Shortform

I love reference books, formula booklets, and cheatsheets.

Textbooks and boardgame rulebooks are awesome, but they have to teach the material, which gets in the way of auramaxxing: explanations are ephemeral and messy, and you have to include arbitrary things like examples.

The layout, ordering, and grouping has to be selected to be pedagogically sensible, which sometimes doesn’t reflect the conceptual proximity or distance between chunks of information. They aren’t even trying to be maps.

But the information density in reference books fills me with awe.
When all the most powerful rules, theorems, and formulas are right next to each other it’s as if you have a whole area of human knowledge compressed into a few lines.