Extracting Signals: Playing The Inverse Waldo Game
I believe most of you will recognize the game in the following image, “Where’s Waldo?”. It has many variations such as finding the cat, the rabbit, the differing number etc.
The objective of the game is to hide an object within similar objects acting as distractions. Expressed in another way, the game uses the distractive objects(noises) to hide the target(signal). A poorly written resume, article, poster, or portfolio is very similar to a Finding Waldo game for the reader.
When the author is unable to extract the signals from the noises and guide the reader with well designed indicators and pointers throughout the content, the readers has to search important pieces of information as thought they would search Waldo. The most fundamental difference here is, the reader does not have to search for Waldo. They have hundreds of articles to read, resumes to review, portfolios to go through. You need to make Waldo as detectable as possible, you need to play the inverse Waldo game.
Inverse Waldo Game
Imagine you are indeed playing the game I described in abstract terms in the introduction. You are in a contest where many people submit their Waldo pictures, and the jury awards the best pictures where it is easiest to find Waldo. I would imagine you would be submitting something similar to the picture below. Maybe you would even delete the distracting background and the letters.
If you need to remember a single paragraph from this article, remember the next one.
Creating content is like playing an Inverse Waldo Game. High quality content reduces noise, guides the reader throughout the signals it tries to convey. Mediocre content is often bloated, it is up to the reader to extract the signals from the sea of noises.
Understanding Signals
So far, I have talked about signals and noises as though they are terms set in stone, they aren’t. They are defined with respect to the information you want to convey, qualities of the reader of the contents, and your objective in conveying this information to the reader, namely your end goal.
A simple rule of thumb within this framework is, you ask if adding some piece of content brings you closer to your end goal, or not. If it is not, you probably should not be adding it.
The most obvious example I see violating this principle is people’s resumes. When creating a resume, one tends to want to stuff it with as much as they can fill in one tiny page, sometimes even filling out multiple pages. If you don’t think of the content in terms of signals and noises, it is very easy to fall into the pitfall of adding anything that might be valuable. Yet, you should never forget that you are playing the Inverse Waldo Game. You should think about in terms such as “Will this information help me get an interview?”, “Is this sentence important for me to coherently explain my past experiences?”, “Does adding this experience provide any relevant information regarding my potential performance in my prospective job?”.
Once one starts thinking about signals, they start thinking about the reader. Empathizing with the reader, writing in order to guide the reader is the key to good content creation.
Less Is More
The central theme of the minimalism move is also one of the central principles of this article.
When curating content, it is easy to add. You can set arbitrary thresholds for adding some piece or not. By nature, adding does not force you into trade-offs. On the other hand, not adding it harder. You need to decide some piece is not worth adding. What is even harder is to delete. Deletion implies some piece of content you found worthy to add earlier is now unworthy. It is an implicit debate against your past self. This rigorous process acts as a natural noise filter. Deletion decides on the least worthy information, effectively separating signals from the noise around them.
Signals Are Not Just Information
I have at several points mentioned “guiding the reader throughout the content”. One might ask, what is this guidance I have been talking about?
Although until now, I have been talking about information, signals and noise as they are isolated pieces, they are not. A writing is not a separate set of words, as pictures are not pixels put together. The whole is not the aggregation of the parts, it is the piece, their interactions with each other, as well as their interactions with the reader. That is why we have sentences, paragraphs, punctuations, bold/italics and headers. Whereas monotonicity turns the best of the signals into illegible noise, dynamicity allows for guiding the reader into what is most important. Without the hierarchy provided by these external signaling mechanisms, information itself is not enough to convey signals properly.
