= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
provocateur comments on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (150)
Brevity is the soul of wit. Why is LW so obviously biased towards long-windedness?
Have you ever tried to read a math textbook that cherishes being short and concise? They're nigh unreadable unless you already know everything in them.
When you're discussing simple concepts that people have an intuitive grasp of, then brevity is better. When there's an inferential distance involved, not so much.
Tried Mathematics 1001? Only $16.13 at Amazon.
I think that illustrates the point actually; the topics in that book either do not have much of an inferential distance or as the description you link to says "The more advanced topics are covered in a sketchy way". Serge Lang's Algebra on the other hand...
Funny, Serge Lang's Algebra was one of my mental examples. (Also see: anything written by Lars Hörmander.)
That's not entirely true -- Melrose's book on Geometric Scattering Theory, Serre's book on Lie Groups and Algebras, Spivak's book on Calculus on Manifolds, and so on.
I think the phenomena you're pointing to is closer to the observation that the traits that make one a good mathematician are mostly orthogonal to the traits that make one a good writer.
I don't know about others, but it helps me understand an idea when I read a lot of words about it. I think it causes my subconscious to say "this is an important idea!" better than reading a concise, densely-packed explanation of a thing, even if only once. This is a guess; I don't know the true cause of the effect, but I know the effect is there.
But an enemy of knowledge transfer.
wit != rationality.
Also, I'm pretty sure the bias, if it exists, runs in the opposite direction. We even like calling our summaries "tl;dr"
Keep your wits about you. In Shakespeare's times the word meant "intelligence".
P.S. Someone explain the downmods to me. The parent either didn't know the saying was from Hamlet, or thought "wit" meant "humor" in this context.
Too many cooks spoil the broth, but many hands make light work. Can someone please explain to me why this broth, made by far too many cooks, was both labour-intensive and delicious?
"Brevity is the soul of wit" is an idiom, not some sort of undisputed fact. Your question doesn't highlight an interesting contradiction; at best it will be interpreted as a weak play on words, and at worst it will be interpreted as trolling.
I take issue with both of your claims!
Sure, wit isn't rationality, but I suspect it can be quite the rationality enhancer.
And I assign high probability to the existence of a "long post bias", though I'm not sure it's higher at LW relative to other places. It may not be a bias, though; Paul Graham, for example, says that long comments are generally better than short ones, and this seems to be obviously true in general. In terms of posts, I'm not so sure. I would have upvoted the grandparent comment of this if it weren't rude (how hypocritical of me).