srdiamond comments on What Curiosity Looks Like - Less Wrong

31 Post author: lukeprog 06 January 2012 09:28PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 13 January 2012 12:52:37AM *  2 points [-]

Who can quarrel with this, except perhaps on emphasis? All that can really be asked is whether the list of subjects prime for pursuit by rationalists is complete. The one major omission: acquiring writing skill. This is vital not only for articulating your ideas, so you get worthwhile feedback. The quality of ideas themselves depends on how well they're expressed. That Darwin was a superb writer isn't an incidental fact. (See "Can bad writers be good thinkers?"; "Are good thinkers good writers?"; "Some writing skills undermine thought"; and "Plain-talk writing: The new literary obfuscation."

Revised citations using markdown format; added last two citations. - Jan. 15,2012, 1 p.m.

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 13 January 2012 01:18:42AM 1 point [-]

One suggests either using the default urls or Markdown, (basic guidance available from Show Help at the bottom right of the window that appears once one hits Comment. Shorteners are bad fur teh interwebz and if the characters are valuable http://ow.ly would be better.

Comment author: dbaupp 21 January 2012 12:48:54PM 1 point [-]

Why is that particular service better than others? (I don't know the context of the grandparent, so this question is possibly misguided.)

Comment author: [deleted] 21 January 2012 09:02:17PM *  0 points [-]

I think he's saying ow.ly is better only in that it gives you some control over the content of the shortener. What I don't understand is 'shorteners are bad for the interwebs'—how? In what sense? Is this advice prudential or normative?

Comment author: Prismattic 21 January 2012 09:12:02PM *  3 points [-]

I think the "shorteners are bad" is shorthand for, "it will become hard to find information later, if the shortener service goes out of business, because the shortlinks won't lead anywhere and you will have no idea what they originally pointed to."

Comment author: gwern 21 January 2012 10:25:27PM 3 points [-]

Jason Scott:

Besides the scraping of millions of Delicious users, a small subset of archive team has formed URL team, dedicated to pulling down the content of URL shorteners. URL shorteners may be one of the worst ideas, one of the most backward ideas, to come out of the last five years. In very recent times, per-site shorteners, where a website registers a smaller version of its hostname and provides a single small link for a more complicated piece of content within it.. those are fine. But these general-purpose URL shorteners, with their shady or fragile setups and utter dependence upon them, well. If we lose TinyURL or bit.ly, millions of weblogs, essays, and non-archived tweets lose their meaning. Instantly. To someone in the future, it'll be like everyone from a certain era of history, say ten years of the 18th century, started speaking in a one-time pad of cryptographic pass phrases. We're doing our best to stop it. Some of the shorteners have been helpful, others have been hostile. A number have died. We're going to release torrents on a regular basis of these spreadsheets, these code breaking spreadsheets, and we hope others do too.

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