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Ben_LandauTaylor comments on Only You Can Prevent Your Mind From Getting Killed By Politics - Less Wrong
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Comments (143)
A lot of text? It's 1400 words. An average adult can read this in five minutes. That is not too much time to invest in a top-level post.
On internet no one behaves as an adult, and no one has the patience to spend five minutes reading an article without pictures. This is why Science invented abstracts. :D
tl;dr: use abstracts
I agree that this phenomenon occurs, but I respond to it differently. Part of what I love about Less Wrong is that it's less tolerant than most places of the "tl;dr lol" approach to skimming content that you describe. I want to maintain or even increase the force of that social norm.
I'm in favor of summaries and abstracts on long pieces. This is not a long piece. The first paragraph is the summary. A separate "abstract" section would only encourage people to skip the body of the essay, and that would be bad.
Fair enough - it's not all that long if it was necessary for a novel or interesting point. It's too long for something relatively simply that I already have in my toolbox, and there was no way to figure out if that's all it was without reading the whole thing.
So because you already have the tool, nobody else needs to be told about it? I feel like I'm strawmanning here, but I'm not sure what your point is if not, "I didn't need to read this."
"I didn't need to read this" is probably close to what prompted my comment. Along with "and I suspect most readers also won't get much out of it",
I should have just said "this should have gone in discussion first, then (if it was popular) rewritten as a top-level post with a clearer summary". Since it's gotten a reasonable amount of comments and upvotes, I think I was incorrect in my assessment that most readers would be like me,
Thank you. I no longer suspect you of being mind-killed by "politics is the mind-killer." Retracted.
Maybe I'm being too hasty trying to pinpoint people being mind-killed here, but it's hard to ignore that it's happening. I think I probably need to take my own advice right about now if I'm trying to justify my jumping to conclusions with statements like, "It's hard to ignore that it's happening."
I was planning to make a top-level comment here to the effect of, "INB4obvious mind-kill," but I think I just realized why the thoughts that thought that up were flawed from a basic level. Still, I think someone should point out that the comments here are barely touching the content of this article, which is odd for LessWrong.
It's not a lot of time, but it can simultaneously be too much, if the value of the post is even smaller than the small cost.
True! But (1) that's not the case for this post, and (2) if it were the case, then this post would not belong in Main, and adding a summary would not fix the fundamental problem of low value.
The fact that the author puts a piece in main, or that the community votes it highly, or that the administrators do not remove it from main, is only very weak evidence that I want to read it.
Do you have an actual complaint here or are you disagreeing for the sake of disagreeing
Because it sounds a damn lot like you're upset about something but know better than to say what you actually think, so you're opting to make sophomoric objections instead.