The Sequences vs evergreen notes

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Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences on LessWrong and evergreen notes in the style of Andy Matuschak have a number of similarities:

  • They try to give labels to concepts, and are not afraid of coining new jargon in order to make subsequent thinking clearer
  • They package atomic insights into notes or blog posts, to be cited in other places in the work
  • They link out in a wiki-like fashion so readers can crawl the site to find prerequisites, related thoughts, and so on

Some big differences are:

  • Andy does not seem to view his evergreen notes as a final product; rather, they are a base of knowledge to pull from when writing an actual public-facing product such as an essay. In contrast, Eliezer views the Sequences as the main product.
  • Evergreen notes are constantly revised, whereas the Sequences were written down so as to externalize a coherent worldview that Eliezer already held.
  • Evergreen notes pages tend to be much smaller than a typical post from the Sequences.