As I wrote in a separate comment, I did like this post overall. That being said, I would definitely push back on the idea that entertainment and truth are “unrelated.” What you narrowly intended by that may or may not be true, but I can definitely say that there are many situations where truth requires nuance/complexity, and nuance/complexity can decrease entertainment and accessibility.
On the one hand, there are many situations where people are already sufficiently familiar with the general ideas and/or those ideas are very easy to grasp such that writers don’t have to hand-hold their audience through the nuances of every idea, yet the writers still try to do it to the point that it gets very boring and can actually confuse their readers even more in some ways (especially if they are using all sorts of needless jargon). I would say that this post is a good example of efficiently and energetically explaining a collage of concepts wherein each concept is generally pretty accessible on its own and you don’t need an instruction manual on how to put them all together: just throw out the ideas and your audience can sufficiently understand the (intended) big picture.
In contrast, there are some posts/topics which are not as amenable to this “hands-off” and “entertainment-heavy” approach, which 1) makes emphasizing entertainment inherently difficult (e.g., it’s just hard to make a dry or confusing topic easy to read) and 2) increases the nuance/accuracy to reading-ease tradeoff (e.g., increases in accuracy tend to come at higher costs to ease of reading). Of course, I could just be a bad writer, but as an example from personal experience, I really struggled to write this post about a decision-making framework I’ve theorized and talked and written about for years. Throughout the process, I tried to keep reading accessibility and efficiency in mind while still preserving sufficient nuance to distinguish it from the life-hacky articles about gimmicky/half-baked decision making heuristics (i.e., to avoid overselling it). In review, I feel like I succeeded on the latter goal, but failed on the former, despite many hours of trying to narrow it down. Again, I may just be a bad writer, but I really felt like I hit major diminishing marginal returns when it came to clarifying concepts and otherwise making it more efficient/accessible for a reader, and I think a major reason for that was that it wasn’t something where I could just throw out big ideas that people already have some understanding of, intersperse some jokes, and call it a day. Ultimately, I’d just say: don’t underestimate the difficulty of making complex ideas accessible or entertaining (especially when one is trying to avoid being shallow/gimmicky).
On a not-really-related point, I am all for adding in comedic relief in the form of memes (which I thought you did fairly well in this post) when possible/appropriate, but it isn’t always easy, and forcing humor can fall flat and/or take more time to create/include. (I do think a few other comments hit on similar points)
(Post-message disclaimer: I did not exhaustively read all the comments, so someone else may have made similar points)
As I wrote in a separate comment, I did like this post overall. That being said, I would definitely push back on the idea that entertainment and truth are “unrelated.” What you narrowly intended by that may or may not be true, but I can definitely say that there are many situations where truth requires nuance/complexity, and nuance/complexity can decrease entertainment and accessibility.
On the one hand, there are many situations where people are already sufficiently familiar with the general ideas and/or those ideas are very easy to grasp such that writers don’t have to hand-hold their audience through the nuances of every idea, yet the writers still try to do it to the point that it gets very boring and can actually confuse their readers even more in some ways (especially if they are using all sorts of needless jargon). I would say that this post is a good example of efficiently and energetically explaining a collage of concepts wherein each concept is generally pretty accessible on its own and you don’t need an instruction manual on how to put them all together: just throw out the ideas and your audience can sufficiently understand the (intended) big picture.
In contrast, there are some posts/topics which are not as amenable to this “hands-off” and “entertainment-heavy” approach, which 1) makes emphasizing entertainment inherently difficult (e.g., it’s just hard to make a dry or confusing topic easy to read) and 2) increases the nuance/accuracy to reading-ease tradeoff (e.g., increases in accuracy tend to come at higher costs to ease of reading). Of course, I could just be a bad writer, but as an example from personal experience, I really struggled to write this post about a decision-making framework I’ve theorized and talked and written about for years. Throughout the process, I tried to keep reading accessibility and efficiency in mind while still preserving sufficient nuance to distinguish it from the life-hacky articles about gimmicky/half-baked decision making heuristics (i.e., to avoid overselling it). In review, I feel like I succeeded on the latter goal, but failed on the former, despite many hours of trying to narrow it down. Again, I may just be a bad writer, but I really felt like I hit major diminishing marginal returns when it came to clarifying concepts and otherwise making it more efficient/accessible for a reader, and I think a major reason for that was that it wasn’t something where I could just throw out big ideas that people already have some understanding of, intersperse some jokes, and call it a day. Ultimately, I’d just say: don’t underestimate the difficulty of making complex ideas accessible or entertaining (especially when one is trying to avoid being shallow/gimmicky).
On a not-really-related point, I am all for adding in comedic relief in the form of memes (which I thought you did fairly well in this post) when possible/appropriate, but it isn’t always easy, and forcing humor can fall flat and/or take more time to create/include. (I do think a few other comments hit on similar points)
(Post-message disclaimer: I did not exhaustively read all the comments, so someone else may have made similar points)