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philh comments on Rationality Quotes March 2013 - Less Wrong
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Comments (341)
- patio11
I don't think the last one is that useful either. Really, anything that can fit in a twitter is unlikely to be useful. And if someone wants to make useful advice that does, they shouldn't be giving generalised messages that can be applied anywhere, but rather highly specific advice with a narrow target audience.
I'm afraid this isn't the thread for you!
Just to be clear, twitter-length messages do have uses in ballast, flammable material, English grammar exercises, signalling wit, quining the message's originator, paper mache, etc. However, patio11 referring to using them as strategies, and here my point stands.
As does my observation. This is not the thread for you.
That would stand even if you were correct that such an enormous amount of data somehow couldn't communicate useful strategic insight.
Maxwell's equations fit in roughly 40 characters.
But the context necessary to interpret what all of the symbols mean and match them to real-world phenomena doesn't. That takes up something like a textbook in electrical engineering.
If Maxwell's equations were sent back to 1850, they would give useful information absent being sent with a textbook in electrical engineering (because there were people who had that knowledge already). Likewise, you don't have to send a description of modern culture with every tweet, because it's common information to the sender and recipient, and only the contents of the tweet provide new information.
Actually, I think it'd take more than 140 characters to write out Maxell's equations in 1850 notation. Vector notation was developed by Heaviside towards the end of that century, when Maxell's equations were already known.
If you use the right notation, even fewer than that.
72 characters.
The idea that there is no simple solution life's problems is already a widespread meme. Most people won't learn anything from seeing a new formulation of it. As for people interested in giving advice, they rarely use twitter as their exclusive or even as their primary means of communication, but rather as an adjunct to some more thorough explanation. Indeed, without my caveat this message could be harmful to both givers and receivers of advice.
patio11 is something of a "marketing engineer", and his target audience is young software enthusiasts (Hacker News). What makes you think that this isn't pretty specific advice for a fairly narrow audience?