I feel that since I'll be using the "five points about this and that" format frequently, I should occasionally revise them. For this post, I'll try to go more in-depth about the creation of such lists and their similarity to physics. You see, what happens in physics is that some measurements can be made impossible due to measurement errors.
In a straightforward example: consider measuring the length of an A4 paper, with a typical ruler used in math classes in high school. It would be tedious and bit annoying to measure a straight line, yet still doable. Consider now, using the same ruler, to measure the exact height of the same A4 paper. Now that's a task impossible to achieve with what you have at hand, because at best, you're limited to the scale that the ruler uses. Even adding a few A4 papers on top of each other will still make it for a pile smaller than 1 millimeter and therefore not measurable exactly with the given tool.
And even if you have the possibility of more precise measurements, you always have to consider if it makes sense to do so. For example, if you're summing up two quantities, one being the height of a chair (let's say around 1 meter for the sake of it) and the other an A4 paper poised on top of it (let's say it's 0,1 mm for the sake of the argument). It doesn't make much sense to include the A4 in your measurements at all. In fact, the chair is 10.000 times higher than the piece of paper and therefore it's perfectly ok to measure only the height of the chair and forget the paper altogether - the 0.01% of paper added value that you discard is very likely smaller than the measurement error you have.
There's a hidden question here: When are approximations good and when not? The answer is far from being simple as it depends on specific cases (what do we want to measure and how) and most of all, to answer it properly, you need a detailed study of statistics and data analysis, which is beyond the current scope of this writing. What I'd like to talk about, instead, is how this (in my opinion) applies to the style of writing a list of five.
The first aspect of writing such a list is thinking about the topic I'd like to write about. Depending on how scattered my thoughts are, I can already know what I'll be writing about, or figure it out as I write. There are plenty of topics that I can talk about, both something I didn't yet cover, as well as revisions of my past ideas.
By choosing 5 points for each topic, I acknowledge that they're more important then the rest - I approximate the whole topic with the select choice of 5. This doesn't mean that other points don't exist or are useless, mind you! It's just that in my opinion, they don't measure up to the five I've chosen. Currently, I don't think I'll be able to give a determined quantity of what was left out. I'm not able to say, e.g. "these following five points cover 90% of the important matters of this topic". And neither am I be able to give a measurement error for them.
Even without measurements, the "lists of 5" can have, between them, a huge difference in the importance of the points they cover. It should be evident (I try to make it evident) by reading them. What this means is that there will be cases where every point on the list is equally important, as well as cases where only one point (or a few) are relevant and the rest is interesting, but not of crucial importance. This is a downside of the lists of 5 - you have to read them through in order to understand what's truly important and what is, perhaps, only a point to illustrate other points better.
In these cases, I could as well decide to keep the list flexible and sometimes give 3, other times 8 points. For the time being, I prefer the number 5. I think it's a really nice number to convey a lot of information and yet not too much and it makes me think really hard in order to prepare it properly.
I'll keep thinking about how to improve this format, and if I can come up with an effective measure of something - anything - about this writing, you can be damn sure I'll use it here. Setting things straight is important in today's world, as far too many people get lost and wind up depressed. I want to be exact, so that people can then either correct me when I'm wrong, or I myself realize what I've failed to properly describe and give it another try.
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