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Tyrrell_McAllister's avatar

Blogs do make a good gestation chamber for new ideas.

But suppose that a theory has survived that trial by fire, has been shaped and honed by all that criticism and elaboration. Now what? How is the theory to spread? Is a new person, interested in the theory, going to go through that entire sprawling mass of blog posts and try to extract the underlying logic of the theory?

No. But a book can take that theory, perfected by the give-and-take of blogging, and present it in a more concise and logically structured way. The original articles presented the theory across a vast collection of texts with a lot of rehashing and digressions over the years. The book can distill and synthesize all this into something that a new intellectual can digest and critique. Without that kind of periodic distillation, you don't get another round of critique and elaboration. And without that, the theory is dead.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Extremely skeptical that non-fiction books as a medium of intellectual expression actually have much to offer in 2017. The best "book-length treatments" are a series of blog posts and/or articles through which ideas can be developed, challenged, and elaborated on either directly through comments or indirectly through peer blogs and fora.

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