A Problem of an Unknown Audience

It seems that I am having trouble completing the posts that I want to share about certain topics, and it seems to be because I do not know how much I should leave to my readers to figure out and how much space I should use for definitions and motivating topics within the posts about those topics.

Certainly, some of the things will be interesting mostly just to people who already know what the words I am using are and have a reasonable level of familiarity and maturing in the area. Other times, however, I feel — particularly in the vein of the famous complexity problem P vs NP — that many people are interested by it but probably have very little background on complexity classes and models of computation (namely Turing Machines).

While I do not think I have come up with a great solution to the problem, it seems I could do any of the following. First, I could just simply ignore it. I could assume that, if someone is interested enough to know what I am talking about, they will gain the necessary background knowledge themselves or already have it. Second, I could mostly ignore it, but put lots of pointers or links in my posts to descriptions of concepts that I am talking about. This seems to make a lot of sense to me, and I can imagine it will happen more than once. Third, I could have separate posts giving small introductions to things and giving definitions so the posts to come later seem less foreign. I like this idea the most, and, I think this is what I am going to try out for now. An issue that I see with this, however, is that it may require a reader to search for my previous posts (which does not seem good, but I will think that over and gladly take suggestions regarding this or anything else, really). Another issue I see with this is that it could make a majority of my posts uninteresting to people who are already educated on these topics. I believe this is excusable, especially if I post frequently.

As a result, I think I may, for some period of time, try to have at least a daily post, most of which will be definitions leading up to something that I think is interesting. I will try to post things interesting to my readers that already know all the definitions about as frequently as you might expect a normal blog to post interesting things. I will try to go no more than a week without posting things that are substantial. Maybe if I structure and categorize the posts well enough (at least on my wordpress site), this may be a useful learning tool for someone in the future.

Thanks for reading!

-A Student of Logic