I did actually consider splitting things up into smaller paragraphs, and it’s entirely possible that I made a suboptimal tradeoff between bittiness and unclarity. Part of the trouble, though, is just that there are a bunch of different people and effects and possibilities to consider, and keeping track of them all is a burden on working memory. And it’s possible that my own thoughts are insufficiently organized and that if I’d been cleverer I could have been clearer :-).
Yeah, not confident this was worth the time to stress about. (although I do think people tend to undervalue “how much time it’s worth to reduce the cost of other people reading a thing more easily”)
(Note sure what you mean by “bittiness”)
This is not meant to be a “you should do it this way”, but FYI here is how I’d have broken up that paragraph, which I think was fairly straightforward to implement (at least as a second pass after you’re done brainstorming)
Case 2 (newcomers of various sorts):
What’s HPMOR-on-the-front-page going to do to these people?
(a) Some people will be immediately put off by it—That’s bad if they would otherwise have become valued members of the community; it’s bad if it leads them to badmouth LW or rationalists to others; it’s neutral or slightly positive if they were going to ignore us anyway and just do so slightly faster, or if they would have tried to participate in the LW community but been annoying or stupid and this scares them off.
(b)Some people will be intrigued, read some or all of HPMOR, and like it. That’s good if they would otherwise have bounced off; it’s neutral or slightly good if they would have been valued LW contributors anyway; it’s bad if they turn out to be annoying or stupid.
(c) Some people will be more or less indifferent to it. By definition it doesn’t have much net impact on them.
Here, everything depends on the relative numbers of these people, and how much we’d have wanted them to stick around here.
(the bold-weight on the site isn’t quite bold enough to do it’s job of making the highlight-point of each paragraph stand out, which was my intent here, so I also italicized them. In any case, point being, with that structure, I can more easily re-skim it to remember each point)
By “bittiness” I mean that the downside of splitting things up into short paragraphs, bullet points, tables, etc., is that the reading experience becomes less “smooth” and more “jerky” somehow. More an aesthetic than a practical thing, though there are practical aspects too. For instance, when you split paragraphs up more, the same material takes up more space, which means you can’t see as much of it at once, which means more load on the reader’s working memory. For another instance, sometimes you want structures with a couple of levels of nesting, and making that nesting visible via new paragraphs or bulleted lists may require multiple levels of indentation, which requires either that the “inner” text be very narrow and therefore hard to read or that the “outer” text be very wide and therefore hard to read.
In general, though, I’m a fan of splitting things up to make their logical structure more visible, and I think you’re correct that in this case I should have listened more to that particular inner voice. (In particular, the example downsides I listed don’t really apply; the fiddly bits of what I wrote weren’t that long, and as your proposed rewrite shows it’s possible to indicate the outer-level structure via boldfaced heading lines or similar.)
I did actually consider splitting things up into smaller paragraphs, and it’s entirely possible that I made a suboptimal tradeoff between bittiness and unclarity. Part of the trouble, though, is just that there are a bunch of different people and effects and possibilities to consider, and keeping track of them all is a burden on working memory. And it’s possible that my own thoughts are insufficiently organized and that if I’d been cleverer I could have been clearer :-).
Yeah, not confident this was worth the time to stress about. (although I do think people tend to undervalue “how much time it’s worth to reduce the cost of other people reading a thing more easily”)
(Note sure what you mean by “bittiness”)
This is not meant to be a “you should do it this way”, but FYI here is how I’d have broken up that paragraph, which I think was fairly straightforward to implement (at least as a second pass after you’re done brainstorming)
(the bold-weight on the site isn’t quite bold enough to do it’s job of making the highlight-point of each paragraph stand out, which was my intent here, so I also italicized them. In any case, point being, with that structure, I can more easily re-skim it to remember each point)
By “bittiness” I mean that the downside of splitting things up into short paragraphs, bullet points, tables, etc., is that the reading experience becomes less “smooth” and more “jerky” somehow. More an aesthetic than a practical thing, though there are practical aspects too. For instance, when you split paragraphs up more, the same material takes up more space, which means you can’t see as much of it at once, which means more load on the reader’s working memory. For another instance, sometimes you want structures with a couple of levels of nesting, and making that nesting visible via new paragraphs or bulleted lists may require multiple levels of indentation, which requires either that the “inner” text be very narrow and therefore hard to read or that the “outer” text be very wide and therefore hard to read.
In general, though, I’m a fan of splitting things up to make their logical structure more visible, and I think you’re correct that in this case I should have listened more to that particular inner voice. (In particular, the example downsides I listed don’t really apply; the fiddly bits of what I wrote weren’t that long, and as your proposed rewrite shows it’s possible to indicate the outer-level structure via boldfaced heading lines or similar.)