventional wisdom. Doing this work is the minimum due diligence to build good faith confidence that you're raising something new and not just learning in public, so you might as well present it to your audience to establish your background and your bona fides. (Learning in public is fine, as long as it's presented as such. "If you're a beginner with X like I am, you may or may not have discovered" is a fine way to start.)

habitue 3y ago
I think this unreasonably splits the world into cutting edge research, and learning in public for beginners. In reality, almost every talk you're going to see would be considered educational, somebody mostly saying things other have said before, maybe in a new way, to an audience who is new to that topic. Also the world is really highly dimensional and there are a lot of things to learn. "Let's talk about sorting algorithms in python" "let's talk about what makes a superconductor" let's talk about how to make your own kombucha at home". If every talk began with an infantalizing "we're both beginners because I didn't invent this topic" we'd all get sick of it real quick.
- dkarl 3y ago
  I don't think the original article makes sense in the context of an educational talk, so I didn't read it that way. For example, if you're talking about sorting algorithms in Python, different readers will naturally find different things surprising, depending on their background (Quicksort? Timsort? neither?) and even if you wanted to target a particular very narrow audience that is supposed to be in the same place in the learning process, like in a university course, it would still be bad pedagogy to jump straight to the new knowledge without connecting to something the audience knew first. I think the advice in the article applies so badly to that situation that it would be unfair to think that the author intended it to be read that way. The article makes a lot more sense if you apply it to speaking/writing for a professional audience with a shared set of knowledge or conventional wisdom, and adding something that you think adds to the shared body of knowledge or contradicts some element of it.
Swizec 3y ago
> "If you're a beginner with X like I am, you may or may not have discovered" What’s a beginner? Reading 3 books on $topic will give you a deeper understanding and appreciation for $topic than 99.9% of the population. Yet you are still at basically zero compared to the people who wrote those books. The people who wrote those books are at basically zero compared to the bleeding edge researchers who invested entire lifetimes into 1% of what the book covers. Those researchers are at like 60% compared to the researchers who are looking into the other 99% of what the book covers. By and large we are all beginners in almost everything.
- dkarl 3y ago
  So be more specific. Share your background. The important thing is to give your readers or listeners a fair chance to judge whether what you have to say will be interesting to them, because if you don't, they're going to default to ignoring you.

by dkarl 3y ago

habitue 3y ago

I think this unreasonably splits the world into cutting edge research, and learning in public for beginners. In reality, almost every talk you're going to see would be considered educational, somebody mostly saying things other have said before, maybe in a new way, to an audience who is new to that topic. Also the world is really highly dimensional and there are a lot of things to learn. "Let's talk about sorting algorithms in python" "let's talk about what makes a superconductor" let's talk about how to make your own kombucha at home". If every talk began with an infantalizing "we're both beginners because I didn't invent this topic" we'd all get sick of it real quick.

dkarl 3y ago
I don't think the original article makes sense in the context of an educational talk, so I didn't read it that way. For example, if you're talking about sorting algorithms in Python, different readers will naturally find different things surprising, depending on their background (Quicksort? Timsort? neither?) and even if you wanted to target a particular very narrow audience that is supposed to be in the same place in the learning process, like in a university course, it would still be bad pedagogy to jump straight to the new knowledge without connecting to something the audience knew first. I think the advice in the article applies so badly to that situation that it would be unfair to think that the author intended it to be read that way. The article makes a lot more sense if you apply it to speaking/writing for a professional audience with a shared set of knowledge or conventional wisdom, and adding something that you think adds to the shared body of knowledge or contradicts some element of it.

Swizec 3y ago

> "If you're a beginner with X like I am, you may or may not have discovered" What’s a beginner? Reading 3 books on $topic will give you a deeper understanding and appreciation for $topic than 99.9% of the population. Yet you are still at basically zero compared to the people who wrote those books. The people who wrote those books are at basically zero compared to the bleeding edge researchers who invested entire lifetimes into 1% of what the book covers. Those researchers are at like 60% compared to the researchers who are looking into the other 99% of what the book covers. By and large we are all beginners in almost everything.

dkarl 3y ago
So be more specific. Share your background. The important thing is to give your readers or listeners a fair chance to judge whether what you have to say will be interesting to them, because if you don't, they're going to default to ignoring you.