If you would like this to be a productive exchange, let me know. Currently I don’t think you want a productive exchange; my (admittedly poor but) best guess is that you simply want me to say “oh gosh, you’re right!” which I can’t say because I don’t think it’s true.
Uh, I think their point that the site UI is ignoring the part that explicitly says “stop reading here”, and thus your “unless you ignore the part” is irrelevant to the post’s perceived length, and that it would be reasonable for a reader to filter whether or not they read the post by something on the second line they see, and not filter posts based on a sentence that’s 1500 words in. [IMO your stronger defense is that the introductory paragraphs try to make clear that the necessary payload of the post is small and frontloaded.]
I’m dinging the gears to ascension on writing clarity, here, but… were you doing a bit, or should I also be dinging you on reading comprehension / ability to model multiple hypotheses? [Like, to be clear, I don’t think your first response was clearly bad, but it felt like something had gone wrong when you repeated the same first line in your second response.]
I do not know what to say to help someone who sees “43 min read,” does not even read the first paragraph, and makes boldly wrong assumptions about what a post is asking of them, to the point of chastising the author and saying “I’m downvoting for this [turns out to be wrong] reason.”
Like, in the future I will respond to such interactions by saying “Here’s a link to a short list of guidelines, of which the zeroth is that, if you are expecting to put in no effort at all, you will not succeed in doing discourse that’s any better than what happens out in the broader internet, and the sixth of which is to be careful with your leaps to conclusions.”
But there was a sort of circular self-protective “I’m going to confidently judge things on surface characteristics and put in no work” mentality that I didn’t know how to break through and didn’t want to engage with and indeed nonzero wrote this post specifically so I could copypasta away from in the future, and that didn’t get any better when they completely ignored my first reply to say “nuh-uh, none of that matters because LessWrong says 43 minutes at the top and that means that my choices are zero minutes or 43 minutes.”
(The above being a strawman that I do not endorse; I am trying to share something like “what my brain heard, and thus what I had to work with in dialogue with my brain.”)
I repeated the thing which had not been heard the first time in lieu of saying many much less productive things; I did not trust myself to find a way to engage charitably; I had nothing more productive to say that didn’t rely on gears being willing to do some very basic moves that I didn’t think I could persuade them to do, given their starting point.
It wasn’t a bit, it was “this whole thing is a trap, and really fucky frame warfare, and it’s putting the burden of proof in all the wrong places, and it’s the very thing that the whole post is trying to get me away from in the future, how about I just reiterate my point without escalating and leave.” Like, I had exceeded my personal competence, and was trying to do the “don’t keep adding words if they’re not going to be good” virtue.
My model of gears to ascension, based on their first 2 posts, is that they’re not complaining about the length for their own sake, but rather for the sake of people that they link this post to who then bounce off because it looks too long. A basics post shouldn’t have the property that someone with zero context is likely to bounce off it, and I think gears to ascension is saying that the nominal length (reflected in the “43 minutes”) is likely to have the effect of making people who get linked to this post bounce off it, even though the length for practical purposes is much shorter.
I think that people who are actually going to link this to someone with zero context are going to say “just look at the bulleted list” and that’s going to 100% solve the problem for 90% of the people.
I think that the set of people who bounce for the reason of “deterred by the stated length and didn’t read the first paragraph to catch the context” but who would otherwise have gotten value out of my writing is very very very very very small, and wrong to optimize for.
I separately think that the world in general and LW in particular already bend farther over backwards than is optimal to reach out to what I think of in my brain as “the tl;dr crowd.” I’m default skeptical of “but you could reach these people better if you X;” I already kinda don’t want to reach them and am not making plans which depend upon them.
If you would like this to be a productive exchange, let me know. Currently I don’t think you want a productive exchange; my (admittedly poor but) best guess is that you simply want me to say “oh gosh, you’re right!” which I can’t say because I don’t think it’s true.
Uh, I think their point that the site UI is ignoring the part that explicitly says “stop reading here”, and thus your “unless you ignore the part” is irrelevant to the post’s perceived length, and that it would be reasonable for a reader to filter whether or not they read the post by something on the second line they see, and not filter posts based on a sentence that’s 1500 words in. [IMO your stronger defense is that the introductory paragraphs try to make clear that the necessary payload of the post is small and frontloaded.]
I’m dinging the gears to ascension on writing clarity, here, but… were you doing a bit, or should I also be dinging you on reading comprehension / ability to model multiple hypotheses? [Like, to be clear, I don’t think your first response was clearly bad, but it felt like something had gone wrong when you repeated the same first line in your second response.]
I do not know what to say to help someone who sees “43 min read,” does not even read the first paragraph, and makes boldly wrong assumptions about what a post is asking of them, to the point of chastising the author and saying “I’m downvoting for this [turns out to be wrong] reason.”
Like, in the future I will respond to such interactions by saying “Here’s a link to a short list of guidelines, of which the zeroth is that, if you are expecting to put in no effort at all, you will not succeed in doing discourse that’s any better than what happens out in the broader internet, and the sixth of which is to be careful with your leaps to conclusions.”
But there was a sort of circular self-protective “I’m going to confidently judge things on surface characteristics and put in no work” mentality that I didn’t know how to break through and didn’t want to engage with and indeed nonzero wrote this post specifically so I could copypasta away from in the future, and that didn’t get any better when they completely ignored my first reply to say “nuh-uh, none of that matters because LessWrong says 43 minutes at the top and that means that my choices are zero minutes or 43 minutes.”
(The above being a strawman that I do not endorse; I am trying to share something like “what my brain heard, and thus what I had to work with in dialogue with my brain.”)
I repeated the thing which had not been heard the first time in lieu of saying many much less productive things; I did not trust myself to find a way to engage charitably; I had nothing more productive to say that didn’t rely on gears being willing to do some very basic moves that I didn’t think I could persuade them to do, given their starting point.
It wasn’t a bit, it was “this whole thing is a trap, and really fucky frame warfare, and it’s putting the burden of proof in all the wrong places, and it’s the very thing that the whole post is trying to get me away from in the future, how about I just reiterate my point without escalating and leave.” Like, I had exceeded my personal competence, and was trying to do the “don’t keep adding words if they’re not going to be good” virtue.
My model of gears to ascension, based on their first 2 posts, is that they’re not complaining about the length for their own sake, but rather for the sake of people that they link this post to who then bounce off because it looks too long. A basics post shouldn’t have the property that someone with zero context is likely to bounce off it, and I think gears to ascension is saying that the nominal length (reflected in the “43 minutes”) is likely to have the effect of making people who get linked to this post bounce off it, even though the length for practical purposes is much shorter.
Yes, agreed.
I think that people who are actually going to link this to someone with zero context are going to say “just look at the bulleted list” and that’s going to 100% solve the problem for 90% of the people.
I think that the set of people who bounce for the reason of “deterred by the stated length and didn’t read the first paragraph to catch the context” but who would otherwise have gotten value out of my writing is very very very very very small, and wrong to optimize for.
I separately think that the world in general and LW in particular already bend farther over backwards than is optimal to reach out to what I think of in my brain as “the tl;dr crowd.” I’m default skeptical of “but you could reach these people better if you X;” I already kinda don’t want to reach them and am not making plans which depend upon them.
Yeah, that is definitely fair