I got a lot of new followers recently after Tweeting a great explanation of quantum computing.

Actually, I explain hard subjects for a living.

Now I'll explain how good explainations work.

Here are 3 high impact tips to make the way you describe something wow other people:

🧵 1. It's not just how good you are at explaining something. It's how hard the information is to get in the first place, and how your explanation ranks against others.

Information that is difficult to obtain is more valuable.

For example, if someone opened a Tweet with…

"I ran a profitable algorithmic trading strategy at a hedge fund. Today, I'm revealing what we did, how it worked, and why we stopped using it"

…that thread would take off massively.

Why?

Because insights into profitable algorithmic strategies (especially ones that work at hedgefund scale) is hard information to obtain. Therefore, even if the explanation is poorly written (repetitive, bad grammar, mispellings, flow issues), it will still be considered valuable. People will put up with bad writing if it takes them a lot less effort to read your essay than to research the topic themselves (let alone discover a useable trading strategy).

This is one reason with @RareSkills_io why I prefer to bet big on creating explainers for difficult subjects. Even if there are gaps in the writing, the *real* effort went into discovering the information, not polishing up the report. Of course, if you can do both, then you have the ingredients for legendary content. This is of course very financially risky, so it's not a blanket recommendation.

If you are the only person who can remotely explain something, then you will be considered good at explaining it even if your writing is subpar.

This does not mean if you write on a hard subject your explanation is automatically good. If the reader has to spend comparable effort to reasearching the subject on their own relative to reading your dense article, your explanation will be lost to the dustbin of history.

But what if aren't the only person who tries to explain something?

Explanations are always implicitly ranked. Your explanation will be judged how good it is relative other explanations.

If someone writes on the same subject better than you, they will click away from your explanation and read someone else's.

If you try to create an explainer for something well-known, like how the quicksort algorithm works, you better knock it out of the park, because people will give you exactly 10 seconds to see if your explanation is better than ones they have seen before, then they will disengage.

Now observe that you either need to 1) spend a lot of effort obtaining hard-to-get information or 2) you need to spend a lot of effort polishing easy-to-get information. A good explanation takes effort, whether in the information acquisition stage, or the understanding-to-writing stage.

So the main point is that explanations that other people consider valuable require investment, because they are intrinsically stack-ranked against other explanations.

When people read an explainer, they implicitly assume that the author wrote it nearly as fast as they are reading it. If the article is good, this is never the case.

I like to compare creating a good article as similar to polishing a gemstone or an expensive watch. You either need to put a lot of work into obtaining the gemstone (it will still look good even if the polish isn't perfect), or you need to put a lot of effort into polishing a luxury watch (which is often made out of cheap materials like steel, but the polishing, or "finishing" makes it cost more).

In either case, polishing and writing is an iterative process, often with an undefined end-state. Explanations are not something you ship once your code passes all the tests.

At the end of the day, explanations are good because they provide value for the reader. Value in this case comes in the form of saved time. If you just summarize easily obtainable information, you aren't saving the reader time. If you put effort into making existing information a lot more clear, or doing a lot of work to obtain hard-to-get information, then you are providing value.

I read Google's paper about their quantum computer so you don't have to.

They claim to have ran a quantum computation in 5 minutes that would take a normal computer 10^25 years.

But what was that computation? Does it live up to the hype?

I will break it down.🧵 First we need a crash course in quantum computing.

A classical computer keeps information in 64-bit groups called "words."

Each of these groups of bits are run through logic gates such as AND, OR, and NOT.

These gates take one or two bits as an input and return a single bit as an output.

AND returns 1 if both the inputs are 1,

OR returns 1 if at least one of the inputs is 1

NOT returns 1 if the input is 0.

Look, I understand why you are bearish on ETH.

I’m bearish too — for the same reason’s I’m bearish on my own company — not because of the mid takes your timeline is parroting.

This thread discusses the following topics:

1. On Vitalik’s resistance to be the face of the brand
2. On the Ethereum Foundation not supporting companies in the ecosystem
3. On parasitic L2s

🧵 1. On Vitalik’s resistance to be the face of the brand

Few things make me happier when I meet someone and they are like “oh you are from RareSkills, thank you so much, love the company!”

On Twitter, it’s kind of common knowledge that I run RareSkills, but for people finding RS randomly online, they often don’t know I exist.

And that is a good thing.

I want the company to stand on the quality of its work, not leverage whatever “celebrity/influencer status” I have.

I’m not a fan of using my personal brand to advance the company, but several people I trust have said that’s not the right mindset. I disagree with them — but I’m trying to find a middle ground. I’m sure Vitalik is doing the same.

Personal brands create very serious single points of failure, both from an enterprise value perspective and from a risk perspective. They are like levering perps with 100x. Yes, you can get high returns fast because people love authentic connections with real people, but it also puts resistance on your upside and greatly increases your downside.

I want anyone who works at RareSkills to have their personal brand enhanced by it — not the other way around.

Take for example how Rolex uses Roger Federer as a brand ambassador. If he stopped shilling Rolex today, their sales would not be seriously hurt. That’s the place I want RS to be at, and I’m sure that’s the place where Vitalik wants Ethereum to be at.

To a certain extent, RareSkills could probably survive the exit of its founder better than a lot of other web3 companies. The reason I know is because many people outside of Twitter don’t know I exist, but they still love the brand. Similarly, aside from Bitcoin, there’s no question that Ethereum is best positioned to survive, relative to other ecosystems, if something were to happen to its founder.

This is a very long term view that frustrates people, because everyone knows that a celebrity founder bullposting works — but what they don’t know is that it only works in the short term.

Some thoughts on the akutars bug good bad and ugly:

- some of my friends have lost due the floor dropping as a result. My heart goes out to you.
- the bug was well intentioned. They blocked themselves from withdrawing the money until everyone got their refund… 👇 … so it had an “anti rug” mechanism built in. They tried to do something novel which was very pro customer and I’m a big fan. Intention was 100% on point. A bug in the anti rug logic left the funds unwithdrawable
- the developers clearly did not follow or were not aware of… 👇