I hadn’t thought about the issue with searching, that’s a pretty good counterargument. (I am not able to search for the probabilities in this document either, because the LATEX isn’t searchable :-/)
Ultimately it comes down to an aesthetic preference for me: I will use these because they look kind of neat. But perhaps applying the reversal test to something like footnotes is interesting here: Imagine one was always writing “more specialized predators have bigger prey (see footnote 3)” instead of “more specialized predators have bigger prey³”. The latter is more compact, but not searchable.
Obviously there are switching costs associated with this. But perhaps the compactness that’s an advantage for footnotes is a similar advantage here, that’s why I’m trying it out.
That still has search problems! Consider: “see footnotes 3, 9, and 11–13”. How do you search for any of those 4 footnotes? The natural language approach is inherently ambiguous for such a hypertext problem which requires some formal support.
(The real solution there is footnote backlinks, like we have on Gwern.net: you can search for all references—site-wide, too—to a footnote by simply going to the footnote in question. If you’re not up to that, then a lightweight HTML approach would be to simply wrap each footnote number in a span and hide the text from display, but not search, so C-f ‘footnote 3’ would always hit the “prey³” construct.)
I hadn’t thought about the issue with searching, that’s a pretty good counterargument. (I am not able to search for the probabilities in this document either, because the LATEX isn’t searchable :-/)
Ultimately it comes down to an aesthetic preference for me: I will use these because they look kind of neat. But perhaps applying the reversal test to something like footnotes is interesting here: Imagine one was always writing “more specialized predators have bigger prey (see footnote 3)” instead of “more specialized predators have bigger prey³”. The latter is more compact, but not searchable.
Obviously there are switching costs associated with this. But perhaps the compactness that’s an advantage for footnotes is a similar advantage here, that’s why I’m trying it out.
That still has search problems! Consider: “see footnotes 3, 9, and 11–13”. How do you search for any of those 4 footnotes? The natural language approach is inherently ambiguous for such a hypertext problem which requires some formal support.
(The real solution there is footnote backlinks, like we have on Gwern.net: you can search for all references—site-wide, too—to a footnote by simply going to the footnote in question. If you’re not up to that, then a lightweight HTML approach would be to simply wrap each footnote number in a span and hide the text from display, but not search, so C-f ‘footnote 3’ would always hit the “prey³” construct.)