[FRIAM] anthropological observations

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I won't read whatever argument Scott Adams might have made about long narratives, mostly because I doubt he has anything useful to say. But also because I *do* prioritize my time. It's not that my time is valuable. It's that if I didn't prioritize (and triage against people like Adams), I'd never be able to get any work done.

Those that *complain* about TL;DR probably comprise a complicated set of multi-faceted people, that won't be well-categorized by the "incurious, impatient, entitled, part of the problem" predicate. That's OK. I'm willing to allow the over-generalization. But it's those that do NOT complain, but simply ignore TL;DR's are more interesting, I think.

One interesting tactic for avoiding constructing TL;DR's is familiar, here in this forum, and consists of *citation*. E.g. one need not post a long explanation of negative probability when there's already an excellent TL;DR exposition out there. All one need do is post a pithy preamble and link to the extant exposition. But the interesting people are not those that complain the TL;DR exposition is difficult to slog through. The interesting people are those who never say a word about it. Did they click the link at all? Did they read it after seeing Feynman's name atop it? Did they get past the 1st couple of pages? Etc.

It reminds me of this bit of hilarity: https://youtu.be/X-ZFoco_1gQ Where Klepper goes round and round some of them "Read the transcript!" "Did you read the transcript?" "No."

On 4/18/20 6:36 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> The opposite of TLDR is the technique described by Scott Adams.   This leads me to posit that those that complain things are TLDR are likely just the incurious, the impatient, and the entitled, and likely to be part of the problem.  Is  there some particular crisis of their Valuable Attention that must be conserved at all cost?  Are we running out of disk space?   Are we running out of network bandwidth?   No.   Netflix is blazing gigabytes of nothing 24 hours a day to the drooling masses.   Enough.

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