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.
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