Antisuji comments on How to Be Happy - Less Wrong

129 Post author: lukeprog 17 March 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: DSimon 17 March 2011 08:27:47PM *  1 point [-]

Footnotes aren't as good a mechanism online as they are on paper (pun unintended). For example, to follow up on the source for the statement "Savor the good moments throughout each day", I have to:

  1. Remember the number 38 for that statement, then scroll down to that same number in the references section.
  2. Remember the names (Bryant & Vernoff) and also the year (2007), and look for them in the references section.
  3. If there happens to be a link, I can follow it. If not, I can write down the citation and find it later. However, in many cases if I had known that I would end up with only a citation and not a web link, I wouldn't have followed this path in the first place!

This is too much work for a page on the Internet! :-) If there's a webpage with the reference, you should make the statement itself link to that reference (as you did in a few places), or else add a hotlinked marker after the statement if the text is getting too Potholed. If the reference isn't online, then clicking on the statement should take me somewhere with information on what paper to look for.

Comment author: Antisuji 20 March 2011 05:40:44AM 9 points [-]

I thought it was an excessive number of notes too at first, and balked at the scrolling. And then I came up with a solution that's almost as good as if the notes were hyperlinked, and now I'm kicking myself a little bit for not thinking of this sooner:

Open the article in a new tab next to this one. Scroll down to the footnotes in the new tab and stay with the main text in the old one.

Hopefully this will save one or two people some time and annoyance when faced with similarly noted text.