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Conventional footnotes considered harmful
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2Nathan Helm-Burger
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Curious what you think of hoverable-footnotes on web pages, or the style of side-notes that LW recently implemented.
1I expect my viewpoint on this is idiosyncratic, but I really quite like hoverable-footnotes, and quite dislike side-notes. I find side-notes problematically distracting.
I think another option that isn't mentioned is to put everything that's 'extra' in an appendix, with no tie-ins from the text. Then, in the appendix, quote the bit of the main article which this extra note is relevant to. That seems even less distracting to me.
I think this is dependent on reading strategy, which is dependent on cognitive style. For someone who skims a lot, they are frequently making active decisions about what to read while reading, so they're skilled at this and not bothered by footnotes. I love footnotes. This style may be more characteristic of a fast-attention cognitive style (and ADHD-spectrum loosely defined).
For those I like to refer to as attention surplus disorder :) who do not skim much, I can see the problem.
One strategy is to simply not read any footnotes on your first pass. Footnotes are supposed to be optional to understanding the series of ideas in the writing. Then, if you're intterested enough to get further into details, you go back and read some or all of the footnotes.
I agree that we could use footnotes better by either using them one way and stating it, or providing a brief cue to how it's used in the text.
I strongly disagree that footnotes as classically used are not useful. And having any sort of hypertext improves the situation.
Footnotes are usually used to mean "here are some more thoughts/facts/claims related to those you just read before the footnote mark". Sometimes those will be in a whole different reference. After you glance at a couple, you know how this author is using them.
Appropriate use of footnotes is part of good writing. As such, it's dependent on the topic, the author, the reader, and their goals in writing/reading. And thus very much a matter of individual taste and opinion.
Endnotes of varied use, without two-way hypertext links, on the other hand, should die in a fire.
1My family has jokingly referred to me having 'attention surplus disorder' my entire life. Your description is indeed accurate. I don't usually skim, and having my train-of-thought focus broken feels quite disruptive.
On the other hand, I don't mind endnotes. I just save them to the end, and read them all then, updating my memory of the document I just read accordingly.
As you probably know, Gwern.net's solution is to use sidenotes, falling back to footnotes.
My current overall approach for writing right now is to:
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footnotes/sidenotes are intended primarily for a mix of "f"/"t": further information relevant to a reader particularly interested in a specific passage or claim, but which the majority of readers would want to skip, and which doesn't pertain to a specific citation.
This reduces the cognitive load to simply, "am I interested enough in this section that I want to look at the sidenote beyond a near-subconscious saccade to skim keywords/formatting?"
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in cases where the 'further niche information' is practically a mini-essay, I have been trying to avoid writing those and fixing up old instances. Usually, they should be factored out to a section or page, or much of the material (especially blockquotes) moved into an annotation.
In cases where those are not really relevant, we have 'collapse' functionality, where arbitrary sections or ranges can be 'collapsed' into a button to expand them, with an optional short description. They're sort of like an anonymous inline-only footnote, if that makes sense to you. (We use this heavily for authors in popups: instead of either showing the entire list, which might be literally several screens of hundreds of authors, or arbitrarily truncating at n characters, we just show the first few authors, and collapse the rest 'and so on'.)
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specific citations: I hyperlink citations to the fulltext, with an abbreviated citation format to make it much more readable when there's a lot of them, using subscripts.
Generally, no more bibliographical information is necessary than just 'Foo et al 2024', and that reads very nicely when written subscripted as 'Foo...2024'. All additional information, such as the full title/author, the abstract and key excerpts, commentary etc, can be provided in the popup for immediate reference.
This removes your "c" example, as well as handling a chunk of "f".
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'd' definitions: I find definitions either ought to be inlined (where I use a Wikipedia-like convention of bolding the newly-introduced term, followed by its definition, possibly in a parentheses), or have a relevant hyperlink, like the specific citation that introduced that term or just a Wikipedia article. No sidenote/footnote apparatus necessary.
(You might think the link is still obtrusive, but my belief is that the link-icons make it less of a cognitive burden. If you see some technical term followed by the familiar 'W' Wikipedia or chi Arxiv link-icon, what else could it be but a definition? And so you can easily ignore it if you feel adequately familiar with the term.)
(We also have a few relevant features, like popups which highlight ranges, added for the detailed line-by-line analysis of "Suzanne Delage", and within-section display of backlinks and backlinks context snippets, which are relevant here.)
Your taxonomy of c/d/f/t sounds like it could be somewhat cumbersome (who wants to mark up every single footnote they ever write with at least 4 classes?), but it also could be fully automated, I'd note. Just let the author write footnotes however they want, then LLM-classify them and mark up with different symbols. You could also use the LLM to summarize them (this is something I've been experimenting with for margin notes and labeling clusters of annotations).
For example, you could simply number 'c', indicating with the cold mechanical enumeration that it's not important (because just citation); replace 'd' with a little dictionary icon postfixed to the term being defined; replace 'f' with a 1–3-word summary by the LLM which is grayed out or shrunk to indicate it's a tangent (with of course a possible manual override by the author if they decide the LLM suggestion is bad); and markup 't' with some ellipsis symbol like '...' to indicate that it's some very unimportant expansion of the current thing.
This is doable mechanically with 0 author effort (very important for adoption! even if you think you are personally willing to bear the burden of this extra overhead, you really don't want to and will shy away from writing because of it) because whatever document format you are using will support reliably extracting footnotes from the AST (even TeX ought to) & feed into a LLM & adding some markup class which your HTML/CSS/JS can use, and I think my GUI suggestions should be intuitive: numbers=citations already, the summaries would be self-explanatory, while dictionary icons & '...' are semi-novel but a reader will guess them on the first instance and remember them after an interaction confirms it.
(The idea of a 1-word footnote anchor, using LLMs to do the heavy lifting of picking a key word, is interesting enough I may give it a try myself.)
So, if you wonder whether you'd care for the content of a note, you have to look at the note, switching to the bottom of the page and breaking your focus. Thus the notion that footnotes are optional is an illusion.
I agree with this. Too many footnotes can really slow readers down when they have to check each for whether it's relevant.
Similar points apply to adding too many unnecessary links. Specifically links where it isn't clear where they lead and what point is made in the link target, as in the previous sentence. (Do they provide a citation? Important additional explanation? Just an allusion to some related idea? So the same issue you point out for footnotes.) Like footnotes, many such links should probably be left out entirely, because they add too little value compared to the amount of reading disruption they add.
For other links, it should be made clear in the text what their purpose is or where they lead, unlike in the example sentence above. So that people can safely ignore them if they don't need them.
Moreover, links to (e.g.) Wikipedia, which explain a simple concept, can often be sufficiently replaced with a short one line explanation inside the main text, perhaps in parentheses. This doesn't require readers to engage with a whole new webpage which likely contains way more information than necessary.
Similar points apply to adding too many unnecessary links. Specifically links where it isn't clear where they lead and what point is made in the link target, as in the previous sentence.
This used to be a recurring failure mode of my own writing, which I've since partially mitigated. Reflecting on why, I think I wanted to do some combination of
- justifying contentious or surprising claims
- preventing being pattern-matched to straw versions of ideas / arguments commonly referenced and adjacent in concept-space
- finding excuses to share cool reads
- making sense of links I'd read by relating them, using publication as a focusing mechanism
I didn't notice the cost of overdoing it until I saw writers who did it worse, and became horrified at the thought that I was slowly becoming them.
(Gwern links a lot but it doesn't feel "worse", on the contrary I enjoy his writing, so "worseness" is as much about adding more value to the reader than the cost of disrupting their flow as it is about volume. His approach is also far more thought-out of course.)
Footnotes are good in translated works. I read the 3-body trilogy translated into English, and it was very helpful to have notes from the translator explaining certain points of cultural context that a Chinese reader would be expected to be familiar with.
1As an example of differentiating different kinds of footnotes, waitbutwhy.com uses different appearances for “interesting extra info” notes vs “citation” notes.
Both kinds also appear as popups when interacted with (certainly an advantage of the digital format).
1(Specifically, asides are given superscript large blue circles with numbers inside; while mere citations/sources are given instead a small faded gray box with numbers. They are separately numbered. The footnote popups themselves are fairly standard click-to-popover.)
- Include, in the cue to each note, a hint as to its content, besides just the ordinal pointer. A one-letter abbreviation, standardised thruout the work, may work well, e.g.:
- "c" for citation supporting the marked claim
- "d" for a definition of the marked term
- "f" for further, niche information extending the marked section
- "t" for a pedantic detail or technicality modifying the marked clause
- Commit to only use notes for one purpose — say, only definitions, or only citations. State this commitment to the reader.
These don't look like good solutions to me. Just a first impression.
Agree that cued FNs would often be useful innovation I've not yet seen. Nevertheless, this statement
So, if you wonder whether you'd care for the content of a note, you have to look at the note, switching to the bottom of the page and breaking your focus. Thus the notion that footnotes are optional is an illusion.
ends with a false conclusion; most footnotes in text I have read were optional and I'm convinced I'm happy to not have read most of them indeed. FNs, already as they are, are thus indeed highly "optional" and potentially very helpful - in many, maybe most, cases, for many, maybe most, readers.
Writers use footnotes — equally, endnotes — intending that they be optional for the reader. A note will hold a citation, technicality, or explanation, any of which is of interest to only some readers. This is a useful tactic, in principle.
Footnotes are indicated with ordinal symbols. A cue to a note may be a number, letter, or sequential symbol (commonly,
*,†,‡, etc). In any case, the reference only indicates where the note is, in the sequence of all notes present, rather than anything of the note's content.So, if you wonder whether you'd care for the content of a note, you have to look at the note, switching to the bottom of the page and breaking your focus. Thus the notion that footnotes are optional is an illusion. The false option is even worse in the case of endnotes in printed works; there, to get to the note, you have to flip across many pages.
Good solutions exist, but are underused: