Comment of the Day: : A Semi-Platonic Dialogue About Secular Stagnation, Asymmetric Risks, Federal Reserve Policy, and the Role of Model-Building in Guiding Economic Policy: "Do you REALLY think that the written dialog form is the optimal way to teach things?...
...I find dialog substantially more difficult to read than a traditional argument (eg a paper or textbook), and I suspect that the prevalence of the latter over the former (even though the former has still been used occasionally, eg Galileo, or Imre Lakatos) means that my experience matches that of most people.
Even the 'genuine' dialog (as opposed to the strawman dialog constructed by one mind) of something like the comments stream to a blog post doesn't operate like a real dialog (and is substantially more useful for operating differently). The units of discourse are fully constructed arguments, mini-lectures composed of many substantial parts; not the single sentence argument fragments of real-life dialogs and of book dialogs.
I do wonder if dialog nostalgia is akin to the same sort of nostalgia that our host mocks regarding writing vs memory, or typing vs manual writing, or paper vs screens, or (doubtless soon enough) dictating vs typing.
