canon is emergent
Canon is emergent, not written as canon
9 tweets · December 2022 · 20 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter
even in the original sense of canon as excellent or supreme books, which began as an extension from the authoritarian canon of the bible... ...those books weren't written AS canon. they BECAME canon when they were selected
likewise, what forms contemporary canon for a given group of people doesn't per se know that it's going to be canon when it's written of course, some blog posts know they're NOT going to be canon, but the question of what IS canon is subject to the sands of time
the @LessWrong books are a great example of how to approach this: they don't even start trying to pick the "best of 2019" until 2021. a whole year must pass—what do people keep going back to?
hmmm... many meanings!
anyway, it seems to me that writing posts INTENDED to be canon is really hard because it sets up a whole perfectionistic vibe, and that having an iterative approach is better and maybe I want my posts to be almost like... numbered as v0.9, v1, v1.1?
although also like, when I started trying to edit this into a post, it changed so much that it isn't even necessarily accurate to call the new version I might publish "v2" of the same thing, except insofar as both might be titled "what is coercion?"
but then maybe that's a sign that that's a bad title! and "an initial PCT lens on coercion" would be better for the first one and "coercion and collapsed awareness" would be better for the second one! "what is coercion" sets the post up to BE canonical! maybe that's a mistake!
this is, I think, btw, why it's so easy to write something up when someone else has just written up a wrong version you cease trying to write the perfect canonical version, and instead seek to write something that's at least better than their shit version