About halfway through a one-page article was this quote.
"If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first."
Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas.
Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article
I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url.
In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or business advice. Anything with quantum physics in the title works too.
Well, I don't comment on Reddit without reading the article, but I notice that, on contentious topics, by the time I've read the article there are 2000 comments already and there's not much point posting a comment after that. If you want somebody to read your comment, you have to post on something nobody cares about, or post REALLY fast.
Just yesterday an article that went in depth on all different kinds of atmospheric water harvesting was filled with comments on how this was 'debunked', despite some of the methods being used in practice (notably fog harvesting).
Moreover, the article was discussing emerging changes in the technology and the hurdles they would face (it's almost always energy!) but none of the comments seemed to discuss that at all.
Most of the discussion today is buried under "reactions". People just state their shallow opinion and fight over them. I hope new more coherent way of discussion emerges again.
In the Usenet there was custom of writing summaries. Article writer would direct the discussion.
> Authors of articles occasionally say that readers should reply by mail and they'll summarize. Accordingly, readers should do just that---reply via mail. Responding with a followup article to such an article defeats the intention of the author. She, in a few days, will post one article containing the highlights of the responses she received. By following up to the whole group, the author may not read what you have to say.
>When creating a summary of the replies to a post, try to make it as reader-friendly as possible. Avoid just putting all of the messages received into one big file. Rather, take some time and edit the messages into a form that contains the essential information that other readers would be interested in.
>Also, sometimes people will respond but request to remain anonymous (one example is the employees of a corporation that feel the information's not proprietary, but at the same time want to protect themselves from political backlash). Summaries should honor this request accordingly by listing the From: address as anonymous or (Address withheld by request).
HN would need to make a significant number of changes for it to restore its signal ratio, including:
1. Flagging sources of information that are known to use clickbait tactics, stupid popups and generally low effort content. Paywalls can also be labeled as such.
2. Niceties like showing original title next to the updated one, or page title next to the submission title. I want to know what the original title was so I can appropriately shame the individual into trying to clickbait a boring topic onto the front page.
3. Downvotes should need to be justified and reviewed. A “I disagree with this comment because it offends me” is not a valid reason to bury good commentary. Happens too frequently. Remove showdead etc altogether.
4. Limited number of new seats for posting/commenting. Read-only for general public. Remove accounts that are regularly submitting garbage to the front page (happens more frequently than you think).
This community has degraded over the years and it’s easily seen in most high volume commentaries. A lot of it is emotionally charged nonsense with people being “convinced” of things with nothing to show where they obtained such strong convictions.
Dan shouldn’t moderate, he should outright ban, and in the process push the low effort armchairing to Reddit and other sites.
HN is first and foremost a vehicle for YC ventures to post their stuff anyway.
While I can understand people are optimistic that this site is somewhat more “intelligent” or “knowledgeable” about particular subjects compared to other sites, the range of that subject matter is so narrow that in majority of categories you’re more likely to find higher quality, insight and volume of posts elsewhere. Namely Reddit.
Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough” topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link posts and only allow text posts.
I see HN in the same way. It happens so often that HN discussion is much better that article itself that I go there first, and RTFA only if the discussion makes me want to read it.
For this article, I tried to read it after reading a few comments, but got bored.
The readability of lot of web articles tend to be quite poor as they are written from viewpoint of SEO rather than readability. I rarely can read complete web article unless it was published in a paper magazine or newspaper.
HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on controversial topics. The HN quality of discussion is not that different from themed serious subreddits.
Give Reddit a chance, find subreddits in your area of interest.
I would have given Reddit a chance if they were not constantly screwing around with the UI. The new UI is sluggish and really affects the reading experience negatively.
I love that HN has not made any changes to its UI for a long time and a fast and convenient reading experience remains top priority on HN. If there are more HN-like forums, that would be something I would be interested in.
It's frustrating, but utilizing old.reddit.com / Reddit Enhancement Suite (https://redditenhancementsuite.com/) goes a long way in making it a more enjoyable experience.
Heh, I remember maybe a decade ago, some e-magazine in spanish which marketed itself as a truly cultural experience, with long articles on interesting cultural topics. It was so badly formatted for SEO that it was so painful to read which probably made people think that the cultural themes were more difficult than they actually were.
Correction: _commenters_ think of Reddit titles as discussion prompts. I think that's a pretty important distinction to make. It's possible that there is a sizable group of people who actually do click the links, but they don't also go back to comment.
Yes, but getting a spate of RTFA was a badge of honour. Also responding RTFA meant that you didn't get it either. To a flood of RTFA you got to be allowed to be quite pithy in response with outrageous indignation and generally still be onside.
My /. id (JSG) is ~18K but is only so large because I lurked for a few years before signing up. sigh
Even back then I have always used identifiable IDs on forums, those are my initials and here I use surname + initial and do so on everything internets these days.
I feel like a closer approximation of what’s going on is that there are perennial discussion topics that people want to participate in when they see an opportunity (e.g. “battery technology continues to improve, but it’s rare that we see the results trickling down to consumer electronics.”)
But just having a forum with “evergreen threads” where people talk continuously about perennial topics, doesn’t seem to work out very well, as people tend to get bored of topics when nobody’s saying anything new.
People might want to participate in them, but they won’t bother if there’s no expectation that their comment will be seen, let alone replied to. Nobody wants to post to a “stale” thread; it’s a waste of effort. And, in a vicious cycle, nobody wants to read other people’s posts on a “stale” thread either, because “thread necromancy” is almost never done by someone with something of value to contribute.
“Post a link and comment about it” sites have stumbled upon a fix for the problem of perennial discussion topics becoming "stale": by having individual threads focused on news articles relevant to these perennial topics, rallying points are created, giving people an excuse/justification to resume the larger ongoing topic of conversation within the comments of the individual news item, with the expectation that others will also be doing so.
The news itself is important to this process, as it offers a promise that fresh content (i.e. comments with a novel thought backing them) might be injected into the ongoing topic due to the news; thereby giving people a reason to check out this particular resurrection of the topic, even if they’ve read previous threads “about” it before.
But it really only has to be a promise that someone else is going to contribute novel thought to the conversation. Most people don’t want to be the source of the novel thought themselves. They want to participate on one of the existing sides of the topic, using what they already knew about the topic going in. They want to try out a “famous” debate for themselves. (And, if there's something new to know, they seemingly want to learn it by being told off by someone who has read the news, and so now knows something they don't.)
So the news article itself has about the same effect on the volume of commenting on a site like this, as public news regarding a company’s value has on the volume of trading in a market. A dose of “the real thing” certainly causes a surge—but so does the expectation of it, whether you actually end up getting the real thing or not.
And, just like speculating on a stock doesn’t require any insider knowledge, commenting under one of the “traditional” positions on such a perennial topic doesn’t require that you read the news that prompted the resurrection.
You can't have a stock market without real signal; and yet the market will always be composed mostly of traders with no access to (or desire to access) real signal. You can't have a perennial discussion without news; and yet the comments will always be composed mostly of people who have no desire to access the news.
Many people seem to mistake the social purpose of these “post a link and comment on it” sites as actually being purely for discussing the content of the link. It’s possible to use such sites this way, but it’s not incentivized by the UX compared to the alternative discussed above. You usually need stringent community moderation if you want people to focus on the news itself.
A free UX design idea: if you want to build “a discussion forum for news topics in a domain”, then rather than endlessly cloning the Reddit/HN model, try building a hybrid of Reddit with a traditional discussion forum. I.e.,
1. start with a traditional discussion forum (thread-list view with threads sorted by last-posted time);
2. make it so threads aren't “bumped” to the top from regular posts in those threads;
3. add a special “news link” type of post, that users can make, which does bump the thread.
(Bonus ideas: scrape the news-links and so render the news-link's content inline in the thread. Have automatic "threadmark" navigation between the spans of posts delimited by these news-item posts. Make clicking the thread in the thread-list view navigate to the newest news-item post. Require moderators to approve news-items before the bump triggers, to avoid "redundant" bumps, to in turn increase users' faith in bumps translating to a real renewal of discussion.)
I imagine such a UX would work much better as a way to explicitly run continuous long-running discussions of news topics, as refueled by news links. One core benefit is that what would on Reddit be “previous threads” would on this forum be “the same thread”, and so people would (hopefully!) feel much less of a reason to recapitulate the exact same posts.
There is a value in rehashing previous conversations. Imagine if you were at a cafe, having an intellectual conversation with your friend while a GPT-12 butler listened. Every time you rehash a conversation that someone else had, GPT-12 butler interrupts and says "excuuuuse me sir, some permutation of this conversation has happened 2000 times on the internet. I will replay the top 3 of those. Please listen carefully, then proceed to tread new ground." I think that GPT-12 butler would be very annoying.
You might think that I'm making a strawman argument, because I'm certain you wouldn't like the interrupting GPT-12 butler either. However, the UX you proposed would sometimes feel just as constraining.
Participating in arguments, even if they aren't novel, is a cognitively enriching experience. Reading but not participating in those very same arguments, while enriching in its own way, is not a complete replacement. Furthermore, I feel that in order to argue at higher levels of abstraction (which new fields are biased towards), you should first participate in discourse at every preceding level of abstraction. Reddit and HN allow for that. They're not perfect, but I don't think that enforced meta-threads would be an improvement.
All that being said, I think that your "bonus" idea of hyperlinking discussion to relevant excerpts in the article, inline, can be singularly transformative.
>> Haha, bravo Mr. Timmer. If IE search is working right, then apparently I am the first. I think its well over 90%...
>> "bananas"
> That was added after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Idea credit goes to our editor in chief, Ken Fisher, and it was put in by our managing editor, Eric Bangeman.
From that first comment mentioning bananas onwards, bananas are mentioned very regularly. A quick sample of a few pages suggests somewhere around 40% of the comments mention bananas.
I actually skimmed the comments but missed the one from the author among the massive number of others. Therefore, seeing the surge of bananas a few pages in, I thought once discovered, people kept looking for what those "bananas" were about and then discovered the sentence above themselves.
> I thought once discovered, people kept looking for what those "bananas" were about and then discovered the sentence above themselves.
I suspect that's what really happened. Would have been better if they included that note since publication time. The first comment with "Banana" then would have been the real indicator. Most others would have simply noted the keyword from the comments before reading the article, like you said.
But isn't that like 'forcing' the readers to the full length of the article? It's fine if the content is very compelling. I think it has to have something to do with reading online. It's really challenging to get readers glued to the page while traditionally physical books and magz have an easier environment (less distractions).
> If you don’t have the patience to digest the article, what give you the authority to write on the topic?
... your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidey sense to detect BS trained since long time ago, your previous experience, or the fact that you are yet a expert in the topic.
Or just your curiosity and desire to participate in the conversation, that is the correct motivation. To take a chance to improve your knowledge about a topic shouldn't be regulated by a pass.
Everybody wants their paper turning into a breaking new / symbol of authority or just cheat in the citations game, but this is not how it happens most of the time. Most of the time it is just published and nothing happens. Nobody will rush to read your hard work. Is just how it is
My boss is very good at skimming through scientific papers. She's so well trained she will get the gust of a paper in a couple of seconds(maybe exaggerated). I guess there is the expertise in the field at play as well...
>your common sense, your sense of logic, your spidy[sic] sense
Consider how accurate the senses of a person that speaks without observing are. Existing is not license to proliferate otherwise there would be no notion of a cancerous cell, these would simply be another part of the organism. Uninformed opinions are the cancer of public discourse. Uncontrolled growth of irresponsible and subjective thought.
I'm guessing from your username that (like me) you're a fan of Nietzsche. Alas those of us who (like Nietzsche) believe opinions should be informed are a dying breed these days.
This is no longer true is it - everyone wants engagement so they salaciously trail some upcoming new fascinating wonderful surprise until the headline is an outright lie, the body of the article is meaningless and the surprise is a disappointment.
> But isn't that like 'forcing' the readers to the full length of the article?
Yes. Personally I don't see a problem with that if you are trying to achieve a certain level of good response.
Maybe an alternative would be to let the presence of the "magic" word/phrase alter the ordering of the comments displayed to other users, or even "shadow delay" responses without it for fifteen minutes.
From my own experience: when I comment on something that I haven't read it's usually because I'm more interested in the conversation around the subject than the subject itself. So, in that case, I have usually read the comments, and if half of them just randomly included the word "bananas" in them, I'm pretty sure that the convesation whould change to be: "wtf are ppl saying bananas all the time?"
Yeah I heard about that one I think, that's really clever. Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool on the best days, but comment sections under news articles? It makes all the undereducated conspiracists come out the woodworks. A Dutch news site (nu.nl) tried to run a comment section and even something of a social network for a while, but they couldn't maintain them.
You can create a comment section, but it needs a barrier like that and tight curation - no comments posted without approval. Which can be a problem because the commenters with "dissenting" opinions will quickly claim censorship and how the outlet doesn't tolerate opposing viewpoints.
> Honestly comment sections on the internet are a cesspool
A bit offtopic, but when YouTube first added comments, they quickly got into cesspool territory, exactly like you describe. However, these days, I find myself really enjoying YouTube comments quite often. Is this just me? Am I just watching more happy happy joy joy videos these days or did YT comments go from "the internet's awfulest" to "pretty neat" somehow? I feel like it's chock full of witty jokes, positive vibes, light entertainment, and the occasional weirdo just to balance things out.
It might have to do with there being real identities linked to them now from Google+, which many say was the main purpose of the project; not to mention the improved recommendation engine and upvotes, etc.
Looking at Facebook I would be willing to say that has literally nothing to do with it.
Facebook insists even more on having "real people" using their real names, often forcing them to vet themselves, yet at times it easily steals the crown in terms of "really bad user interactions" from YouTube comments.
Very likely much more related to the topic under which people are commenting: Non-political feel good fluff does not allow for much friction to be inserted, thus the tone of comments will be much more civilized and friendly.
But anything that goes into controversial, and particularly political, territory is bound to quickly escalate into a complete shit show, on YouTube and Facebook alike.
Which fits neatly into common communication strategies like focusing on similarities rather than on differences.
> It might have to do with there being real identities linked to them now from Google+, which many say was the main purpose of the project; not to mention the improved recommendation engine and upvotes, etc.
But the migration of YouTube channels and comments to G+ linked identities was reversed[0], wasn't it? Not to mention that G+ has since been shut down.
Shouldn't that make the abortive effort irrelevant for the quality of YouTube comments today?
Nu.nl's comment section has been back for a while, they dumped the social network ambitions and invested in better moderation before turning it back on. It's helped somewhat.
This is a popular opinion - that there are some things that people should just not be allowed to say, anywhere, ever, and while I (sort of) understand the impetus behind it, every proposed cure is worse than the disease.
I had this idea as well. It only solves the low quality comment problem if that is something the site owners want. In some cases they may benefit from low quality comments.
Before the web, the HTTP POST equivalent was an envelope and stamp and maybe some moderation at the receiving side. People should look into ways to limit comments / filter noise now that it is in abundance.
I would assume the questions are of the simple, "What facts did we state?" kind, rather than requiring some deeper understanding or inference. So why would you allow someone who couldn't grok the facts to comment? If my assumption is true then it works as a reasonable anti-bot measure, allowing wrong answers would negate that.
Or how about shadow banning the user on that specific article? Make it appear their comment was posted, only on their logged in account (and maybe IP address). Rest of the world wouldn't see it.
Works very well, but the massive lack of transparency will make it difficult to justify and ultimately creating paranoia and scissors in the heads of people.
I would not want to participate on such a platform forcing me to double check if my contributions were actually published or simply hidden away for some secret reason.
It's these pieces of accountability that go a long way to have users compliant with moderation.
It would be funny if so many didn't already wear their ignorance as a badge of pride.
Imagine an article on vaccinations--many who would be posting exactly the sort of nonsense you'd be hoping to prevent would wear their "understood 0% of the facts in the article" as a badge of pride, and others who agreed with them would interpret it as such.
At least 0% would require more knowledge than guessing. You might even accidentally educate a few anti-vaxxers, who would be forced to learn what they were disagreeing with. (Yes, I know it still wouldn't help.)
Let's go further. Make it a quiz about the general topic too. If you don't have any fundamental knowledge about a topic, your opinion shouldn't get a platform for it to spread.
What it demonstrates is that people have already made up their mind on the topic and aren't genuinely interested in new perspectives. This helps explains the inflammatory nature of Internet debates in general.
Someone is always complaining regardless of the message.
You can state that you like strawberry marmalade and someone on this planet will threaten you and your family for that transgression. Problem is the net isn't as anonymous as before thanks to social media and some people without significant personality try to call your employer, who succinctly distances the whole company from strawberry marmalade to underline how important it is to have values.
Employees will be reprimanded and strawberry marmalade removed from the canteen.
Good information has a long tail. The first time anything is posted, the internet is going to shit on it, regardless of what it is. But good content is sticky, and people doing serious research will be able to dig it up.
I think it also possibly shows that in general we've not learned to be able to tune out or self filter the information overload that's thrown at us via the Internet.
>an article isn't going to convince a political party supporter to switch sides for example //
Why not? Are you suggesting articles can't carry information that changes peoples opinions; that people are wedded too much to Party identity; or perhaps that only one article wouldn't do it?
It should be able to change someone's mind if that person were rational, open minded and the article contained some very revealing information. It should.
...But it won't, not in today's American politics. There's no nuance left, it's us versus _them_, entrenched political warfare. If the article says something bad about my party it's either: _fake news!_ or a smear campaign by _them_! If it says something good about their party it's ____-wing propaganda.
I did a similar thing with recruiting ads, I added a line of "If you are interested in this role, please reach out to me starting with 'Heyyyyyy I am XXX', thanks!" in the middle of the JD.
And I simply ignore 99% of the reach out because they didn't start with that line.
It's just like the brown M&m thing Van Halen did.
Job ads are universally filled with jargon-y HR copy-pasta bullshit, so I’m sure most people never read them on purpose.
Instead of being clever, you’ve simply overestimated the importance of your ad in people’s lives while simultaneously optimizing for inexperienced people who’ve never read a job ad before and don’t know they are BS.
I don’t put PR bullshit in my vacancies and I write a lot of them. I respect my potential hires and expect them to respect me and at least read the damn thing. Unbelievable, right?
Sure, your ads might be the greatest ads ever written. But if you respected your potential hires you’d be mindful of the fact that it’s easy to get job ad fatigue since all the other company ads are filled with bullshit.
Playing king-in-the-castle with people’s lives by rejecting them over some bizarre game where you assume bad intent doesn’t sound like “respect” to me.
The job ad is around 200 words. If someone is serious about a job that they will be working on for 5 days a week, do you think it's too much to ask if I expect them to read through these words?
> Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article
This is natural if you follow the amount of effort required. Effort to comment ~ close to zero. Effort to go through an article worth several pages (or worse, a paper!) without dropping off is much, much higher.
Thats because an awful lot of people are chewing ice.
(epistemic status: I am 100% projecting here. Maybe I'm broadly right though)
A person with an iron deficiency, will often have an urge to chew ice [1]. Ice does not have iron or help you absorb iron -- but brains are weird.
There are an awful lot of people who are lonely and want the sort of emotional and intellectual connection that they'd normally get comes from sitting by a fireside doing chores for hours. It takes effort and vulnerability to make friends with whom you can have 2-hours-long chats. It requires planning and intentionally-directing attention to maintain those relationships. Those who fail to plan and execute those actions will reach out in weird ways to try to meet that need. These will disproportionately be people who:
A. Struggle to sustain attention long enough to plan and execute what they really intend.
B. Fear that interactions with new people will end up with them assaulted, infected, or dead.
C. Feel trapped in some situation and unable to plan a way out.
D. Struggle to form an intellectual connection during opportunities for deep social interaction.
E. Have been in a situation where A-D was true and are falling into old habits.
I posit that the intellectual masturbation of people on twitter or other forums is a symptom of an unmet hunger for real intellectual connection with other humans.
No ^^
Your source says the chewing ice is a known symptom of anemia, but does not say how prevalent this symptom is in anemia-affected people.
So from that source you can't conclude that anemia "often" leads to chewing ice, it may very well be quite rare.
Abstractly, "A is often a consequence B" does not logically goes to "B often leads to A".
To use an extreme exemple, crossing paths with polar bears (chewing ice) is generally linked with dieing (anemia), but death is quite rarely caused by crossing paths with polar bears.
I've noticed that when i'm bored or switched off at work, i'm more likely to go on Twitter and start arguments with people i don't know. That usually makes me unhappy, which makes me more switched off at work!
Even lower effort/risk - make a comment in response to a wrong-headed comment from another commenter that hasn't read the citation. All you have to know is that their comment is wrong, whether or not it has any relation to the new information.
Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.
no, the journalists do not love misinform. If that was the case they wouldnt be journalists by definition. It may be 1:1 as 'no true scotsman' but this is what it is
I'm certain that social networks have played a large role, if not the sole reason for this behaviour by encouraging limited attention, FOMO, OCD-scrolling etc. But, I guess we wouldn't able to prove that more people read the content before commenting before social networks without a proper control and besides many visitors of these sites are from social networks.
All major News organisations know that only small fraction of their audience on social networks even click the link anymore and rest of them just make up what they wanted from the title and description. At least now I think, Facebook doesn't allow one to alter the title, description of the website they're sharing; for years someone who shares could change those as well!
> I'm certain that social networks have played a large role, if not the sole reason for this behaviour
I don’t think that’s correct, depending upon your definition of "social networks". People were complaining about people not RTFAing on Slashdot in the 90s.
The sheep in Animal Farm (who repeat talking points independently of applicability or even consistency with the past) were probably a complaint about people not RTFAing in 1945.
If one squints enough, Plato's Cave could be a complaint (circa -375) about opinions via pale shadows of secondary and tertiary sources.
First 3 to come reads the title, skim read TFA, write corrections or complements.
Next 30 reads the title, read comments, and write some pretend skepticism.
Next 300 reads the title, view comments, upvote the strongest opinions, and share.
Next 3000 reads the title and immediately decide whether to share.
Somewhere from here and above, 3-4 people tries to plagiarize something in it just to get votes and/or because they have personal issues in forming opinions.
Rest of the million people after this point just applaud and share what’s being thrown at their faces.
We were given a test like this in school once. The first instruction was to not do anything until you'd read all the questions. The 'questions' were all stuff like poke holes in the corner of the paper, some math problems stuff like that. At the end of the test, the last question was, don't do questions 1-9, simply write your name in the corner and turn the test over.
The test was supposed to be about your ability to read and follow instructions, few people in my class passed the test. As soon as the test started you could see people poking holes and writing things.
Although it's point is good, I hate this test because--at least in most versions I have seen--nothing tells you to skip questions 1-9. The directions say, "Read all the questions first." OK fine. Then question 10 says, "Just write your name on the paper and turn it over."
But why should question 10 be the only one you follow?
"Read all the questions" is the only direction you have. There is never a "skip 1-9", except in number 10, but why would you start with that one?
The instruction is very clear and precise. It says to read all the questions. Not to answer them (or answer them right away).
Therefore, if you follow the instruction, you end up reading question #10 following the process, within the time it takes to read all the questions.
Now, that instruction might seem controversial, but it really isn't. If you have the time, its a good idea to read content well, before dealing with it further.
So, after you have read all of the instructions, why follow the instruction in question 10 instead of starting at the beginning?
I suppose you are saying that no one ever told you to actually take the quiz, but that is pretty stupid if you follow that in every other situation. It's a set up, designed to make people look stupid.
The lesson is that sometimes patience pays off. If I have the time (and I don't like to stress myself), I always have an overview of the whole picture, in this case the questions. For example, if I have to sign a document, I first read it through once, and then another time to act. It might seem like lost time, but actually you have a much better understanding of the content.
I had something similar and failed and thought it was the dumbest thing ever.
I'm not an automaton. You didn't tell me at the beginning that the point was to follow every single thing exactly to the letter. Of course I could play that game, but you spend my entire career as a student telling me to happily skip problems and go on the next and then you want to act as if it's a problem with me that I engaged in the test in good faith.
Ha, brilliant. Kind of the equivalent of how sometimes students put in random sentences in essays submitted for classes, to demonstrate that their teachers don't fully read their work. Or how surveys can have nonsense questions/answer options to weed out people not reading the questions.
In college I used to take psychological studies for extra beer money. The tests would have the standard scale (rate from 1-5 your agreement with statement x), except a random page of each test would have instructions to ignore the prompt, and just to mark all of the answers a certain way. Same concept, weed out the people who ignore the instructions and just fill in random answers.
I always wondered what would happen if I incorrectly answered those questions - would they still pay me? But I prefer cash to the truth
I put swearwords in an assessment once, just to see if anyone noticed. I presume they didn't, because nobody commented - but maybe they did, and didn't care enough to comment.
Reminds me of this software that, like all softwares, had a miles long Terms of Use. Buried in the middle the developer said something to the effect of "Contact us at this address and receive USD XX,000".
Most users clicked the "I have read and agree to the Terms and Conditions" and only a handful actually contacted the developer. They did receive the money though.
It’s a standard quality measurement tactic in Internet based surveys. In the list of survey questions, you post a few question which have clear black or white answers. The answers from the survey takers will let you know to further investigate the the survey response. You can then decide to take actions accordingly. Most of the times, you discard.
Google had a surveys program where you could earn credits for the google play store and every now and then you would get a trap question usually formatted something like "Have you used x product" or "how well do you know x" where x does not exist. Anyone who answers incorrectly will see limited surveys in the future.
> Google had a surveys program where you could earn credits for the google play store and every now and then you would get a trap question usually formatted something like "Have you used x product" or "how well do you know x" where x does not exist. Anyone who answers incorrectly will see limited surveys in the future.
Google Rewards still exists, and as recently as a couple of weeks ago had a question in that format (though I am not sure if it was actually a nonexistent brand, and I don't recall enough about the question to look it up now).
Not sure if they stopped using the trick questions or not but they still have the program. You can Download it in your phone from Play Store, it's called Google Rewards.
It really made me much more conscious about seeking out and reading original sources, rather than relying on interpretations and summaries from journalists, bloggers, etc.
I did something similar once with an essay I wrote in high school to see if the teacher actually read the whole thing. It turns out that he did read it and I got docked a mark for that.
This reminds me of a prank I tried in high school.
There was a rumor that one teacher didn’t read submitted essays. I decided to test this by applying the jargon translator from Dilbert’s Desktop Games (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert%27s_Desktop_Games) to my essay. The translator output was painful to read: for example, it replaces “mother” with “female parental unit”. I added a paragraph on the third page asking him to call me if he was still reading the essay. I never received a call but he later said that he had lost the essay so the results were inconclusive.
From that story's author, they added it after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Doesn't change your point for later ones.
I had something like "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in title of your Message" in the middle of my linkedIn profile to know which recruiters would read through the whole profile.
I've done similar with online groups like freecycle when selling or giving away things. Include "to prove you've actually read this post, mention the word elephant in your response" in the advert and have my mail agent delete everything to that address[1] which doesn't include the word.
Massively reduces the number of messages you get from time wasters who just mash "can I have this?" or "is this still available?" to get in first, who will then ghost you because they've taken an extra half second to decide they don't want the item after all[2] so you spend time writing replies that achieve nothing.
Probably means some genuinely interested people get redirected to trash too, but if the item is worth having there will be enough responders to make this not matter. If you see no responses after a time, maybe then check your trash to see if there are any there worth responding to.
[1] those services attract much spam, always have a specific address for each that you can turn off once the junk starts flowing in
[2] as it isn't the right colour, or the right size, or you can't deliver, or will deliver but can't conveniently offer collection, or they completely misread the subject line, ...
The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes.
In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise, that's how I try to structure my own engagement.
When people have 50 Tweets per day or more, it's unlikely that they're taking time to really think and engage. It's more about rapid fire comments designed to get the most engagement.
I have no idea how to do Twitter well. I have a serious medical condition and other issues and I spend most of my time basically trying to distract myself from the misery of my life and I sometimes spend all day on Twitter and sometimes don't look at it for weeks at a time.
I have heard of folks on twitter with huge follower-counts who use the medium as a form of one-way communication: they don't look at replies or mentions and have DMs turned off. That seems to be the best way to use it in my opinion.
So you're saying we need a platform with both characters/post and post/day limits?!
I mean... that's beautiful, because I created a second twitter account just so I can follow a select few people for the pretty much the same reason you gave without having to worry they're getting lost to the noise.
In lieu of browsing Twitter directly, I've been using this service lately: https://fraidyc.at/
It's great because I can just see what people I care about post, and you can arrange it so that the people who post infrequently but that you really care about will be in your face when they do post. I find it soothing, and I can't wait for a proper mobile release.
This is a really nice concept. I shall be signing up.
I quit Twitter recently due to the massive adverse impact it was having on my mental health. It essentially ended up personalizing every major bad thing happening in the world. I feel like I live on a significantly more peaceful planet since I stopped.
But I do miss the tech side, I used to follow a load of interesting people that I no longer see. I will add them on this!
Huh, for a while I've been wanting almost exactly this. I simulate it on Twitter by using a lot of (private) lists and sometimes navigating to single users, but that's clunky.
The social network I honestly want is something akin to the tradition of Christmas cards: a rare update (at most once a quarter) about how life is going with the option of attaching a few photos.
No comments section, but instead a "I'd like to get in touch and chat sometime" button which helps schedule a video chat.
The ideal social network in my opinion is instant messaging. Its the only major platform which hasn't been infested with algorithms, marketing, "influencers" and all the other crap. Its just you and close contacts. The downside is you won't see random updates from people you don't interact with regularly but honestly its not the biggest loss.
Man, sign me up. I would love to have a Facebook again if you removed the news feed, likes, alarm red notifications, and long comment threads about politics or whatever. Just a casual "hey let's catch up" and "here's how my last month / quarter went," oh yeah, I'm in.
So Facebook before "shares", with a "poke" button?
F.B. Purity can help restore some sanity to Facebook by killing all the shares, but since people stopped doing their own updates and photo albums to do vapid blog reshares instead, it will probably be a hollow experience.
Dead, really? Maybe it was the lmgtfy link that tripped the modbot.
> if it's not as easy as social media, it won't get the adoption these days.
I think that is backwards. Starting a blog is as easy as starting a Facebook account. The problem is that a blog does not give you the "engagement" of a social network and therefore can not compete for your attention against the very fine-tuned engagement machines of Facebook et al.
At the end of the day, content production in social networks follow a Pareto distribution. A small percentage produces the majority of the content and the rest is just there to share or produce noise. If you remove the tools that produce noise, you remove any reason for the majority to join. If you remove the strings that pull the noisy majority, you don't have a "social network". This is why my feeling is that "a social network with no engagement" is an oxymoron.
Yes you're right, the engagement is the most important part.
It's not the ease of creating the site, it's the ease of directing people to view / subscribe / communicate through & return to it & that is a very difficult problem to solve if you do not simply approach as a standard social network.
I guess to me there's a niche for smaller scale networks, which would suit those with lesser engagement needs. Most people want to comment & subscribe, I'd say that you could cut almost all other social network features and it would work to a degree.
My point is that we don't need to wish for a "Social network with less features". We just need to embrace technology that already exists and that has been ignored by big tech because they don't have much to gain by adopting it.
Totally agree, just think that we're talking about the same thing.
The technology exists, but it's making it super easy to sign up for completely tech illiterate users that's the problem.
I actually think tech-literacy on a wider scale is probably worse than it was 10 years ago because people stopped using the wide web and starting logging onto facebook and nothing else.
I really don't think it is a problem of "being difficult for non-techies".
I think that techies gave up on it. Even techies want to chase metrics, taking whatever shortcuts they can to build an audience, "growth hacking" and that includes playing the game by the rules of Big Tech.
As an example: I am working a lot with the blockchain/web3 community the past years and every company/project uses medium for writing their articles, have a strong Twitter presence and rely on Reddit for forum announcements. Nowadays it's getting worse that a lot of projects are adopting Discord for group chat. If even the uber-techies and supposedly defenders of decentralized are giving up on fundamentals of the web, why would the non-techies?
You don't have to do it so simply as X posts/day. You can give some kind of 'influence points' per account or whatever that get automatically spread between posts. Tune it so at X/day each post is neutral, while more frequent become penalized and less frequent get a boost. There are probably better ways to do it, but this should get the idea across.
If the guiding rule from GP was "the best people to follow on Twitter are the people who don't use Twitter much" or "who only use Twitter to share what happens elsewhere", I don't think a rate limit would really help to satisfy that.
It doesn't even matter if they're good at it. Anyone who is even trying to "win" at twitter is just going to actively make your feed worse. It's not just that they spam you with low-value tweets, but also that following them helps ensure that you land in that awful filter bubble of people who see twitter as a competition.
> The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes.
Interesting. Do you have some specific heuristic for identifying those people?
I dislike twitter. But do like digital painting artworks. My solution is an RSS feed of a bunch of twitter digital artists. Means I have no contact with twitter itself, but I do get exactly the content I want.
You mean Ben Shapiro didn't actually have to make his tweet about how his sex life sucks and his wife had gone on a two month getaway with her personal trainer? :o
I never "got" Twitter, it's a rapid fire barrage of random remarks and unless you spend a lot of recurring time on it you won't be able to follow what's going on. In my opinion anyway, my GF is really into it.
if i may share my personal experience with twitter: like any social media platform, it might be beneficial to actively avoid content that the platform is known for i.e. mainstream content.
i'm on twitter because i think there are some pretty funny people on there. so i only follow people i think are funny, and i actively block any type of content at first sight that kind of annoy me. worked out pretty well for me so far.
Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it.
The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated how it was mathematically possible for 2+2 to sometimes be 5. The argument may have been weak, and some people may not have found it convincing, but it was a mathematical argument, meant as a joke for a small Twitter audience.
Through the Twitter telephone, many retweets and steps later, the original argument - considered, funny, valid, perhaps weak - somehow transformed into "2+2=4 is a mere social construct, and 5 is a valid answer" - which, yes, would be a disturbing trend if that were actually the argument. Thus the unduly passionate took up "2+2 is 4 not 5" as a political rallying cry. People I otherwise respect as rational began tweeting this.
It became complicated because there are always people who believe dumb things, like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct", and as always with the unduly passionate, extreme opinions are held up as examples of dangerously typical. The author of the original thread was bullied by a mob.
It's complicated even further by the existence of an actual replication crisis in academe, in part driven by post-modern ideological pressures; there is actual loss of academic freedom even for the tenured.
But the lesson at the end of the day, to my mind, is that articles about whatever goes on over at Twitter, such as this one, such as this my post here, are always going to involve mobs of people being shitty, because the nature of the medium. Maybe they are as inevitable as "mobs of people are gambling in Las Vegas"
It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left.
The platform literally exists to make things look like they're a bigger deal worldwide than they really are. It's dangerous.
I quit twitter a while back - when I was on the platform, all my news consumption revolved around it. I was deeply concerned about the state of the UK and the US because of the constant stream of political propaganda from both sides.
Since I quit my brain feels like it's been completely freed of political dogma and I'm in a significantly better mood generally. I've not missed the trending page, that's for certain.
The biggest issue is the loss of academic freedom you alluded too, mainly & ironically being pushed heavily by the 'Twitter Left'. Twitter is like a heavily left leaning version of /pol/ these days.
I'd like to be clear that I would consider myself on 'the left', to be a progressive person & I am absolutely aware that the extremist cesspit that is twitter does not represent the genuine left, much as it doesn't represent genuine moderates or genuine conservatives.
It's the most extreme weaponized propaganda & rent-a-mob tool thats ever existed in human history.
>
It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left.
It is like unleashing a neural net that amplifies whatever it sees in a image but fed with white noise IMO. And then it just keeps on spiraling in on itself.
It scares me how much people on twitter believe that what they see trending on there from the news and other sources is being seen and blown up worldwide when it's not. It's being blown up worldwide ON TWITTER.
The vast majority of the world never sees or hears any of it.
It causes delusions of grandeur across the userbase.
> It scares me how much people on twitter believe that what they see trending on there from the news and other sources is being seen and blown up worldwide when it's not. It's being blown up worldwide ON TWITTER.
Unfortunately, "Twitter users react to..." is an entire genre of news article these days, even on otherwise-reasonable sources like the BBC.
I've seen commenters here claim that the majority of all human communication and interaction takes place on and is controlled by a few social media silos.
The fact twitter has so much political sway in the real world is appalling considering how small the user-bases are relative to populations.
We find ourselves in a position where the media can use twitter to amplify opinion and provide a false sense of majority to implement political pressure.(See cancel culture)
Along with that, the beltway bubble, where "reporters" mostly follow each other leads to, quite frankly, bizarre stories along with a unhealthy dose of outright wrong reporting.
>[Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms
Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
A more fitting hypothesis would be, "Twitter opened up a couple new paradigms of influencing people". The paradigms are complex, opaque, and subtly inter-related; quite hard to grasp for people that aren't fully "in the loop". That's why there appearance of chaos and, at the same time, we see highly organized action emerges from this chaos.
> >[Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending algorithms
> Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old style media, etc.).
I'm not sure why you think that the two are incompatible, or opposed.
I don't mean to suggest that marketing is entirely meaningless, but surely the ROI of any particular marketing effort is largely independent of its meaningfulness?
That's fair - I wasn't trying to make the point that it can't be weaponized. In fact it's quite the opposite.
I guess my main point with that quote is that it amplifies things (sometimes organically viral, sometimes engineered) and then places them all on the same level. So the userbase starts to believe that something that trended on twitter is just as globally important/well known as the genuine world news story that trended beside it, because it's all in one pot.
There's a bit more to it than that - once reactionaries started saying that 2 + 2 could only be 4, anyone who was woke and knew a bit of maths started brainposting about how actually 2 + 2 could be defined to mean 5 in various ways, and that was perfectly valid mathematics, and the reactionaries were showing their mathematical ignorance - all as a dunk on the reactionaries, not a defence or explanation of the original joke.
I'm not sure how widespread this was. I may be friends with an abnormally high number of radical leftists who like abstract algebra.
This was all mildly irritating, but the worst thing was when some of them said 2 + 2 could be 5 in modular arithmetic.
The whole thing was pointless and stupid. It was perfect Twitter.
So, 2+2=5 is true in the ring Z/Z (arithmetic modulo 1) which is just the trivial ring consisting of a single element. It's not true in any of the other modular arithmetic rings. So, it's not particularly interesting.
If you move away from modular arithmetic and the numbers 2 and 5 being in any way related to their standard meanings, you can of course redefine them to mean whatever you want (e.g. rotations of a cube or whatever) and then you can make 2+2=5 work. But I suspect no sane mathematician would do that, it would just be totally confusing.
It's possible there is some deeper structure out there in which you can reinterpret something like 2+2=5 to be actually useful, though But I doubt it.
So in a sense, it's true: You can construe a mathematical world where 2+2=5, but doing so reduces either the whole affair to a triviality (everything is equal to itself), or is just deliberately using confusing notation.
I think there's probably an interesting argument in here about how on the one hand languages and structures are man-made and arbitrary (nobody decreed that 2 should be the symbol denoting the concept of two-ness), and yet on the other hand, how once you fix meanings and rules, the mathematics is fixed and not up for debate, and also how just changing standard meanings without good reason would annoy even mathematicians.
IIRC the moral of the original 2+2=5 guy's comment was "if someone reaches a different conclusion than you, ask them under which axioms they reached that conclusion." I think that's valuable advice. Note that he didn't say you have to accept their axioms. Clearly working in arithmetic modulo 1 is meaningless in most circumstances, and you can criticize that. But if you're not reasoning under the same axioms, you cannot have a productive discussion.
If so, then the argument he makes is totally braindead. He doesn't even consider special algebraic structures or anything. He's just coming up with the most obvious observation ever: if your mathematical model doesn't match the reality or asks the wrong questions, then the results are worthless.
This is probably obvious to any high school student but that's certainly no reason to run around and say that 2+2=5. In any case, there is zero mathematical insight there, he doesn't even make a mathematical argument for it, and the "I am a former mathematician" part only serves to distract from that fact.
I could go onto an entire different rant about his infinity argument and how mathematics seemingly haven't figured out how to work with infinity "naturally" (I don't know what he means by naturally, but they certainly have figured out how to work with it precisely), but let's leave it at that.
Sure, this is true. But it's also true that some people just like shifting the goal posts or redefining terms whenever it suits them (not in mathematics, outside of it, that is).
So in terms of a productive discussion, saying 2+2=5 without context and then backtracking and saying "well but I'm talking about Z/Z (or R/Z, see uncle comment)" would be kind of annoying and it's not generally what mathematicians do.
I think this is one of the fascinating and difficult aspects of maths:
On the one hand, once you fix your axioms, there is no way in hell you can avoid the conclusions - they might be hard to find (sometimes even impossible to find), but if you find and verify them, they are unmistakably true. This can turn off some people that are more used to thinking about everything being just shades of gray and there always being multiple valid opinions. Maths is the subject where you can't just make up your mind, the evidence when you're wrong is deafening.
On the other hand, real maths can also turn off some of the more OCD-ish kind of people that think maths is all about the one single truth and everyone agreeing about everything, whereas maths is infinitely malleable and you can say things like "what if the parallel axiom is wrong" or "what if negative numbers have square roots" and even if it sounds silly, you can create proper maths out of it. If you've ever seen people with only high school maths knowledge arguing passionately online about the correct order of operations or whether the square root of -1 is i or -i (or, in another context, Grammar nazis), you know the kind of people I mean.
I think mismatched-axioms misunderstandings happen all the time and it really is a useful mental model to ask people about their axioms. In fact, I think it's even helpful when people are arguing in bad faith. If they have to state their axioms you pin them down and there are then at least some things they can't redefine on the fly.
I think even really high profile debates suffer from mismatched-axioms misunderstandings, such as the abortion debate. For instance, I think a lot of people have very different definitions of what constitutes a person. You're probably not going to have a meaningful discussion about abortion if you disagree about that, you probably have to argue about the definition of personhood first.
I think your characterization of maths is spot-on and most people don't understand what "mathematical truth" means. But my impression is that the 2+2=5 guy understands all of this (I think he was a maths PhD student too) and his point was completely valid, including its application outside of mathematics. The reactionaries who caricaturized his argument, however, don't understand any of this and believe he was making a different point entirely, namely that all truth is relative and that every person's point of view is valid. Of course, this misunderstanding is on them.
I don't doubt that the guy with a maths PhD understood the mathematical content. And I would even go farther than to say that many disagreements are based on different axioms. Many disagreements are even due to different definitions (such as "free will"). I think that was one of the key points of late Wittgenstein.
So yes, in many cases, laying out the assumptions carefully is a good idea, I agree. I just didn't think 2+2=5 was the best example.
Yes, and perhaps more importantly, Twitter seems like the wrong forum to bring up such a subtle point. Especially in a political debate where you have hordes of people who will simultaneously not understand what you're saying and be very eager to turn your argument into a viral caricature.
R/Z is also a group where 2+2=5 is technically correct, and this abelian group is actually useful. For example, if you consider the quotient topology on R/Z, you find that it is homeomorphic to a circle.
While that is also true, in this group all integers are equal to each other. The point is that there is nothing particularly interesting about the specific 2+2=5 example, not that groups in which this is true can't be interesting.
Comedians have a tough enough time doing jokes with face-to-face communication and body language as it's been done for thousands of years.
So most of the people on Twitter are already behind them, but then they want to try and do jokes on a brand new human medium that lacks a lot of information from face-to-face communication.
And then they get upset that someone didn't get their joke.
I learned a while back that twitter is a sludge fest in the abscess of the internet. Any meaningful commentary is drowned out by a deluge of downright bafoonery and willingful ignorance.
Twitter, social media, and now even regular media stories are a game of telephone, with slight misinterpretations snowballing as the minutes and hours go by. People lining up to fight on both sides of accidental straw man theses is a weekly occurrence.
I'd say that part of the reason for such a reaction is that stuff like "mathematx" actually exists - so people don't bother checking when a claim sounds like it's related.
As a rule of thumb, I try not to quote from media unless I have seen the whole book/story/article/movie myself and am sure I understand the quotation in context.
Part of that comes from the kind of frustration Hillel Wayne voices here:
> People will offhand use famous quotes to support their arguments, when the context the quote was given in has nothing to do with it.
I spent a lot of hours in high school debate listening to people misattribute quotes or misconstrue them to mean the opposite. This was frustrating at the time but in retrospect this was a valuable lesson -- if EVERYONE is gonna say that Voltaire said that thing about disagreeing with what you say, what else is everyone wrong about?
I'm also pretty sure I had this idea reinforced by an Asimov book where he argues that intellectual societies decay as they begin to rely on secondary-source research (going to the library and reading what people have written about others' experiences, instead of going out there yourself and looking at stuff). But I can't find the source now, ha ha.
This is a thing I've been pondering recently, and I don't have the same takeaway as you. My thought is: The context doesn't always matter, and a quotation can mean different things in different contexts, and that's not a bad thing.
For example, with the Knuth quote, both interpretations can be valuable? There are people who need to be told "don't optimise yet", and there are people who need to be told "there are critical times and places to optimise, and you probably shouldn't just breeze past a 12% execution time improvement".
Neither of these lessons are "wrong". The main wrong thing is probably attributing the intent of the first to Knuth, which uses his status as an expert to (falsely) back it.
I think Scott Alexander from SSC wrote something about opposite pieces of advice (eg. telling college nerds to "get out more" and telling college partygoers to "buckle down and study more", because neither of those can be universal pieces of advice), but I don't feel like searching for it rn. It's a good read though.
I guess it depends on the purpose of using a quotation. My belief is that most people cite a quotation when arguing something as an appeal to authority. "Knuth says don't optimize at all, so we shouldn't do it either." In that case, I think understanding the context is key: if you use someone's words to back up your point, but that's not actually what they meant, then context does matter.
Yes, it's true that different people might need to hear different things at different times. If you're trying to tell someone not to micro-optimize ahead of time before profiling, then quoting Knuth is appropriate. If you're trying to tell someone not to optimize at all (let's say you have a valid reason for not optimizing at all), then its disingenuous (or at best ignorant) to use the Knuth quote.
So in general I'm OK with using someone's words to illustrate a different point than they were originally making. But when I do this I prefer to explicitly state the original context and explain how I am reusing their work -- I try to point out what next information changes their idea, or where I disagree with them.
This helps in a few ways:
(1) Improves communication. When I use a quotation, some readers or listeners will know the whole context (or think they do). If I use it in a dissonant way and explicitly acknowledge the contradiction, that part of the audience will be more likely to trust that I have understood the person I am quoting. I won't be dismissed as ill-informed or as deliberately misinterpreting my sources.
For example I might say "yes, this part of the code is hard to read. Here is the deal. Knuth said that premature optimization was the root of all evil, and that you should understand what your code's slow parts are before you try to optimize it. But in this specific case I cannot easily modify my code after I deploy it and cannot easily test it on all kinds of real-world data I am expecting it to encounter pre-production, so we are defensively making this function very complex but also very performant on a diverse variety of inputs. That is why this function is so complicated up front."
(2) Improves understanding. For audience members who don't know the original context of the quotation, explaining it will help them learn something new. I thought the idea was interesting enough to quote, so probably it's worth at least a footnote about what the idea originally meant? Often if you beyond the one sentence there is a rich tapestry of prior context that is worth understanding. Humans spread our thoughts via the fragile web of written language and reiterating what has been said before can help reinforce those links and make our knowledge more durable.
For example I might say "You may have heard that Knuth said that premature optimization was the root of all evil. But it's worth reading the full three paragraphs from his paper, 'Structured Programming With Go To Statements' (1974), because he develops an entire nuanced argument that today is settled wisdom in software engineering practice. He argues that optimizations can be a great idea on the core inner loop of your program, even if they significantly hurt readability and maintainability. This still holds true with complex networked software -- you should always know what your system's slow inner loops are and you should be willing to go to unusual lengths to speed up the slowest parts. Here are some ways that distributed tracing can help with that…"
(3) Knowing what the original author was getting at seems to help me form my thoughts better.
In particular, reading the whole paper before I quote it helps me avoid re-discovering an idea that Knuth already had, and it helps me think more clearly about "given what he knew then and what I know now, what are the next logical steps? What can we learn?"
Overall the rule of thumb I use of reading/watching an entire work before quoting from it is … not for everyone. It can be exhausting. But it helps me learn and (I can't prove this) it feels like it improves the quality of discussion.
> intellectual societies decay as they begin to rely on secondary-source research (going to the library and reading what people have written about others' experiences, instead of going out there yourself and looking at stuff
I have to assume that Asimov was thinking about the course of history from the classical period through to the Enlightenment here, as it is conventionally told. Back in the day, the Greeks etc actually looked at things, and thought about them, and wrote down what they came up with. Some of it was good (mathematics), some bad (biology). But then at some point that stopped, and people relied entirely on the books the Greeks had written. Aristotle was the ultimate authority on natural science for centuries. Until the Enlightenment came along, and people started doing experiments and observations and exploration again.
I'm sure modern historians will fall over themselves to tell you this isn't true (it leaves out the Arabs, for a start, but it probably isn't even entirely true of Europe), but that's the story of history that Asimov would have known.
[Hardin:] ‘Then why rely on him? Why not go to Arcturus and study the remains for yourself?’
Lord Dorwin raised his eyebrows and took a pinch of snuff hurriedly. ‘Why, whatevah foah, my deah fellow?’
‘To get the information first hand, of course.’
‘But wheah’s the necessity? It seems an uncommonly wound-about and hopelessly wigmawolish method of getting anyweahs. Look heah, now, I’ve got the wuhks of all the old mastahs – the gweat ahchaeologists of the past. I wigh them against each othah – balance the disagweements – analyse the conflicting statements – decide which is pwobably cowwect – and come to a conclusion. That is the scientific method. At least’ – patronizingly – ‘as I see it. How insuffewably cwude it would be to go to Ahctuwus, oah to Sol, foah instance, and blundah about, when the old mastahs have covahed the gwounds so much moah effectively than we could possibly hope to do.’ Hardin murmured politely,
‘I see.’ Scientific method, hell! No wonder the Galaxy was going to pot.
[and then, much later, Hardin says:]
‘It amounts to a diseased attitude – a conditional reflex that shunts aside the independence of your minds whenever it is a question of opposing authority. There seems no doubt ever in your minds that the Emperor is more powerful than you are, or Hari Seldon wiser. And that’s wrong, don’t you see?’
For some reason, no one cared to answer him.
Hardin continued: ‘It isn’t just you. It’s the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin’s idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject – written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don’t you see that there’s something wrong with that?’
E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops also covers the idea of primary vs secondary research.
"First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation."
When I first learnt to program the thing that I really enjoyed was learning to make a terminal app that took in the users input and used it as a conditional.
I’d make all these little toy apps where my family had to type in the right word to continue. Eg “Who is the leader of the autobots?” => “Well done. Transform and roll out!!”
It strikes me we could encourage better discourse with one word locked comments that the writer of the post draws from the article.
“New research and on the impact of race on tenure”
Per the article, what % of tenured professors identify as people of color in 2019?
What do you think of something like this?
Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key thing’
> Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key thing’
I have gotten good results from including these in my expository writing. Having the reader stop and go through actively using the material at even a basic level seems to really help them integrate and retain it. They're multiple choice questions embedded throughout the text.
There's no reason you can't force everyone to correctly answer them before being able to comment. That being said, writing good incremental questions like this is actually quite a bit of work.
That won’t work. :visited was neutered for privacy reasons a decade or so ago, so that all you can change with it is colours, and if you try to inspect it with JavaScript it will give you the answers it would if :visited didn’t apply (e.g. it’ll tell you that purple link is blue).
The closest you’ll be able to get is a JavaScript click handler on .paper revealing .comments. If you do such a thing, you should probably only hide the comments with JavaScript in the first place, so that users with JavaScript disabled can still see them.
As mentioned in the article, firefox also limits what you can actually do with the visited selector so there is no way you can use css to change something which is detectable with js so the comments hidden thing won't work.
It doesn't need to be one or the other. The quiz could be optional, and answering correctly would simply give your comments a rating boost - or inversely, you could put a badge of shame on any comments from people who hadn't passed the quiz. Then you just let the natural human dynamics play out.
Does it even need to be judgemental? Sometimes I see great comments in which the author admits they only read the title (and really, are just sharing some related insight, not responding to the article. I'd be up for just having two comments sections. The hard part would be getting people to use it correctly; I'm not sure exactly what incentives would accomplish that.
you lose a bit of quality, too. It might up the ratio towards quality, but you'll definitely lose some comments that the author doesn't feel like jumping through hoops to send through.
example : captcha/captcha-like services.
I've written well-thought out responses and comments on various forums and communities , and finally when asked to identify all the buses or traffic lights I quit the process.
Why? Is it because the comment isn't worth while? Is it because some moral repositioning enticed me to not to go through with the comment?
No.
Clicking every bus increases friction, I may not be all that motivated to begin with -- this friction pushes me over the edge and I close the tab. The captcha/whatever process may have succeeded in the job of fighting spam, but it also lost my comment to the ether.
I contend that gatekeeper systems like pop-quizzing the reader, and to an extent captcha-likes, are not necessarily a good gauge for content quality but rather of poster motivation.
Captcha doesn't stop spammers, it sets the bar higher -- requiring spammers to harbor a larger motivation in order to create the systems needed to circumvent captcha-likes.
A pop quiz would not hinder someone filled with vehement hate from posting a comment -- they'd skim the text, cherry pick the answer, and proceed to post the hateful or incorrect comment.
A community filled with people who post due to a large motivation seems like a bad thing.
I already abort a lot of comments I've written to post on forums, Reddit, HN, etc. Sometimes multiple paragraphs of written and re-written text. Usually my thinking is "someone will inevitably misconstrue my intent and start a dispute" - the chance of that often seems higher than the chance of someone finding my comment useful. So, I figure "what's the point?"
Adding a gateway, like your example with the CAPTCHA, would only reduce that chance of my posting further.
But as you indicated, it is a small barrier to a motivated, angry, agenda/conspiracy-fueled commenter.
I agree. On certain places I just give up. That place that is complete different from your opinions? But who cares? Your comment on an echo chamber will just be deleted, ignored, you banned, downvoted at hell at best.
The only places to give dissenting opinions is places where all posts have no score and are merited not by the ego of the poster but the content of the post, the anonymous places have been both the most accepting and the most toxic.
I agree. It does sound like a valuable process. However, now we've increased the burden of work on the author. It is not only the author's job to conduct research, validate and share learnings; but also their job to make sure to keep noisy commenters away.
At the limit, this could lead to knowledge getting concentrated to small groups of people? :shrug:
In situations where this could be used and the author would have the opportunity to create and enforce the use of such a "quiz", the author (or the collective of people the author associates with) has already chosen to give the commenters a platform when they don't have to.
This feels like the old anti-piracy techniques games used in the 90s... asking specific questions along with the page number of the answer in the manual.
I adore this idea, and it's brilliant. It would get me to stop commenting on things I have no business commenting on, and make me consider whether or not I really want to read a certain article.
And, of course, the more honest and balanced discourse we can have the better. This is one of the reasons I appreciate HN over other social media.
That would be fun to implement in election voting worldwide. I still don't get why you have to pass a test before driving, healing and working at your profession, but not before changing how your society works.
Historically, societies have given a pretty shitty deal to people who can't vote, and a much better deal to people who can.
After all, if you're a politician, you want to get re-elected - so appeasing voters is much more important than appeasing people who can't vote. And appeasing demographics where 90% of people can vote is more important than appeasing demographics where 50% of people can vote.
So any type of testing to be allowed to vote - high school graduation, reading, IQ, current affairs - would be quite detrimental to the people who don't get to vote.
I'm not saying that you have to be cool and smart to vote. Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease <xyz> in their program to be sure that a voter is able to at least read and understand the damn booklet before putting their [V] into the bin.
But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0. That would be fair — you didn't care to inform your decision, so it doesn't count as much as one's who did.
> But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0.
Unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem - because spending money in the town with lots of people with a full vote will produce more votes than spending the same amount of money in the town with lots of people with half a vote.
> Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease <xyz> in their program
Everyone knows whether they feel happier, healthier, more successful, and whether they've got more money in their pocket today than they had 4 years ago.
Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?
Maybe I'm wrong with election math, sure have to check it, but the point is not that some towns are completely dumb forever. The point is that voters would be more aware of candidates plans intellectually rather than emotionally.
>Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?
Not more important. Important thing is voters would better realize what a program actually is and in future elections vote a little more for programs than for candidates to be sure that their votes count as 1. It is $subj idea — "please read on the paper before you comment". By looking for tariff rates you have to read the paper at least until these numbers.
Ed: as a politician you also cannot be sure if that town would or would not read your plan this time. You can agitate them to do that and convert 0.5 to 1 for you (and not for others). Isn't it a positive feedback all things considered?
> I have about as much ignorance of these domains as all the people mocking the paper on Twitter. But there’s one big difference between me and them: I actually read the paper. All of this information is on the first page. Even if you don’t know about sci-hub, you could still read the abstract and check out the researcher bios! Nobody read the paper before dunking on it. Nobody read the abstract either. About half the people yelling at this paper had only read the press release. The other half hadn’t even done that. They had only read tweets about the press release.
This is a real problem. I'm guilty of not bothering to read the paper many times. I instantly look for the easily digestible reviews or comments that other people made. I'm part of the problem. Damn.
Without wishing to downplay the fact that this is a major issue, it’s hard to read scientific literature from a field you haven’t previously studied. Layman summaries are a great way to get a sense of what the paper is actually saying, though summaries made by random commenters are unreliable.
Many papers in general are just not well written, even if the subject is interesting. I wish it were seen as a social requirement that if you publish a paper, then you accompany it with a blog post—even if it's the only thing on your blog. With multiple authors, each author would write their own blog post. I'd rather read three different takes on the same subject, generally, than to slog through any given paper even once. Sprinkle in the not-minor accessibility problems around the tendency to publish exclusively in PDF, and there are good reasons to seek out a digest instead of looking through the real thing. Heck, most abstracts verge on being almost unreadable, for that matter.
While there are reasonably good reasons that most scientific articles are in PDF format (way too much work to change), I heartily agree with writing blog posts on articles. I started doing this: the effort (once you have somewhere to publish it) is negligible compared with the amount of effort of writing a paper, and it is also quite fun to be able to write more free-form text on the subject.
Thanks for saying this. Lots of people like to jump to their own defense like "I always analyze every primary source thoroughly before forming any mote of an opinion on the subject". But identifying and understanding and accepting our flaws is much more important than trying to be right all the time IMO.
The press release DOES have a very “machine learning ‘discovers’ trivial thing people already knew” vibe. The actual paper doesn’t - it’s not trying to “rediscover” anything, it’s just building on existing work, there’s none of the arrogance in the press release that’s triggering everyone on Twitter. The press release taints the actual research, which is a sadly common pattern, and I think a fair bit of that lies with the writers of press releases, not just the readers.
I've thought about this with respect to sources. I was reading a book which mentioned Emile Durkheim's work. I have never read any Durkheim. I cannot speak to Durkheim's points nor whether the author accurately represented them. What's even worse is that if I did read Durkheim, he'd probably discuss someone before him. And I wouldn't know if he accurately represented that person's points. I'm not sure if the author who referenced Durkheim has read the people who Durkheim cites^[1], so I'm not sure if they know either. We have this game of telephone where we all cite these sources and people rarely, if ever check. And this is in academic literature where publishing happens pretty slowly! In Twitter it's easy to reach a source chain of 5-6 deep in days, let alone months.
I mean, this applies to many of the discussions on HN too. I've noticed that there's so many people getting the facts around the topic completely wrong, and quite a few will push some simplistic narrative or long-standing grievances, instead of the relevant point which often is subtle and nuanced. I suppose that's just being human.
It's not just getting the facts wrong, it's often about them misunderstanding the topic entirely because they didn't bother to read.
I don't think it's about being human, I think it's because HN is a BBS where people can get points by chatting, which also happens to link to articles which you can read if you feel like it. Of course this is how it ends up.
People play the game according to the rules they're given. In the early days when HN was more caustic, you got more points by reading the articles and posting accurate facts. But in the dang era where comments are required to be nice and calling people out is discouraged, you get more points by rushing to post something plausible-sounding and vaguely related to the headline. So people do that instead, unsurprisingly.
Indeed, the rules are slanted to give bad-faith word-salad as much of an advantage as possible. Even the site's layout is hostile to correcting those posts; in addition to the rules prohibiting us pointing out that the article doesn't say what they claim (because we cannot directly imply that they did not read), the formatting of quoted text is messed up and ugly and distracting.
On this current account, I don't really care about overall karma, just per-post karma. I try to post simple but defensible points when I get early top-level timing, and I put effort into upvoting people that I agree with rather than adding on yeah-me-too posts for more karma. But I'm punished for not playing by the rules of the game; I can't downvote or vouch or any other useful features, so (-1, flagged) is a common fate.
In the design circles that I frequent, we often consider Conway's Law for social communities. The API of HN, including the rules, generates the shape of the conversations. The shittiness of discourse here is inherently due to the low-quality rules just as much as the lack of meta-moderation.
This points a difference between Internet public discussions an private interactions discussions.
In private interactions, either chatting or RL, I quote "facts" without references, discuss papers I never read, and in general do things just for the act of communication, knowing I'm often wrong, and knowing the other side knows to take me with a grain of salt.
However, in public discussions you can't afford this liberty. Stating a wrong fact in a public discussion may cause a diffusion of false information which is almost impossible to undo.
I think most people are aware of this difference, and even in the academy the accuracy required in private conversation is not as harsh as the accuracy required in a public forum.
The problem is that for many people, Internet discussions feel like a private conversation. Hence I see even people I highly appreciate throwing the accuracy standard out of the window, and making public Internet comments as if it was a pub conversation over a drink with some friends.
> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets.
I had to have a conversation with my wife over this yesterday. She ran into the office in tears because opposing protestors were standing off with guns as if it was the American revolution.
The reality of the situation is a couple people had paintball guns but that’s not what she saw.
What she had seen was a tweet about a tweet referencing another tweet that in turn referenced a video.
While I know this example is extreme, it really opened my eyes to just how far we have come.
People read the headline. The small words beneath it are there for the headline to rest upon. Sometimes a picture also rests on the small text. That small text is pretty useful.
When I worked at a newspaper a lot of work went into headlines and pictures, in relation to the rest of the copy. We knew what we were doing, and we also knew what are readers weren't doing.
I appreciate the author's rant. It touches on the larger problem of the 'telephone game'[0] in media, news, youtube, twitter. Syndication of syndications of summaries of abstracts of research.
Any abstraction or simplification runs into the risk of having its underlying meaning changed. It is our duty as humans to be willing to chase the core of truths or to change our minds given new evidence pointing to truths.
It was said well in Hamilton - "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story".
For the record, I did read the article, but my life is not significantly richer (or poorer) for having done so.
A classic technique for reading scientific papers, is to read the abstract, then the conclusion. If they motivate us to read the rest, then we do so.
What I often do here, is first check the comments, and see if I want to go and read the OP. If I do that, I’ll generally read it all; unless it’s really painful.
As a prolix author[0] (and commenter[1]), I’m fairly familiar with low reader engagement, and I’ve learned to do good abstracts/intro sentences that hook the reader.
I’ve also learned not to lose too much sleep over whether or not people read my stuff (spoiler: they don’t).
I write for my own satisfaction. It would be nice if others enjoyed it, but I won’t live or die by the opinions of others.
Don’t get me wrong; I do care what others think of me, but it isn’t a principal driver of my life.
I have great respect for good tech writers. The world needs more of them.
A lot of what I write is basic information. It needs to be complete, clear and concise; not great literature. A simple ToC is useful in these cases, and good information architecture is important.
If I really want others to read my stuff, it’s incumbent upon me to write short, brutally-edited, articles, with clear, succinct, paragraphs, “hooky” abstracts, and conclusions that encourage people to go back, and read what they missed.
Basically, my experience is that it’s my job to write stuff in a way that encourages reader engagement, and to lead them to the important components of the document.
Abstract and conclusion are useful for quickly determining what the authors want the takeaway to be, so they're better than journalism which can misconstrue even that. But the problem with reading just the abstract and conclusion is that you don't learn the methods the scientists used. Lots of science is junk due to bad methodology. Of course laypersons are not likely able to determine that even if they read the whole thing, which leaves me to conclude that you should never modify your world view in response to a scientific publication until many credible sources all say the same thing.
I used to be upset about this. But now I just use a chrome extension to ban people who have clearly not read the article. It just kills any comment thread they start. My HN is much more useful now.
My Twitter is fine because I only follow people who don't do this.
Oh, I just see if they comment on things that are obviously revealed by the article. I don't think there's any real difference to me whether someone reads the article and then posts a statement trivially answered by the article and whether they don't read the article.
This also goes the other way. Someone who people think of as a thought leader or a science communicator says something that seems reasonable, but is not actually based on any science gets amplified and soon if you even dare to ask for evidence you are painted as "the enemy" and "russian bot" for daring to think on your own and actually request papers on the matter.
Then people will start linking you papers that are only tangentially related to the question at hand and get offended when you actually go and read the paper and point out that the paper has (almost) nothing to do with the actual question at hand.
Read it. And read more from the blog. Certainly some truth to this, but the blog is a great example why peer review actually matters.
The article itself is a bit of a straw man: one example of a bad peer review dismisses the whole process.
Other articles are similar. For example one talks about how "green parties want 100% safety", which simply isn’t true.
Some are click bait like "if there is no Corona vaccine, how about we ask anti-vaxxers how to deal with this?" And gives some generic advice that every doctor also says while neglecting that the core argument of anti-vaxxers often goes like "vaccine is bad for you and you actually should contract a virus because it makes you stronger in a natural way".
Stopped reading after having found too many of these fake arguments in several posts.
You don’t need to read anything. Just parse the headline and comment with some tangential personal anecdote or a vaguely provocative statement about the likely conclusion of the text.
First read the article, then read the comments, and spot who didn't read the article. You may have to scroll down / go to the more section, as the people who are way off base didn't get upvoted as much as the ones who actually read it.
The problem is people want their internet points. If you take the time to read, and then comment, your comment won't get enough visibility on all social media platforms, especially if dozens or hundreds of other comments quickly begin appearing. You have to 'show up early' to get visibility. Optimizing for that dopamine hit, users choose to maximize points over thoughtful discussion.
Yes they do that, however sometimes I feel like nobody will read your comment (opinion) if you post too late. And the competitive thing to do in that case is to try to be first to comment if possible, and when people who don't read the article are always first you are kind of forced to comment without reading the article too.
It would be interesting to see if hiding all points would change things significantly. That is, you wouldn't even be able to see the point count for your own comments.
It's amazing how much the author lacks self-reflection.
If there was no misunderstanding, would he have even bothered to read or even know about the paper at all? The bad use of the paper was probably his primary driver of engagement. Otherwise at best you would see the source or original tweet, think "Oh that's nice" unless you have a serious interest in linguistics, and move on.
The darkly cynical thing is that as the flood of information grows, the value of that information lessens as opposed to its ability to create a happening and drive engagement. You can say the sky is blue all you want, and it's true, but people will mill about the person who says the sky is green because they can interact with it, if just to disprove or mock the person and use it as a "gathering place" like the author himself did.
I mean, this is how flat earthers exist. The idea is rubbish but it creates a space that people inhabit.
Twitter is much worse than HN or Reddit about this. The author hits the nail on the head that Twitter in any news- or article-sharing context is about dunking on headlines. Read the headline, tweet a one-liner reply or quote.
I don't think users are entirely to blame; this is what the app incentivizes. So for Twitter I don't think there's much hope in asking people to read articles. It's like wondering why people aren't reading your 8 paragraph Instagram caption- that's not why people use the app, and the app does not encourage using it in that way.
However I do empathize with authors who dedicate years of their life on academic work, only to have someone post it to Twitter with a 1 sentence jab and that be the most common level of familiarity with the work their "readers" have.
This is a good article and it would be great if people felt an obligation read the source papers more, but the nature of sensationalist journalism and gamified social media means in all practicality they never will. The journalist gets views by writing stories that fit into an emotional narrative regardless of the actual facts. Social media gives users reinforcement for telling people what they want to hear. That echo chamber drowns out everything else. There is almost no room for nuance anymore.
> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad. The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper itself is a primary source. If you want to know what the paper’s about, you gotta read the paper!
Expecting people to make meaningful even informed comments in an arena that is in no way suitable to the information your sending is not a failure of the receivers or the commenters. It is a failure of the sender.
Asking people to invest their time to actually read extensive information about what your try to say, with no perceived additional benefits to them is just hubris.
Pick your audience or tailor your message to your audience. Don't blame the receiver.
Whilst I sympathize with why this person is ranting, I find it kind of funny. People act the way they do on social media due to a mix of the design of social media, and human nature. It's not complete chance that twitter has an entire underclass of people who just yell vitriol at the blue checkmark brigade. It's not chance that reddit divides itself into lots of echo-chambers that are essentially repeating the same handful of opinions in various different colours (in reddit's defence this can be avoided using extremely hands-on moderation).
Fundamentally, there aren't too many people who can meaningfully comment on most papers. The alternative to commenting before reading the paper is almost certainly reading the paper and then not commenting because you don't really have much to add. So let's assume some people do start reading the articles? Well, they're just going to say less. There's a thousand ways to have an easy and wrong take on a paper. If you want good reasoned discussion about papers you're better off looking elsewhere - for example, The Weeds podcast from Vox, where they actually take a white paper, read it, think about it and discuss its implications. You can disagree with them and talk about how effective they are at engaging with the topic (or as is often the case you can get irrationally angry because you don't like their politics), but fundamentally it's a much better venue for having that sort of nuanced and informed discussion than 140 characters at a time mixed in with the sewer that is twitter.
I think a better exercise is to ignore (it's hard, I know) those who haven't obviously read the paper/article: it's not like they'll read your reply either.
And sometimes (usually?), people will truly not understand what a paper is about, and that makes it even harder to figure out which comment is which.
The article's page had a terrible viewing experience. With js turned off, visiting the page shows content split across 12 columns with a single row that took up just a quarter of the screen's real estate. Given all this, and the nondescriptive title, I was not about to turn on js.
Tangential I know, but how is the Knuth quote misunderstood? I have only ever seen it interpreted as you should only optimize for performance when you know a section of code is performance critical. Which is typically only the case for small parts of the code (3% according to Knuth).
Does it make sense to have a service that checks whether people have read the article before talking about it in the comments section? Could be done by some js, I presume.
I mean, it obviously won't work in case people share it on twitter, but could reduce people from talking bullshit in the comments section.
Is there a way I can see Hacker News comments alongside the article with a chrome extension or something? I normally click to the comments here first for tab management purposes (comments contain a link to the article but reverse is not true) but I know that's a bad pattern.
This is true of most news. Headlines claim something crazy, the article has some nuances and clears up the click bait confusion. Then people read the headline without reading the article. Then they form a world view accordingly.
One of the HN rules, though, is to not accuse someone of not having read the article. Of course, few people read the articles here. (A lot of the posts are people complaining that a linked source is subscription only, then going on to comment based on the title!)
From what I hear twitter has become one of the more 'basic' social networks. the 140 characters force you to write quick sound-bite opinions without any nuance. Anonymity makes sure your opinions do not follow you around. I quit a long time ago.
Perhaps they should check the grammar on their article before they post it:
"They also do a literature review of existing work in word meanings, making in very clear they were building on the existing work in anthropology and linguistics. "
It's actually kind of beautiful to see an organic example of the behavior that the article quite rightly criticizes happening on the sharing of said article.
Out of interest, how many lines even of the article did you read before you decided to post this? Because it can't be many.
It says something about the sad state of affairs that the universally agreed answer here seems to be "yeah just pirate it, nobody cares, everyone does it."
I wish the addendum to that rule was “because we will just delete their post anyway.”
The lowest value contributions on HN are inevitably those that use a headline to air personal grievances vaguely related to the subject of the post (“Apple releases new cure for diabetes”, top comment: “Let me tell you why I hate the touchbar.”) the second lowest are those that clearly read the headline and ran with it, without reading the content that utterly contradicts what they imagine the article would contain.
Not having read the article / not discussing anything in the darn article should absolutely be grounds for criticism.
Hey, can I tell you about how Firefox uses too much of my battery and is made by Mozilla Foundation who I will never donate to in a million years and why the person who gave me my last whiteboard interview probably clubs seals? Oh, you're telling me the article was about performance improvements in IonMonkey and how in-person interviews overwhelmingly fail to pick African American applicants?
Drives me mad. Any Hacker News discussion has an extremely strong push towards the same couple dozen topics that anyone can relate to, and commenters who drag the conversation in that direction for no good reason are doing the thread a disservice.
I wish Hacker News would remove that rule and replace it with two:
1) Please read the article before you comment.
2) If you haven't read the article, please refrain from commenting.
It wouldn't accomplish much, but it will at least prioritize engagement over politeness, as the current rule does. And yes, both of those are the same thing but I feel it's worth mentioning twice.
I believe the reason for that rule is to avoid polluting the thread with "did you even read" type remarks. Starting an argument won't help the thread recover from an uninformed comment.
Nothing in the rules discourages downvoting people who didn't read.
No, it's not. It's a criticism of posting habits on Twitter and it's not terrible.
Writing an article about bad habits in cyberspace where the title of your piece vaguely calls to mind some guideline in some forum and appears to contradict it is not somehow a violation of that guideline.
As someone with eyesight issues and a demographic outlier for HN who, thus, sees life different from most people here, it's sort of common for people to think I didn't read something when I did, I just missed a detail or I did, I just have a different education and life experience and see something different in it.
And that's one of the reasons you shouldn't say that to someone directly. You are assuming something ugly, basically.
But talking about how reading the article before expressing your opinion is a best practice is unrelated to that detail of etiquette.
The title is the verbatim title of the linked article and the article is about the topic of people not reading papers when discussing them. I don't see how you'd come to the conclusion it's an inappropriate title.
> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad. The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper itself is a primary source. If you want to know what the paper’s about, you gotta read the paper!
And what about this article, which is about the tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release?
I'll freely admit that the article about the tweets dunking on the press release for the paper, is as much as I'll ever want to know about this particular kerfuffle.
About halfway through a one-page article was this quote.
"If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first."
Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas.
Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article