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GabrielDuquette comments on Rationality Quotes August 2012 - Less Wrong
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Why did people in olden times hate paragraphs so much?
Paragraphs cost lines, and when each line of paper on average costs five shillings, you use as many of them as you can get away with.
I propose all older works be therefore re-typeset as their creators obviously intended. It'll be like Ted Turner colorizing old movies, except the product in this case will become infinitely more consumable instead of slightly nauseating.
I support this motion, and further propose that formatting and other aesthetic considerations also be inferred from known data on the authors to fully reflect the manner in which they would have presented their work had they been aware of and capable of using all our current nice-book-writing technology.
...which sounds a lot like Eliezer's Friendly AI "first and final command". (I would link to the exact quote, but I've lost the bookmark. Will edit it in once found.)
I concur, with the proviso that "nice technology" must also include the idea compression style of Twitter.
Also, if paper was so expensive, why the hell did they overwrite so much? Status-driven fashion?
I think much of it is that brevity simply wasn't seen as a virtue back then. There were far fewer written works, so you had more time to go through each one.
I think it's the vagary of various times. All periods had pretty expensive media and some were, as one would expect, terse as hell. (Reading a book on Nagarjuna, I'm reminded that reading his Heart of the Middle Way was like trying to read a math book with nothing but theorems. And not even the proofs. 'Wait, could you go back and explain that? Or anything?') Latin prose could be very concise. Biblical literature likewise. I'm told much Chinese literature is similar (especially the classics), and I'd believe it from the translations I've read.
Some periods praised clarity and simplicity of prose. Others didn't, and gave us things like Thomas Browne's Urn Burial.
(We also need to remember that we read difficulty as complexity. Shakespeare is pretty easy to read... if you have a vocabulary so huge as to overcome the linguistic drift of 4 centuries and are used to his syntax. His contemporaries would not have had such problems.)
For context, the first paragraph-ish thing in Romance of the Three Kingdoms covers about two hundred years of history in about as many characters, in the meanwhile setting up the recurring theme of perpetual unification, division and subsequent reunification.
Sure, but popular novels like RofTK or Monkey or Dream of the Red Chamber were not really high-status stuff in the first place.
I detect a contradiction between "brevity not seen as virtue" and "they couldn't afford paragraphs".
Yes, I don't think "couldn't afford paper" is a good explanation, books of this nature were for wealthy people anyway.
Some writers were paid by the word and/or line.
Ancient Greek writing not only lacked paragraphs, but spaces. And punctuation. And everything was in capitals. IMAGINETRYINGTOREADSOMETHINGLIKETHATINADEADLANGUAGE.