If we’re counting, I disagree about having too many hyperlinks. WHen digging deep I open links in additional tabs as I need to and check them either immediately or later depending on context. I don’t trust tests of reading comprehension with and without unfollowed links as being relevant, obviously the text that experiment was designed for was a test of flat text reading comprehension. Finally I don’t believe the tested were limited to people who were incredibly facile with reading hypertext. I love the fact that these articles give lots of in line hyperlinks.
I really like hyperlinks as well. What I use them for (and like them for) is to keep track of the flow of an idea.
As I develop an idea, I often remember some places where that idea came from and I’ll link to the ‘seeds’ of that idea. The ‘seeds’ can be my own comments or someone else’s, and I feel I am pretty good at organizing information in this way.
Reading through a set of threads in a page, there is often an obvious vacuum where some other ideas should be linked. On Less Wrong, the same conversations occur over and over. Sometimes a conversation that is very interesting to me fizzles out and when that conversation spontaneously picks up again, it seems important to connect them with links.
Ultimately, I model Less Wrong as a brain, where more links between ideas corresponds to fast, more complex, non-linear and higher order thinking.
I agree it can be annoying and frustrating. In response to SarahC’s comment here where she writes:
I’m a sequential thinker so I just don’t click on hyperlinks as I read. I’m left with a nagging sense of incompletion afterwards, and if that nagging sense is strong enough I go back and check the links.
I agree and feel the same way but it would be worse if the links weren’t there. While there’s a nagging sense of incompletion if you don’t link, without the links there is a real lack of completion. (Sometimes, knowing that humans can’t realistically follow, keep track of or care about all these interconnections, I imagine I am doing this for a future artificial intelligence building a model of how humans develop ideas or for a graduate student writing a thesis about the development of physical materialist viewpoints in the 21st century).
We can definitely improve hyperlink use with a list of best practices. For example, while referring to SarahC’s comment above I also copied the sentence I was referring to. I think this was helpful (you don’t need to follow the link, I already included the relevant information) and I did this consciously in response to criticisms I’ve read about hyperlinks in this post.
I would definitely like to see a more detailed analysis of the studies. I’m sure the truth is more complicated than “hyperlinks are bad. Always.” And the article doesn’t actually cite anything, so it’s possible some things are exaggerated. But I think the evidence is compelling enough that if you don’t think hyperlinks are bad for your comprehension, the proper response is “hmm, well, these experiments might be flawed, but I should think about what experiments wouldn’t be flawed and how I would respond in a least convenient world where it turned out that hyperlinks are worse than I think they are.”
And it seems to me this should actually be possible for us to run an experiment on, tailored specifically for Less Wrong members. It would take a fair amount of work to set up but it’d be doable.
the proper response is “hmm, well, these experiments might be flawed, but I should think about what experiments wouldn’t be flawed and how I would respond in a least convenient world where it turned out that hyperlinks are worse than I think they are.”
My proper response is “I am going to continue to want to read heavily hyperlinked posts anyway, my confidence that this study is irrelevant to my particular case is high enough that neither studying this study nor fixing this study is concievably worth my time. And oh, I better post that opinion in case in the absence of posts to the contrary, some posters who currently do a great job putting hyperlinks in their posts are motivated to stop doing that thinking this new ‘information’ is valuable.”
But a proper response for someone who either takes the former study more seriously or takes the whole question more seriously might be to propose a study which looks for the difference.
Meanwhile, I’m still going after dualism vs materialism, the implications of newcomb’s problems for how I should think about the world, and whether or not free will really is trivially solved on lesswrong. I prefer to do that with plenty of hyperlinks as I cast about widely.
I think it’s fair to consider this enough of a nonissue to not care. But I honestly don’t understand where the confidence that the study is completely flawed comes from.
I am willing to put in effort to work out an experiment relevant to Less Wrong, but only if other people are willing to actually participate.
I don’t believe the original study was completely flawed, and indeed as far as it went it might not have been flawed at all. As I read it, the study showed
Experienced web surfers use a pile of neurons when surfing the web
Reading a sequential story where the links to further pages were somehow intermixed with the text of the story was slower and more confusing than reading a sequential story where the links to further pages were at the end and labeled “next”
Reading comprehension of a flat article which had not hyperlinks in it was better than reading comprehension of that same flat article when hyperlinks were added to it, whether or not the hyperlinks were followed.
If you want to make a test that shows hyperlinks are better, test the readers of the article with hyperlinks on some of the things the hyperlinks went to. We will then find that readers of the hyperlinked articles comprehended more than readers of the same articles without hyperlinks.
I imagine when I read hyperlinked articles on something that my alternative to a few hours of that is a few days of reading textbooks, and having to hope I remember the connections from one book to another and can find information in the other books when I need it. Even before hypertext I used book indexes and tables of contents extensively when I was learning something.
If we’re counting, I disagree about having too many hyperlinks. WHen digging deep I open links in additional tabs as I need to and check them either immediately or later depending on context. I don’t trust tests of reading comprehension with and without unfollowed links as being relevant, obviously the text that experiment was designed for was a test of flat text reading comprehension. Finally I don’t believe the tested were limited to people who were incredibly facile with reading hypertext. I love the fact that these articles give lots of in line hyperlinks.
I really like hyperlinks as well. What I use them for (and like them for) is to keep track of the flow of an idea.
As I develop an idea, I often remember some places where that idea came from and I’ll link to the ‘seeds’ of that idea. The ‘seeds’ can be my own comments or someone else’s, and I feel I am pretty good at organizing information in this way.
Reading through a set of threads in a page, there is often an obvious vacuum where some other ideas should be linked. On Less Wrong, the same conversations occur over and over. Sometimes a conversation that is very interesting to me fizzles out and when that conversation spontaneously picks up again, it seems important to connect them with links.
Ultimately, I model Less Wrong as a brain, where more links between ideas corresponds to fast, more complex, non-linear and higher order thinking.
I agree it can be annoying and frustrating. In response to SarahC’s comment here where she writes:
I agree and feel the same way but it would be worse if the links weren’t there. While there’s a nagging sense of incompletion if you don’t link, without the links there is a real lack of completion. (Sometimes, knowing that humans can’t realistically follow, keep track of or care about all these interconnections, I imagine I am doing this for a future artificial intelligence building a model of how humans develop ideas or for a graduate student writing a thesis about the development of physical materialist viewpoints in the 21st century).
We can definitely improve hyperlink use with a list of best practices. For example, while referring to SarahC’s comment above I also copied the sentence I was referring to. I think this was helpful (you don’t need to follow the link, I already included the relevant information) and I did this consciously in response to criticisms I’ve read about hyperlinks in this post.
I would definitely like to see a more detailed analysis of the studies. I’m sure the truth is more complicated than “hyperlinks are bad. Always.” And the article doesn’t actually cite anything, so it’s possible some things are exaggerated. But I think the evidence is compelling enough that if you don’t think hyperlinks are bad for your comprehension, the proper response is “hmm, well, these experiments might be flawed, but I should think about what experiments wouldn’t be flawed and how I would respond in a least convenient world where it turned out that hyperlinks are worse than I think they are.”
And it seems to me this should actually be possible for us to run an experiment on, tailored specifically for Less Wrong members. It would take a fair amount of work to set up but it’d be doable.
My proper response is “I am going to continue to want to read heavily hyperlinked posts anyway, my confidence that this study is irrelevant to my particular case is high enough that neither studying this study nor fixing this study is concievably worth my time. And oh, I better post that opinion in case in the absence of posts to the contrary, some posters who currently do a great job putting hyperlinks in their posts are motivated to stop doing that thinking this new ‘information’ is valuable.”
But a proper response for someone who either takes the former study more seriously or takes the whole question more seriously might be to propose a study which looks for the difference.
Meanwhile, I’m still going after dualism vs materialism, the implications of newcomb’s problems for how I should think about the world, and whether or not free will really is trivially solved on lesswrong. I prefer to do that with plenty of hyperlinks as I cast about widely.
I think it’s fair to consider this enough of a nonissue to not care. But I honestly don’t understand where the confidence that the study is completely flawed comes from.
I am willing to put in effort to work out an experiment relevant to Less Wrong, but only if other people are willing to actually participate.
I don’t believe the original study was completely flawed, and indeed as far as it went it might not have been flawed at all. As I read it, the study showed
Experienced web surfers use a pile of neurons when surfing the web
Reading a sequential story where the links to further pages were somehow intermixed with the text of the story was slower and more confusing than reading a sequential story where the links to further pages were at the end and labeled “next”
Reading comprehension of a flat article which had not hyperlinks in it was better than reading comprehension of that same flat article when hyperlinks were added to it, whether or not the hyperlinks were followed.
If you want to make a test that shows hyperlinks are better, test the readers of the article with hyperlinks on some of the things the hyperlinks went to. We will then find that readers of the hyperlinked articles comprehended more than readers of the same articles without hyperlinks.
I imagine when I read hyperlinked articles on something that my alternative to a few hours of that is a few days of reading textbooks, and having to hope I remember the connections from one book to another and can find information in the other books when I need it. Even before hypertext I used book indexes and tables of contents extensively when I was learning something.