Packaging ideas has become cheap. Creating them hasn't.
A long form output is part of the long form idea process. We should respect this even as the long form output becomes a bad means for idea proliferation.
As the means of consuming ideas moves towards towards shorter forms (podcast clips, tweets, etc.) the effort to produce meaningful ideas has not significantly reduced (you still have to think, research, challenge).
If we are not careful, as creators of ideas, we will see our idea forming pipeline squash along with the idea consuming mechanisms, producing weaker takes designed to only hold up in a short form environment.
The asymmetry of compression
A sufficiently strong thesis can become a book and be defended on a podcast clip. A weak idea can be defended in a TikTok but cannot hold up to being stretched across 50,000 words. Simply put ideas put to the short form are weaker because they never get stress-tested at length. Compression is lossy in one direction only.
The claim here is that we should continue to go to long form lengths for long form ideas. And if long form lengths looks like long form research and long form thinking, maybe we should produce long for outputs? (I’ll get back to this later)
A short form world will produce both worse ideas and undisciplined thinkers.
We have seen no value tradeoff over time in the capacity for book-writing to build and shape our ideas, but we have seen a value tradeoff in book-selling as a means to share ideas.
For idea shaping and idea distilling the value in writing a book sits almost entirely before reception (although as previously argued the reception of ideas is an important part of shaping them)
If good ideas could always have been shared with low lift we would have worse ideas
At the point when to convey an idea you had to produce an output like a book or documentary, this high lift output was part of the process of distillation allowing better ideas to be formed. No one started making a documentary with the final conclusion neatly formed. (It’s worth noting a mechanism here. Shorter pamphlets and essays have also existed for a long time, but publication was expensive across the board.)
Now it’s low lift to convey ideas but you should still put the full amount of effort in (to the extend you basically have a book) to the crystallisation of an idea.
Sharing ideas with the masses
I asked if we should continue to produce long form outputs even as their reception worsens and their ability to proliferate ideas weakens. There is a filter by which as you create more cohesive defences for ideas the defensibility of those ideas grows, but as we begin to simplify those defences into podcast appearances the opportunity for learning decreases.
Defending an idea at length is itself part of building it, and a short-form defence is a leads to a degraded idea.