I think the steelman of the tl;dr is an abstract. It has the problem, the solution, and the implication that if you really want to understand you need to read the whole thing.
Yeah, seems true to me. And also, I think many things cannot properly have an abstract. Feels similar to how some essays can have their thesis up front, and other essays genuinely break if you try to put the thesis up front.
There's a piece you didn't really touch on here - I'm often impatient with long-form content because it (understandably) is for a general audience, and doesn't know or care about which parts will be novel or interesting to me personally.
I'm not really sure how to solve this though - reading stuff meant for a smaller audience helps (but has echo chamber issues), and maybe an AI with a lot of context on me personally could do it, but for now it seems like just the nature of the thing.
Just to clarify: you mean "I'm impatient with long-form content WHEN it's for a general audience, because it will contain chunks that aren't relevant or novel for me," not "long-form content is in-general for a general audience," right?
(I don't think there's any correlation between length and generality, or at least there isn't in my experience.)
Certainly I did not mean to imply that there's a correlation between length and generality, but basically all content is for an audience more general than me personally, although it varies in generality
Yeah, makes sense. I definitely agree that various parts of a long-form piece will be more or less interesting to me/will have more or less of the magic. I think in my own experience, I've found that trying to skip the less golden parts tends to make the whole thing break? Sort of like how people often complain that Circling circles are "boring until they aren't," and have a vibe of, like, why can't we skip the slow meander and get right to the good stuff. I think I, too, would like it if we could skip the slow meander and get right to the good stuff, but in my own experience you Just Can't (alas).
I get the gist of what this essay is about, but it feels too...strong? Final? It makes a lot of claims about stuff that takes X amount of time, but isn't the entire point of improving as a writer (or whatever else) to communicate more information in less time? It might be true that you, the author, can't make the information any shorter than it is without diluting the value of it, and maybe no author on Earth can. But it sorta goes without saying that eventually, in some distant future where people have learned all the most powerful rhetorical techniques and are customizing blogposts for individual readers, someone might be able to cut it down to a tl;dr.
And I know that's a meaningless distinction, but you're usually so precise with your words about where the line is, and I just don't feel that here. If there actually is an object-level disagreement, then it's worth knowing about.
Yes, I do mean this more in the "what's pragmatically possible in the foreseeable future" sense; I expect that there are ways to cut most of these concepts down by some reasonable amount if you e.g. applied near-superintelligence levels of effort to them.
I happened to read this on the same day as watching "In Defense of Inefficiency" by Zoe Bee (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-_rK0KkB6k) which makes quite similar points as the ones in this post. Most notably, the fact that "efficiency" is very ingrained in our culture yet is often a trap because it fails to recognize that some of the "waste" that it got rid of was actually desirable or that the *actual* point of doing something was in the doing of the thing itself. But look at me here trying to summarize the video, it's pretty good and it's just one hour so do give it a watch.
I think the steelman of the tl;dr is an abstract. It has the problem, the solution, and the implication that if you really want to understand you need to read the whole thing.
Yeah, seems true to me. And also, I think many things cannot properly have an abstract. Feels similar to how some essays can have their thesis up front, and other essays genuinely break if you try to put the thesis up front.
There's a piece you didn't really touch on here - I'm often impatient with long-form content because it (understandably) is for a general audience, and doesn't know or care about which parts will be novel or interesting to me personally.
I'm not really sure how to solve this though - reading stuff meant for a smaller audience helps (but has echo chamber issues), and maybe an AI with a lot of context on me personally could do it, but for now it seems like just the nature of the thing.
Just to clarify: you mean "I'm impatient with long-form content WHEN it's for a general audience, because it will contain chunks that aren't relevant or novel for me," not "long-form content is in-general for a general audience," right?
(I don't think there's any correlation between length and generality, or at least there isn't in my experience.)
Certainly I did not mean to imply that there's a correlation between length and generality, but basically all content is for an audience more general than me personally, although it varies in generality
Yeah, makes sense. I definitely agree that various parts of a long-form piece will be more or less interesting to me/will have more or less of the magic. I think in my own experience, I've found that trying to skip the less golden parts tends to make the whole thing break? Sort of like how people often complain that Circling circles are "boring until they aren't," and have a vibe of, like, why can't we skip the slow meander and get right to the good stuff. I think I, too, would like it if we could skip the slow meander and get right to the good stuff, but in my own experience you Just Can't (alas).
I get the gist of what this essay is about, but it feels too...strong? Final? It makes a lot of claims about stuff that takes X amount of time, but isn't the entire point of improving as a writer (or whatever else) to communicate more information in less time? It might be true that you, the author, can't make the information any shorter than it is without diluting the value of it, and maybe no author on Earth can. But it sorta goes without saying that eventually, in some distant future where people have learned all the most powerful rhetorical techniques and are customizing blogposts for individual readers, someone might be able to cut it down to a tl;dr.
And I know that's a meaningless distinction, but you're usually so precise with your words about where the line is, and I just don't feel that here. If there actually is an object-level disagreement, then it's worth knowing about.
Yes, I do mean this more in the "what's pragmatically possible in the foreseeable future" sense; I expect that there are ways to cut most of these concepts down by some reasonable amount if you e.g. applied near-superintelligence levels of effort to them.
I happened to read this on the same day as watching "In Defense of Inefficiency" by Zoe Bee (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-_rK0KkB6k) which makes quite similar points as the ones in this post. Most notably, the fact that "efficiency" is very ingrained in our culture yet is often a trap because it fails to recognize that some of the "waste" that it got rid of was actually desirable or that the *actual* point of doing something was in the doing of the thing itself. But look at me here trying to summarize the video, it's pretty good and it's just one hour so do give it a watch.
Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.