Viliam_Bur comments on Only You Can Prevent Your Mind From Getting Killed By Politics - Less Wrong

39 Post author: ChrisHallquist 26 October 2013 01:59PM

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Comment author: Viliam_Bur 26 October 2013 06:29:12PM 5 points [-]

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

Comment author: Ben_LandauTaylor 26 October 2013 07:03:24PM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Dagon 27 October 2013 07:12:31AM 0 points [-]

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.

Comment author: BaconServ 27 October 2013 07:18:39AM *  0 points [-]

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."

Comment author: Dagon 27 October 2013 07:32:14AM 2 points [-]

"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,

Comment author: BaconServ 27 October 2013 07:45:19AM 0 points [-]

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.