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Patrick McKenzie on why having a publication date on your blog entry devalues it.
(Link to the, er, "content".)
And yet books always have a publication date.
ETA: as do scientific articles, of course, and the date really matters, not because of being "up to date" but because the date gives some context to whatever it is.
As far as books go:
I'm curious if showing a date is as bad as he thinks; he doesn't mention ever A/B testing the claim himself. (I'd test it on my site, except the date is already buried in the sidebar to the point where many people miss it, so I wouldn't expect much of a difference.)
I predict yes, but if I'm reading his position right showing the date is just a symptom of not having a Long Content focus, which is what he's really arguing for in that article (and which your site already has in spades).
If the problem is focusing on short-term writing which becomes worthless quickly, then simply hiding or showing dates shouldn't much affect how long readers stay on the page: most short-term stuff shows its colors very quickly. (How many sentences does it take to figure out you're not interested in a rant about John Kerry from 2004?)
I think McKenzie's argument is that using a date can turn long content into short content, which many people do on accident, and while he doesn't quantify it (which would be the value of A/B testing) I think he has enough evidence to establish the direction of the effect. Not using a date is obviously not sufficient to turn short content into long content, but I do think it may be helpful at getting one into the right state of mind, as it focuses the attention on sorting things by content rather than time. (Imagine trying to find all of Robin Hanson's writing on construal level theory- yes, you can use the nearfar tag on Overcoming Bias, but that's sorted by date, and there's no solid introduction.)
That's a good example of how weak date markers are: if the dates were deleted completely from every OB post, people would still find them incomprehensible because there's only one post which could be considered an overview of the concept, and is a needle in the haystack until and unless Hanson in some way synthesizes all his scattershot posts and allusions into a single Near-Far page.
The posts need some sort of organization imposed; the lack of that organization is what kills them, not some date markers. If my essays were broken up into 500-word chunks, and sorted either randomly or by date, they wouldn't look much better.
To expand on this a bit: he gives the following supporting example:
I wanted to give this a fair shake, but it reads like McKenzie has never heard of journalism.
He's writing for an audience that sells software as a service (SaaS). Why would he give journalism more than a disclaimer (which he does include)?
He might be writing for an SaaS audience, but he's writing about the blog format, which is built to facilitate crowdsourced magazine journalism or editorial-style content. Now, he's quite right that the format's poorly suited to long-form or reference-style content, but starting a post with "let's talk about blogging" and proceeding to talk about all the ways it sucks for those content types, without much more than a word for its intended purpose, strikes me as a pretty serious omission.
If instead he'd framed it as "blogs are often misused", then we wouldn't be having this conversation. But that's not where we're standing.
What makes it serious? What purpose does including journalism in the article serve?