vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin 2020-04-07

A mini-tutorial on how complicated technical things are done and what some of the technical challenges are in a totally different industry:

As a side note, I am *deeply* disappointed by the uncaring attitude toward intellectual accessibility in the hackernews thread on this article:

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Nonstop shudder.

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Given my own experience reading wiki articles (and academic articles) on mathematical topics, I know that the people saying “well you can’t dumb it down *too* much” are NOT being reasonable. We are VERY VERY FAR from any state remotely resembling “dumbed down too much”.


scoopy trooples @scupytrooples 2020-04-07

It would be great to have domain knowledge levels to tab between. Something like high school / undergrad / postgrad.


vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin 2020-04-07

The fundamental problem with even thinking about it in terms of “high school / undergrad / postgrad” is that it assumes that everyone takes the same path to learning a field. This may have been true 20 years ago. This is increasingly not true today.

It’s very easy to have full up-to-the-frontier knowledge of one part of a field, even to the point that you’re making original contributions, while still being “first-year-undergrad” level in a directly adjacent area.


scoopy trooples @scupytrooples 2020-04-07

It was just an example as there are certain standards of what we expect people at those levels to be able to comprehend. Layman / experienced / technical would be the same thing imo.


vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin 2020-04-07

Agree there’s nothing wrong with considering different levels; I’m just suggesting to make sure to remember that your readers will have very uneven levels of understanding of any background material a topic requires


scoopy trooples @scupytrooples 2020-04-07

Forgive the lack of granularity, twitter doesn’t give a lot of room to expand on ideas. Conceptually we are in agreement 100%