I agree that this phenomenon occurs, but I respond to it differently. Part of what I love about Less Wrong is that it’s less tolerant than most places of the “tl;dr lol” approach to skimming content that you describe. I want to maintain or even increase the force of that social norm.
I’m in favor of summaries and abstracts on long pieces. This is not a long piece. The first paragraph is the summary. A separate “abstract” section would only encourage people to skip the body of the essay, and that would be bad.
Fair enough—it’s not all that long if it was necessary for a novel or interesting point. It’s too long for something relatively simply that I already have in my toolbox, and there was no way to figure out if that’s all it was without reading the whole thing.
So because you already have the tool, nobody else needs to be told about it? I feel like I’m strawmanning here, but I’m not sure what your point is if not, “I didn’t need to read this.”
“I didn’t need to read this” is probably close to what prompted my comment. Along with “and I suspect most readers also won’t get much out of it”,
I should have just said “this should have gone in discussion first, then (if it was popular) rewritten as a top-level post with a clearer summary”. Since it’s gotten a reasonable amount of comments and upvotes, I think I was incorrect in my assessment that most readers would be like me,
Thank you. I no longer suspect you of being mind-killed by “politics is the mind-killer.” Retracted.
Maybe I’m being too hasty trying to pinpoint people being mind-killed here, but it’s hard to ignore that it’s happening. I think I probably need to take my own advice right about now if I’m trying to justify my jumping to conclusions with statements like, “It’s hard to ignore that it’s happening.”
I was planning to make a top-level comment here to the effect of, “INB4obvious mind-kill,” but I think I just realized why the thoughts that thought that up were flawed from a basic level. Still, I think someone should point out that the comments here are barely touching the content of this article, which is odd for LessWrong.
I agree that this phenomenon occurs, but I respond to it differently. Part of what I love about Less Wrong is that it’s less tolerant than most places of the “tl;dr lol” approach to skimming content that you describe. I want to maintain or even increase the force of that social norm.
I’m in favor of summaries and abstracts on long pieces. This is not a long piece. The first paragraph is the summary. A separate “abstract” section would only encourage people to skip the body of the essay, and that would be bad.
Fair enough—it’s not all that long if it was necessary for a novel or interesting point. It’s too long for something relatively simply that I already have in my toolbox, and there was no way to figure out if that’s all it was without reading the whole thing.
So because you already have the tool, nobody else needs to be told about it? I feel like I’m strawmanning here, but I’m not sure what your point is if not, “I didn’t need to read this.”
“I didn’t need to read this” is probably close to what prompted my comment. Along with “and I suspect most readers also won’t get much out of it”,
I should have just said “this should have gone in discussion first, then (if it was popular) rewritten as a top-level post with a clearer summary”. Since it’s gotten a reasonable amount of comments and upvotes, I think I was incorrect in my assessment that most readers would be like me,
Thank you. I no longer suspect you of being mind-killed by “politics is the mind-killer.” Retracted.
Maybe I’m being too hasty trying to pinpoint people being mind-killed here, but it’s hard to ignore that it’s happening. I think I probably need to take my own advice right about now if I’m trying to justify my jumping to conclusions with statements like, “It’s hard to ignore that it’s happening.”
I was planning to make a top-level comment here to the effect of, “INB4obvious mind-kill,” but I think I just realized why the thoughts that thought that up were flawed from a basic level. Still, I think someone should point out that the comments here are barely touching the content of this article, which is odd for LessWrong.