Side note: if the relative lack of comments (compared to other of my posts) continues, this is potentially interesting (if weak) evidence on a fairly experimental post.
Null hypothesis: Noise. This went up on a day when people just happened to have less time and energy to spare, or were spending it in other places, and one comment is not that different from five comments, and there’s nothing more interesting to read into it than that.
Hypothesis 1: People consider this post to be representative of less effort, and are withdrawing an effort-based reward they have offered me previously (btw, it is not below the mean in terms of effort required to produce it).
Hypothesis 2: People prefer text over images/infographics generally, within this subculture, and engaged with this post less than with other posts that had more complete and nuanced/interesting thoughts.
Hypothesis 3: People prefer information that requires them to do less construction. This post is nonsense unless you stop and think on each picture for at least 3 seconds and better 10 or 20. That level of effort is higher than they bargained for with a daily Conor Moreton LW post, and so they disengaged.
Hypothesis 4: Framing; there is no warning at the top of the page and no set of guide rails that tell you “hey, this’ll be nonsense unless you stop and think.” People started the post as consumers because they were not told otherwise, and thus became discouraged and left.
Hypothesis 5: Pedagogy. This post does not convey the concept as well as I think it does, from my position over on this side of the illusion of transparency.
Hypothesis 6: Richness. This is on the simpler side and there’s just less to dig into or disagree with or elaborate on.
Hypothesis 7: Everything makes perfect sense and there’s nothing left to say.
There are probably other obvious hypotheses I’m missing, but those above give me neat toys to play with and possibilities to test out in future posts.
The way this post “presents” to me, it feels like a “here’s a list of interesting thought experiments / questions for you to ponder in your head.”
It just doesn’t feel like a discussion is being called for; it feels like it’s calling on me to have interesting thoughts, but silently. (Like it’s feeding into my shower thoughts, not the verbal-discussion thoughts.)
The post feels like a good thing to link to in the future.
When a post is in text it’s already in or close to the form of a discussion, and the post gives language and many specific places to reference to continue the discussion.
For this post, engaging with each image means moving out of a verbal space and if you want to type comments you need to come up with your own schema for determining what part you’re responding to and how to discuss it in words. That’s a lot more effort, resulting in fewer comments.
I think it’s also very important to distinguish “makes sense” or “is preferred” from “provokes comments” here—the post has about the same level of upvotes as your usual posts, just fewer comments. That means people are probably reading and appreciating the post at similar rates, just not commenting because it’s more difficult without being obviously more rewarding.
I observe that if I were going to comment on this, it would feel like either 1) a list of short answer replies or 2) Mumon’s commentary on a koan, and it feels like the first is not interesting enough to say, and the second the source is not interesting enough to provoke?
(With “interesting” having a particular meaning here.)
As a data point, I think for me Hypothesis 3 is roughly correct, though I wouldn’t say that I “prefer” information that requires me to do less construction, and just that when I am low on mental bandwidth, that the stuff that requires me to do construction gets necessarily dropped first.
Side note: if the relative lack of comments (compared to other of my posts) continues, this is potentially interesting (if weak) evidence on a fairly experimental post.
Null hypothesis: Noise. This went up on a day when people just happened to have less time and energy to spare, or were spending it in other places, and one comment is not that different from five comments, and there’s nothing more interesting to read into it than that.
Hypothesis 1: People consider this post to be representative of less effort, and are withdrawing an effort-based reward they have offered me previously (btw, it is not below the mean in terms of effort required to produce it).
Hypothesis 2: People prefer text over images/infographics generally, within this subculture, and engaged with this post less than with other posts that had more complete and nuanced/interesting thoughts.
Hypothesis 3: People prefer information that requires them to do less construction. This post is nonsense unless you stop and think on each picture for at least 3 seconds and better 10 or 20. That level of effort is higher than they bargained for with a daily Conor Moreton LW post, and so they disengaged.
Hypothesis 4: Framing; there is no warning at the top of the page and no set of guide rails that tell you “hey, this’ll be nonsense unless you stop and think.” People started the post as consumers because they were not told otherwise, and thus became discouraged and left.
Hypothesis 5: Pedagogy. This post does not convey the concept as well as I think it does, from my position over on this side of the illusion of transparency.
Hypothesis 6: Richness. This is on the simpler side and there’s just less to dig into or disagree with or elaborate on.
Hypothesis 7: Everything makes perfect sense and there’s nothing left to say.
There are probably other obvious hypotheses I’m missing, but those above give me neat toys to play with and possibilities to test out in future posts.
The way this post “presents” to me, it feels like a “here’s a list of interesting thought experiments / questions for you to ponder in your head.”
It just doesn’t feel like a discussion is being called for; it feels like it’s calling on me to have interesting thoughts, but silently. (Like it’s feeding into my shower thoughts, not the verbal-discussion thoughts.)
The post feels like a good thing to link to in the future.
When a post is in text it’s already in or close to the form of a discussion, and the post gives language and many specific places to reference to continue the discussion.
For this post, engaging with each image means moving out of a verbal space and if you want to type comments you need to come up with your own schema for determining what part you’re responding to and how to discuss it in words. That’s a lot more effort, resulting in fewer comments.
I think it’s also very important to distinguish “makes sense” or “is preferred” from “provokes comments” here—the post has about the same level of upvotes as your usual posts, just fewer comments. That means people are probably reading and appreciating the post at similar rates, just not commenting because it’s more difficult without being obviously more rewarding.
I observe that if I were going to comment on this, it would feel like either 1) a list of short answer replies or 2) Mumon’s commentary on a koan, and it feels like the first is not interesting enough to say, and the second the source is not interesting enough to provoke?
(With “interesting” having a particular meaning here.)
As a data point, I think for me Hypothesis 3 is roughly correct, though I wouldn’t say that I “prefer” information that requires me to do less construction, and just that when I am low on mental bandwidth, that the stuff that requires me to do construction gets necessarily dropped first.
I believe Null Hypothesis. This site isn’t getting too many comments so there’s plenty room for variation. I would definitely rule out Hypothesis 7.