[FRIAM] TL;DR
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sun Apr 19 11:50:24 EDT 2020
Glen -
I very much appreciate your balance in this regard. I did not (and
likely Marcus did not either) interpret your frustration with parsing my
(overly) layered response to your Necker-Cube post as judgement of TL;DR
unless the "L" was for "Layered" not "Long".
I also appreciate your *prescription* for citation with pithy preamble,
and your *example* of it which I think has evolved over the years we
have been doing this continuous "salsa rueda".
(too)Much of my rambling here, unfortunately, is little more than
"thinking out loud" and I DO trust that most (though not all) will
delete or skip or skim most of my maunderings.
I have enough evidence that others find bits and bobs, gems and pearls,
in the swill that is my monolog (channeling Stephen Colbert?), that I
continue. Yet I am inclined to try to *learn* from my betters (many
here are MUCH better at being concise and precise) by example to
hopefully increase the apparent signal/noise ratio. I need not demand
of everyone that they have my public-key memorized to decrypt my often
crytpographic gibberings.
Waxing Gibbous,
- Steve
On 4/19/20 9:29 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> 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.
More information about the Friam
mailing list