alt Hacker NewsYeah, deciding on your assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge is one of the toughest parts of presenting information well, I think. If you give too much info, you come across as boring or patronizing; if you don't give enough info, most (if not all) of your audience will rapidly lose interest. But it's all gotta be based on your exact audience in the moment, and that's really hard to take into account a lot of the time.
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> Yeah, deciding on your assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge is one of the toughest parts of presenting information well, I think.
Right, all good (human) communication boils down to both the author and the reader having a theory-of-mind for one-another. The writer must anticipate what a reader will be thinking, and a reader must imagine [0] what the writer wanted to convey.
That's part of what makes the modern epidemic of LLM slop so frustrating: The correctly-formed words make us waste effort trying to reconstruct a mind that was never really there. Like some animals encountering an extremely realistic plastic fake that we cannot eat/mate-with.
When writing text, you have the advantage of being able to link to another text. In principle academic citations form a DAG that allows you to understand all prerequisite knowledge for any given paper. Your paper is expected to cite everything it depends on that isn't common knowledge but doesn't need to re-explain it.