The Shape of the Essay Field

The content in this essay applies just as well to YouTube videos and TikToks.

I came up with difficulty, opportunity and motivation.

If an idea is difficult or non-obvious, if it requires insight or following the steps of a particular argument, many people of any age may remain ignorant of it. You could kind of force this into the obtuse bucket, but in my experience people are less obtuse, than slow. Obtuse, as a label, is mostly a way of lazily flipping the bozo bit and cutting your losses.

And if you don't encounter an idea or concept or piece of knowledge, you won't know it. If it's useful, you may just have accepted a worldview without that use. This kind of ignorance isn't just inexperience. It can be learned helplessness too.

Motivation is an axis that isn't fully orthogonal to the others. Motivation can overcome difficulty, and encourage searching and testing behavior which gets you to opportunity.

I'm not sure, having read the essay, that PG's perspective is more correct. I think obtuseness is too reductive, and inexperience strikes me as more plausible as a reason an essay might be impactful, optimizing for one reason for ignorance, than a reason for not knowing the topic of any given essay if it's not general common sense.

On impact: I think something is likely to be more impactful the more ignorant you are about the topic were beforehand (the distance between what you knew before and after reading), multiplied by how motivated you are (which is related but distinct from importance: you can be motivated by stamp collecting or trainspotting). Your motivation is generally split among competing motivations the older you get; you can't afford focused monomania like a teenager.

A big dose of information isn't likely to shift your momentum (getting close to physical impact) when it's just a glancing blow, rather than hitting it head on.

Anyway, it sure is impactful to tell the kids stuff. I think we already knew this though.