Sharing what you know
I remember an interesting scene from an old 20th century movie called The Matrix. One of the characters is taught a martial art in just a few moments with the help of some fancy sci-fi technology.
As a thought experiment, this speed-learning illustrates that there’s nothing intrinsically important about education taking time. If we could learn instantly, what’s the down side?
In fact, if we were to consciously redesign our entire education mindset today, there would be huge changes. Could most educational material be built digitally, in a scalable way? Could we provide all educational materials — analogous to textbooks — free for everyone online? Could we instill a widespread appreciation for the importance of education, and make it worthwhile for the best people in any given field to devote some of their time to communicating clearly to a wide audience?
I’ve spent a lot of time struggling with my own self-education outside of a formal school system, and this post explains what I think authors can do to empower democratized learning.
Learners connect to stories
A few things can go terribly wrong when you’re trying to learn. You can get bored. You can get utterly confused. Yet every subject can be fascinating when it’s presented well.
Many things have to go right for an area of thought to be recognized as a field of study. Someone has to recognize the problems that the field can solve. Someone has to solve those problems, and many people have to see value in the solutions in order for these ideas to survive as a meaningful part of society. All of these people had to find something worthwhile in this work, and the instigators had to have a true passion for it. Even if bad writing hides this passion, it’s there somewhere, ready to act as the foundation for great writing.
The easiest way to bring out the excitement of a field is to speak in terms of stories. Even in fields like math, physics, or philosophy, stories abound. Instead of talking about analytic geometry in terms of (x,y,z) vectors drawn only as arrows, you could explain how a video game may internally represent a tree, and how that data enables the game to work as expected.
Stories don’t have to be all about applications, either. So many mathematicians have gone insane that it seems to be an occupational hazard. Kurt Gödel proved that mathematical logic could never be complete, and later in life became terrified of being poisoned—to the point that he starved himself to death. Georg Cantor, the father of set theory, felt the pain of his peers’ criticisms so harshly that he suffered lifelong bouts of depression.
I’m trying to think of some uplifting stories about mathematicians, but I’m coming up empty. In any case, happy stories can work as well.
Stories can also be about connecting learning paths within a field. If someone begins to read what you write, they’d love to know how it fits into the big picture, and the various paths they could take after they’re done reading. I like to think of every piece of information as fitting into a global tree of human knowledge. If we head rootward from the current topic node, we see bigger-picture stuff — more abstract ideas that live in the intersection of fields. If we head leafward, we often have many choices as to which specialized pieces of knowledge to pursue in depth.
Write with vulnerability
Non-fiction books often do two things that are detrimental to readers:
- They gloss over details for fear of insulting the reader’s intelligence; or
- they make up anecdotes and belabor their points to death.
There’s a sweet spot between underwriting and overwriting. Math books tend to underwrite by skipping too many details, and lightweight business books tend to overwrite about too few. I suspect a lot of these habits are cultural. People naturally learn to write from authors who’ve written about similar things.
Write for this audience: a version of you who hasn’t yet learned what you’re writing about. They’re smart, so you don’t have to write down. They’re busy, so you want to be concise. But they make mistakes and may stumble without examples, so you don’t want to overestimate how fast they can learn. Ask yourself: If I was forced to read this in several years, would I cringe because it was too long, or because I had trouble following it, having forgotten some details?
It seems to be a common thought among programmers — and probably among other fields — that “if I know it, then it must be common knowledge.” This can feel like humility to the person having the thought, but it can feel horribly condescending to their friend who doesn’t know something. This kind of thinking leads to RTFM-style answers. It’s helpful to be conscious of this harmful thought, and to explicitly push it out of your writing style.
I’ve read many explanations that took great pains to express a sanitized view of a subject. Gauss was famous for publishing a tiny fraction of the ideas he had, insisting on presenting the work so that the proofs coalesced from thin air as if by magic, utterly obscuring his historical line of thought. While there is some appeal in this approach — and it is certainly impressive at first glance—it’s ultimately harmful. It removes the critical high-level lessons imbued by seeing how a result was first discovered and it removes the relatability of the writer.
One of the best possible thoughts a reader can have is this:
If I worked hard enough, I could do work like this.
Light content is uninspiring; over-processed content is unapproachable. The balancing point between the two is easiest to find by being frighteningly honest — admitting your own faults and the ease of the path you took to discover what you’re writing about. Such sincerity is at once terrifying to the author and empowering to the reader.
Access to knowledge is a fundamental right
The society I live in seems more concerned with individual advancement than a sense of global welfare. The ironic thing is that, sometimes, what’s good for everyone is also what’s good for a given individual. The creation of the internet is one such improvement. Another, not yet achieved, nor even yet a universal goal, is the ideal of treating access to knowledge as a fundamental right.
On a practical level, I have in mind two major hindrances to this right. The first is the common practice of researchers giving their copyrights away to for-profit publishing companies, effectively making it impossible for the vast majority of the world to partake in this vital swath of human knowledge. The second is the lack of learning as a lifelong goal — among many writers as well as readers.
Our current cultural norms accept the right of a business to make money over the right of individuals to share information. There are obvious pro-business cases, such as fiction authors who depend on sales for their livelihood. But there are other cases where the interest of the creator is aligned with freedom of information, such as researchers who want their work to be shared as widely as possible and expect no money for this distribution.
At the same time, modern journalists writing on non-fiction topics typically explain advanced technical concepts in terms of vague, questionable analogies. It’s common for wide-audience articles on scientific advancements to leave the reader unable to easily find the original technical paper being covered.
I’d love to live in a world where the right to freely access educational or research-level knowledge was viewed as fundamental, alongside other basic human rights.
Individual writers can champion this worldview by adopting the principle that if you have the ability to add something new to the global tree of human knowledge, then you have a responsibility to do so. This includes making your work open to all, respecting the intelligence of your readers, the vulnerability of yourself, and promoting a culture of lifelong learning.
