I certainly have the same tendency. Whenever I come up with an insight I consider important, I always find myself trying to make sure the presentation is long enough (whatever the hell that means). Just three sentences? Make it two paragraphs! Just 500 words? What about 2,000!
As you said, we see this in the book publishing business, where with no exaggeration nearly every non-fiction book seems at least an order of magnitude longer than what would be necessary and efficient for raw communication, but we can allude to the explanation of this fact with a simple observation: it’s difficult to publish a 20-page manuscript and sell it for $20 each.
But why does the presentation length bias you speak of seem to apply so broadly? Not just to books, but to everything. So often when somebody has what they think is an important idea, they find it necessary to write a useless, wandering introduction; pepper their presentation with point after point that sounds related but doesn’t add anything to the real insight to be had; and so on. Anything to make it longer, dammit!
We must combat this tendency. As a community, we should try to establish norms that reward explaining important points concisely, and acknowledge that when the goal is just communication (rather than signaling), length is a cost. We should do what we can to optimize for a community with the highest reading investment to information return as possible, the best signal to noise ratio manageable.
I should mention though that the sheer character or word count of an article or comment is only one factor in its brevity. One comment may be twice as long as another in terms of its word count, but be twice as readable and easy to get through. Longer sentences can be more concise than shorter ones if they’re written to flow really well and optimized for quick assimilation.
There’s potential for lost purpose here. The character count is certainly a strong indicator for how concise it is, but it’s not a perfect one. Just because you can remove five words from a sentence and have it still convey the same meaning doesn’t necessarily suggest that you should do so. It may end up flowing worse, or being harder to follow because of some oddity about our language hardware, etc.
Anyway, if any community is in a position to do away with this bias, or at least make it much less pervasive, it’s this one. Length is a cost, or rather a high time and effort requirement is a cost. I’m here to learn, and do so as quickly and efficiently as possible. If I can get the same amount of important information in 1⁄10 of the time, that’s great! Whatever signaling function bloating the length carries, we must find a substitute (if possible)!
Plus a bunch of other (perhaps useful and relevant) details. Either that, or I just bloated it well past what would have been necessary, and did so solely for the purpose of making it look important.
I certainly have the same tendency. Whenever I come up with an insight I consider important, I always find myself trying to make sure the presentation is long enough (whatever the hell that means). Just three sentences? Make it two paragraphs! Just 500 words? What about 2,000!
As you said, we see this in the book publishing business, where with no exaggeration nearly every non-fiction book seems at least an order of magnitude longer than what would be necessary and efficient for raw communication, but we can allude to the explanation of this fact with a simple observation: it’s difficult to publish a 20-page manuscript and sell it for $20 each.
But why does the presentation length bias you speak of seem to apply so broadly? Not just to books, but to everything. So often when somebody has what they think is an important idea, they find it necessary to write a useless, wandering introduction; pepper their presentation with point after point that sounds related but doesn’t add anything to the real insight to be had; and so on. Anything to make it longer, dammit!
We must combat this tendency. As a community, we should try to establish norms that reward explaining important points concisely, and acknowledge that when the goal is just communication (rather than signaling), length is a cost. We should do what we can to optimize for a community with the highest reading investment to information return as possible, the best signal to noise ratio manageable.
I should mention though that the sheer character or word count of an article or comment is only one factor in its brevity. One comment may be twice as long as another in terms of its word count, but be twice as readable and easy to get through. Longer sentences can be more concise than shorter ones if they’re written to flow really well and optimized for quick assimilation.
There’s potential for lost purpose here. The character count is certainly a strong indicator for how concise it is, but it’s not a perfect one. Just because you can remove five words from a sentence and have it still convey the same meaning doesn’t necessarily suggest that you should do so. It may end up flowing worse, or being harder to follow because of some oddity about our language hardware, etc.
Anyway, if any community is in a position to do away with this bias, or at least make it much less pervasive, it’s this one. Length is a cost, or rather a high time and effort requirement is a cost. I’m here to learn, and do so as quickly and efficiently as possible. If I can get the same amount of important information in 1⁄10 of the time, that’s great! Whatever signaling function bloating the length carries, we must find a substitute (if possible)!
Summary: Length is a cost.
Plus a bunch of other (perhaps useful and relevant) details. Either that, or I just bloated it well past what would have been necessary, and did so solely for the purpose of making it look important.