This is pretty inside baseball and I suspect boring to most readers. You have my blessing to skip it.

Two weeks ago I published Knowledge Boostrapping v0.1, an algorithm for turning questions into answers. Since then I’ve gotten a moderate amount of feedback, a major theme of which is lack of clarity in certain sections. That’s entirely fair, but not something I immediately know how to fix. In an attempt to make some headway on the problem, I recorded in detail the steps I took in a recent attempt at using a method.

This isn’t really a central case of use- the question was of business norms, not The Truth, and the research I did more primed me to think of the solution myself, more than it provided the answer. But non-central examples are sometimes more useful and the cost to sharing is low given, so here we go.

 

 

  1. 12:30 Working on a project with someone, get to the point where we think “we should have a white paper”

  2. Problem: I’ve never written a white paper, and he has but isn’t really clear on what the goals or audience are. I decide this is worth an hour to get right.

  3. 12:45 Follow my own advice to come up with questions to investigate.

  4. Step 1 is make a mind map of questions. Discover Whimsical’s free plan only allows four creations, ever, even if you delete old work.

    1. Go on FB to complain to friend who recommended it to me

    2. 12:57. Try to create in Roam instead
      Start page currently looks like:

  5. 12:58 Google “white papers 101”

  6. 12:58: first hit https://thatwhitepaperguy.com/tips-best-practices-white-papers/ . Seems…uncomprehensive? Not high level enough? Extremely vague to the point of uselessness?

  7. 12:59 fight with NYTimes paywall https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/business/smallbusiness/12toolkit.html . Article itself is useless but links to some promising pages.

    1. 1:01 https://smallbiztrends.com/2009/04/its-national-write-a-white-paper-month-april-2009.html . It’s basically a link to http://www.rgmcomms.com/whitepapers.html

      1. 1:02 http://www.rgmcomms.com/whitepapers.html no longer has the PDF referenced above

    2. 1:02 http://www.howtodothings.com/hobbies/a4622-how-to-write-a-white-paper.html

      1. Not useless. Begin notes on the top level Roam page, because I expect to only extract a few things from it.

      2. White papers can be aimed at a variety of audiences. Know which one you want and tailor it to them.

        1. 1:06 He doesn’t say it explicitly, but presumably a white paper is aimed at people you want things from. I think about who [partner] and I want things from

          1. This is kind of a dumb revelation. If white papers weren’t aimed at who we wanted things from, we should write a different kind of thing aimed at people we wanted things from.

          2. Rest of page is kind of vapid but I’m feeling pretty inspired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • 1:10 Remember to tag parent Roam page as a question. I would show you what Roam page looks like now, but apparently I forgot to take a picture.

  • Take that prompt and think a bit, till I come up with an algorithm I’m happy with

 

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