Packy - you continue to amaze. Your writing and clarity of composed thought (hyperlegibility) as of late is improving at a drastic rate from an already high watermark. The entire context of this post (taking in all the linked content, some yours and some others) is extraordinary. You may go down as one of the great modern philosophers and thinkers.
This is fascinating, good call outs to Venkatesh and others. Brings a new perspective and advantage to being a parent I hadn’t considered, which is we get to raise our own generation of hopeful hyperlexics - they’re already helping me learn and shift perspective so much, but the fact at some point they’ll be able to learn and teach me at a rate faster than I can learn (of course because of decay, but potentially faster than I ever was able to learn even at my peak) is wild!
I think Twitter is the supreme example of Hyperlegibility and watching its adoption and centrality within the internet demonstrates information's shifting importance with people.
Twitter had a lot of great technical innovations (hashtags, retweets, etc.) but the pioneering thing was 140 characters. There are so many ideas that are worth sharing, but how would you do it before Twitter? 100 years ago you'd write a book, 20 years ago a blog post, now, a single tweet. Some ideas are not book-worthy, or blog-worthy, but they are tweet-worthy.
The seamlessness of Twitter meant the entire range of information could be easily shared (from the most atomic thought to a life-time's dissertation).
So related to your quantum investment example—maybe you don't want to dedicate all the time to starting a new fund, you can just send a tweet, and that information is shared. Information is democratized.
You'd think with the infinite amount of information, a truly novel thought would be extra valuable, something to protect and keep hidden. And it would be, if novel thoughts existed. Everything's a rehash of something else—ideas aren't worth a damn. (I'm thinking of your post about startups using ideas from the 60s)
Finally, I think the last thing about why hyperlegibility proliferated is that the Time-To-Create (TTC) has shrunk significantly. If you had a great idea for a new app, you could just pull up Claude and make the app. Withholding information isn't that useful, but trust is. So by sharing incessantly, you stand out in your network, and can build frequently while cultivating a reputation you can rely on.
Fascinating take on hyperlegibility! The balance between clarity and creativity in design is such an interesting challenge. Really enjoyed this perspective!
The world is becoming more complex and more nuanced explanations are needed to understand it. And it becomes harder and harder to create legible knowledge that is true.
Funny though how hyperlegibility makes us hyperskeptical by default -- think about the last health claim you saw on a food product, or a statistic you read in a tweet. Like you say, optimizing for legibility is optimizing for attention, which unfortunately creates an incentive to be less than honest in a hyperlegible world. If you're the top 1% in your field, being hyperlegible is obvious. But for the rest, the hyperlegible meta game probably means claiming customers you don't really have...
No flipping way! I wrote a 5 pager to a VC friend yesterday who is just about to raise his next fund on how he needs to be much much more open on thesis, trust, legibility about investing in vertical integrators.
Could have saved myself the time by waiting for this to drop
Great piece. The funny thing about innovation, basic economics comes into play. The opportunity costs might change but, it's still basic microeconomics. How much does it cost me to produce one more, and what's the cost? Information becomes less scarce, but what does become more scarce? How does scarcity change?
Read a great quote recently “in past generations we were born into community and had to become individuals. Now we are born individuals and must find our communities”
It seems there is a an optimal strategy that is selective-hyper-legibility.
Apple for example is extremely public and yet highly secretive. Bridgewater discloses high level thesis, differentiated culture, and touts the fame of Dalio, but is secretive on tactical strategy.
In both places hyper-legibility is critical to notoriety but unrelated or in opposition to execution.
It’s the combination of demonstrating intelligence enough to be known but not enough to lose your alpha.
Eh. It depends. For every "hyper legible forest" being engineered for carbon credits only to burn down in the north of Canada, there are plenty of agronomists who have unplugged in order to seed biodiversity everywhere.
Attention is scarcest in myself, no one else. That in mind, for as many times as I try to make myself easy to understand, there are plenty of times I try to create a kind of illegible biodiversity to my craft in order to restrict the audience size to a hyper specificity.
Some parables expose. Some parables obscure. And in an era of hyperlegibility, hyperbiodiversity in all categories and sectors seems to me to be the undervalued play.
Compare your newsletter to David Bentley Hart's and you'll see immediately what I mean.
Easier to read isn’t the goal, at least it shouldn’t be. Otherwise you just end up speaking like social media is a real thing.
The goal is to convey information with economy. To manipulate your audience in the simplest way possible. How much information resides in your writing is determined by the audience. If you’re dealing with IT people or sports fans, there’s no need to convey much information because they are easy to manipulate. If you’re dealing with academics it requires your writing to convey much more information as they are more difficult to manipulate.
Engaging your audience and manipulating their opinions is the goal and success there is a function of understanding your audience.
Great writing Packy - love your essays. On hyperlegibility, I wonder though if this has the same effect as unlimited (even if bespoke) buffets i.e. food coma. Do we get better & better at integrating at speed such that we forget to step back to ask the right questions on direction? So engrossed in the 'how' that we forget the 'why'.
Packy - you continue to amaze. Your writing and clarity of composed thought (hyperlegibility) as of late is improving at a drastic rate from an already high watermark. The entire context of this post (taking in all the linked content, some yours and some others) is extraordinary. You may go down as one of the great modern philosophers and thinkers.
Thank you Andrew, I really appreciate that!
This is fascinating, good call outs to Venkatesh and others. Brings a new perspective and advantage to being a parent I hadn’t considered, which is we get to raise our own generation of hopeful hyperlexics - they’re already helping me learn and shift perspective so much, but the fact at some point they’ll be able to learn and teach me at a rate faster than I can learn (of course because of decay, but potentially faster than I ever was able to learn even at my peak) is wild!
I think Twitter is the supreme example of Hyperlegibility and watching its adoption and centrality within the internet demonstrates information's shifting importance with people.
Twitter had a lot of great technical innovations (hashtags, retweets, etc.) but the pioneering thing was 140 characters. There are so many ideas that are worth sharing, but how would you do it before Twitter? 100 years ago you'd write a book, 20 years ago a blog post, now, a single tweet. Some ideas are not book-worthy, or blog-worthy, but they are tweet-worthy.
The seamlessness of Twitter meant the entire range of information could be easily shared (from the most atomic thought to a life-time's dissertation).
So related to your quantum investment example—maybe you don't want to dedicate all the time to starting a new fund, you can just send a tweet, and that information is shared. Information is democratized.
You'd think with the infinite amount of information, a truly novel thought would be extra valuable, something to protect and keep hidden. And it would be, if novel thoughts existed. Everything's a rehash of something else—ideas aren't worth a damn. (I'm thinking of your post about startups using ideas from the 60s)
Finally, I think the last thing about why hyperlegibility proliferated is that the Time-To-Create (TTC) has shrunk significantly. If you had a great idea for a new app, you could just pull up Claude and make the app. Withholding information isn't that useful, but trust is. So by sharing incessantly, you stand out in your network, and can build frequently while cultivating a reputation you can rely on.
Still haven’t solved how to discern information from nonsense, how to weight opinions by fact-fullness, etc
Good info is as valuable as ever
To put it more simply- you still have to know what questions to ask
Fascinating take on hyperlegibility! The balance between clarity and creativity in design is such an interesting challenge. Really enjoyed this perspective!
The world is becoming more complex and more nuanced explanations are needed to understand it. And it becomes harder and harder to create legible knowledge that is true.
Funny though how hyperlegibility makes us hyperskeptical by default -- think about the last health claim you saw on a food product, or a statistic you read in a tweet. Like you say, optimizing for legibility is optimizing for attention, which unfortunately creates an incentive to be less than honest in a hyperlegible world. If you're the top 1% in your field, being hyperlegible is obvious. But for the rest, the hyperlegible meta game probably means claiming customers you don't really have...
Brilliant. It is fascinating how the game theoretic dynamics incentivize sharing of our best ideas...
No flipping way! I wrote a 5 pager to a VC friend yesterday who is just about to raise his next fund on how he needs to be much much more open on thesis, trust, legibility about investing in vertical integrators.
Could have saved myself the time by waiting for this to drop
HA!! Synchronicity city.
You can’t unsee this. Quite a contribution. Thanks Packy!
Great piece. The funny thing about innovation, basic economics comes into play. The opportunity costs might change but, it's still basic microeconomics. How much does it cost me to produce one more, and what's the cost? Information becomes less scarce, but what does become more scarce? How does scarcity change?
Damnit. Time to go hyper-pathless
Great piece packy
Too late. Hyper hyper pathless or GTFO
You could extend a lot of this to politics too. Grown men signaling for trump and other causes (so many kinds of flags)
1000% had some politics in an earlier draft. It’s everything.
Read a great quote recently “in past generations we were born into community and had to become individuals. Now we are born individuals and must find our communities”
It seems there is a an optimal strategy that is selective-hyper-legibility.
Apple for example is extremely public and yet highly secretive. Bridgewater discloses high level thesis, differentiated culture, and touts the fame of Dalio, but is secretive on tactical strategy.
In both places hyper-legibility is critical to notoriety but unrelated or in opposition to execution.
It’s the combination of demonstrating intelligence enough to be known but not enough to lose your alpha.
Thus makes sense to me
Eh. It depends. For every "hyper legible forest" being engineered for carbon credits only to burn down in the north of Canada, there are plenty of agronomists who have unplugged in order to seed biodiversity everywhere.
Attention is scarcest in myself, no one else. That in mind, for as many times as I try to make myself easy to understand, there are plenty of times I try to create a kind of illegible biodiversity to my craft in order to restrict the audience size to a hyper specificity.
Some parables expose. Some parables obscure. And in an era of hyperlegibility, hyperbiodiversity in all categories and sectors seems to me to be the undervalued play.
Compare your newsletter to David Bentley Hart's and you'll see immediately what I mean.
Easier to read isn’t the goal, at least it shouldn’t be. Otherwise you just end up speaking like social media is a real thing.
The goal is to convey information with economy. To manipulate your audience in the simplest way possible. How much information resides in your writing is determined by the audience. If you’re dealing with IT people or sports fans, there’s no need to convey much information because they are easy to manipulate. If you’re dealing with academics it requires your writing to convey much more information as they are more difficult to manipulate.
Engaging your audience and manipulating their opinions is the goal and success there is a function of understanding your audience.
Great writing Packy - love your essays. On hyperlegibility, I wonder though if this has the same effect as unlimited (even if bespoke) buffets i.e. food coma. Do we get better & better at integrating at speed such that we forget to step back to ask the right questions on direction? So engrossed in the 'how' that we forget the 'why'.
Whoa is the date removed from this