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You didn't contribute to the talk about Wittgenstein, but exclusively talked about yourself and things you do.

In addition, instead of explaining the relationship of your activities with Wittgenstein (that could have been an on-topic contribution), you ask the reader to watch recordings.



How would recommend explaining the relationship of my activities W?

Honest question, I’d love to not come across as such a moron.

Thanks for the feedback.


Let me start by saying that it is great to see how you deal with the feedback you get, this is not an easy feat.

Some more preliminaries: When I write a comment on HN, I first ask myself: what is the message I want to send to potential readers? And then I put some effort into expressing it as good as I can. After reading your comment, I had a hard time identifying any message, and I think the reason is that you employed the method of giving us your raw thoughts without considering which message you would like to send. When I first read your comment, I didn't even bother to dig deep enough to decipher the content; if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading? Now, after having watched the first video and read your comment five times, I understand the structure, but still only fragments of the content.

Let me give one example what I think you could explain, based on the partial understanding I gained: it seems that you consider it very important for people to capture and communicate their thoughts 'unfiltered', as they happen. If you could relate that to Wittgenstein's philosophy, that would be an on-topic comment. (I am not very familiar with Wittgensteins philosophy and don't see how that would obviously follow from his philosophy, maybe Wittgenstein experts immediately see it).

I see the dilemma you are in: you want to exemplify the style, and I ask you for something which is impossible to do in this style: polishing and refining a message until it is easy to read and understand. However, I also would say that your experiment - convincing the reader by exemplifying the approach - has failed, so it seems you anyway need to reconsider your approach.

Finally - and I hope it doesn't come over as patronizing - I think only few exceptional people have such clear thoughts that conveying them without any editing is a win for a large readership. I know for sure that my thoughts are initially much too chaotic. Maybe Wittgenstein was able to do it. You and me are far away from that level.


Absolutely! I truly don't want to come across as that downvote seeking troll. I really want to share and engage in rich conversations with interesting people online.

I really appreciate your feedback. I think you touched on a key point of contention for me that I need to work very hard on:

> if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading?

I come at this from precisely the opposite angle: "I could pour my heart into something and have it ignored because it's too long, so I'm just going to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks."

Obviously, I know this is a poor solution. I'm actually building a website instead that I believe solves my problem and many more. That will give me the motivation required to put in the effort up front to polish things up a bit more.

The problem, for me, boils down to one thing: we have a content discovery problem. Low energy bullshit rises easily, while content that takes a while to parse rises quite quickly.

The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is perfect here. It's also roughly 1,000 times more difficult to read, parse, understand, and provide feedback for content such as mine than to like a gif on Reddit, for example.

Again, thank you for the feedback. I've copied it into my notes (highly recommend Bear app for mac / iOS if you're in the market) and will meditate on it and hopefully improve through it.

If you're interested in the project I'm working on that I believe solves this problem, here's some stuff I wrote about it:

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-t...

https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-o...




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