Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Writing Style and the Typical Mind Fallacy - Less Wrong

27 Post author: lukeprog 14 July 2013 04:47AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 14 July 2013 05:54:20PM *  14 points [-]

Fortunately, you don't need a detailed model of which people prefer which writing style to encourage people to write posts on LW in a variety of styles!

Rather than "abstract stuff first, examples later" or "examples first, abstract stuff later" I prefer a hybrid approach: give as much of the abstract stuff as is necessary to motivate why you're looking at the examples (which may be no abstract stuff at all), then give the examples, then give the rest of the abstract stuff. The main application I have in mind is mathematical writing, where sometimes a definition is very hard to motivate without examples, but sometimes the examples are very hard to motivate without looking at a previously well-understood abstraction first. The problem I have with always giving examples first is that I often don't know what to do with the examples if they haven't been properly introduced: where, in the filesystem of my brain, should I be filing these things?

Comment author: Stabilizer 14 July 2013 10:16:35PM 0 points [-]

Paul Halmos!