Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting(maalvika.substack.com)
maalvika.substack.com
Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting
https://maalvika.substack.com/p/compression-culture-is-making-you
204 comments
I have thought of this as knowing _about_ things, as opposed to knowing things, and not having the self-awareness to be able to differentiate between the two.
I've seen this most notably in a former coworker who enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially when the rest of the team was hard at work, but that was another point of contention entirely). He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points, but if you asked him about second-order effects, or implicit simplifying assumptions, or how X from the video would be different if Y and Z were different, it was obvious how surface-level his "understanding" was.
I've seen this most notably in a former coworker who enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially when the rest of the team was hard at work, but that was another point of contention entirely). He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points, but if you asked him about second-order effects, or implicit simplifying assumptions, or how X from the video would be different if Y and Z were different, it was obvious how surface-level his "understanding" was.
> He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points
I do think people have that bias - when someone is able to regurgitate talking points or answers about whatever topic in no time, said person is perceived as intelligent.
I do think people have that bias - when someone is able to regurgitate talking points or answers about whatever topic in no time, said person is perceived as intelligent.
Because it takes time to actually know if someone is smart, because intelligence is complex and multifaceted – and we don’t have time anymore.
So, if within 10s you have one guy regurgitating something and the other one shrugging, it does make some sense to assume the first one is smarter.
What would make even more sense is to accept one cannot know this about someone in 10s. But uncertainty sucks, humans will always try to reduce it as much as possible, at all cost.
So, if within 10s you have one guy regurgitating something and the other one shrugging, it does make some sense to assume the first one is smarter.
What would make even more sense is to accept one cannot know this about someone in 10s. But uncertainty sucks, humans will always try to reduce it as much as possible, at all cost.
I just finished up some freelance (hardware/embedded software) where I had to talk to a “software” engineer who was sort of the “lead”. Every time we hit an interface problem he would say “if you don’t understand the error feel free to use ChatGPT”. Dude it’s bare metal embedded software I WROTE the error. Also, telling someone that was hired because of their expertise to chatgpt something is crazy insulting.
It was such a strange interaction - like this guy who thought he knew everything because he could leverage AI and anyone not doing that instantly was wasting their time. People are already offloading having a single thought to AI and then turning around and acting like they know everything because they have access to this tool.
Also weird to watch someone in the web-sphere act like AIs knowledge and understanding is the same for all fields because their field was so heavily trained on. No, AI will not know the answer for this one register in this microcontroller correctly or understand a hardware errata for this device or fully understand the pin choices I made on the device and the system consequences of those choices.
It was such a strange interaction - like this guy who thought he knew everything because he could leverage AI and anyone not doing that instantly was wasting their time. People are already offloading having a single thought to AI and then turning around and acting like they know everything because they have access to this tool.
Also weird to watch someone in the web-sphere act like AIs knowledge and understanding is the same for all fields because their field was so heavily trained on. No, AI will not know the answer for this one register in this microcontroller correctly or understand a hardware errata for this device or fully understand the pin choices I made on the device and the system consequences of those choices.
I had this experience at a recent job, where I'm working with, theoretically at least, the people who literally wrote all the software I'm trying to learn about, and half the responses I got were "just ask chatgpt". Like, you wrote this stuff, why am I supposed to ask an LLM??
I've noticed this lately too, I think everyone is like posing as an AI-influencer or something and copying the "Just use AI" slogan that everyone is repeating right now. What if I don't want to use AI for this problem, and instead want to learn a re-usable and more deterministic skill for debugging?
Oh boy does this ring true to me. Worked briefly with a contractor who wanted to do something with some internal tooling and couldn't figure out how. Said he asked ChatGPT and it doesn't know either. Terrifying how little supposedly qualified people understand what they're even doing.
I think the terrifying part is just how fast software practitioners completely gave up trying to understand anything. As if these oracles actually know anything about our bespoke systems. It was almost overnight that SMEs were lost.
The content of your post made me think you’re a real one and I wanted to reach out as I’m thinking of hiring a freelancer to help me build some stuff I am working on, but the site in your profile is not responding.
Would be interested in learning more - feel free to reach out hardwareteams at gmail (and thanks for the heads up about the site!)
There is definitely a truth to it. And then there's also this increasingly complex world that you can not possibly deeply know in all important ways, where I believe having ambient knowledge about a lot of things really does useful stuff.
I don't think the article author is claiming that we should have no compression, that all compression is bad. But compression culture can reach absurd levels, for example in the opening sentence of the article where the author receives requests to summarize a novel. The whole point of a novel is to be experienced. Nobody has time to deeply learn everything, but that shouldn't become an excuse to be lazy and refuse to deeply learn anything, just because it's possible to ask anything of ChatGPT.
Donald Rumsfeld didn't do much good during his life, but this quote by him lives in my head rent free like the kids say:
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.
My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.
Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.
If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.
My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.
Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.
If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
It's so recent that Good Will Hunting used it back in 1997.
CLARK
There's no problem. I was just hoping
you could give me some insight into
the evolution of the market economy in
the early colonies. My contention is
that prior to the Revolutionary War
the economic modalities especially of
the southern colonies could most aptly
be characterized as agrarian pre-
capitalist and...
WILL Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob'ly, and so naturally that's what you believe until next month when you get to James Lemon and get convinced that Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That'll last until sometime in your second year, then you'll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
CLARK Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of--
WILL --"Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from "Work in Essex County," Page 421, right? Do you have any thoughts of your own on the subject or were you just gonna plagerize the whole book for me?
WILL Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob'ly, and so naturally that's what you believe until next month when you get to James Lemon and get convinced that Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That'll last until sometime in your second year, then you'll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
CLARK Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of--
WILL --"Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth..." You got that from "Work in Essex County," Page 421, right? Do you have any thoughts of your own on the subject or were you just gonna plagerize the whole book for me?
You just sent me down a rabbit hole where I had to watch that scene and then watch the sequel scene from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
Agreed. And with AI, this is going to be even worse.
I disagree. Most articles on the web are very shallow and kind of tend to terminate searches for more knowledge while LLMs are fantastic at pointing you to more nuance on subjects you're unfamiliar with if you know how to ask them.
Except so far the LLMs are completely terrible at saying "No". It's a lot easier to turn it into a personal echo chamber.
However since it doesn't actually reason you have to be familiar enough with the subject that you can tell when it is and isn't hallucinating since it's extrapolating from those same shallow articles.
And if they can't find the nuance, they'll make it up!
I used to try services like Blinkist. Did anyone have similar experience as I had: I simply couldn't remember what I read, let alone what I listened to. The summaries, despite being reasonably detailed and having key points and representative examples, were still bland and boring, to the point that they left little impression on me.
This isn't due to Blinkist, but due to how you consume (high information density) content. What you need to do is write the insights you are getting from it down in a way where you will see them again when they are relevant.
Lengthy stuff has lots of repetition and different access routes to the insights and information. Even then the above approach works much better than hoping that the passive consumption will lead to memorization.
Lengthy stuff has lots of repetition and different access routes to the insights and information. Even then the above approach works much better than hoping that the passive consumption will lead to memorization.
some things that have helped me with this
1. introduction to epistemic humility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility
Your knowledge is limited and fallible. Other people may know things you don’t. Reality is complex.
Though, it makes any political discussions difficult.
2. first principles thinking
3. Zettelkasten note-taking
What is a web browser? What is HTTP? What is an IP address? Link on and on IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
1. introduction to epistemic humility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility
Your knowledge is limited and fallible. Other people may know things you don’t. Reality is complex.
Though, it makes any political discussions difficult.
2. first principles thinking
3. Zettelkasten note-taking
What is a web browser? What is HTTP? What is an IP address? Link on and on IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but those who think humans walking around armed with half an understanding and making claims about reality is a recent thing would, on face, seem naive to thousands of years of history. Nearly every scientist was persecuted in their time (worse as you go further back in time) because the entire world thought they knew better. Wouldn’t you consider climate exchange advocates to be in an echo chamber? What about Nazis, or towns with high klan membership? Were they not living in their own echo chambers too? Every “movement” and belief system is a de facto echo chamber; no one has a meeting to promote their ideals by spending the entire time sharing contrary facts. In fact, wouldn’t it have been even worse the further you go back in time because contrary information was primarily distributed by singular people? People weren’t exposed to thousands of contradictory facts that went against their beliefs; they just ignored what Tommy had to say because they knew better. They had their one set of facts they believed and judged whether what another person said was truth mostly by character and how it aligned with their beliefs, and rarely because it was truth. This is still true today. Change only came as the number of people they encountered who were saying the same thing increased; again, not because they were right, but because they were saying the same thing. Young Margret had no way of calculating the trajectories of planets or evaluating the science of gravity; she just had to trust others explanations of how things we can plainly see are the result mystical magical forces. The only thing that has changed is the number of people we are exposed to who are saying the same things, right or wrong, but what hasn’t changed is the number of people who were believed things and repeated them…right and wrong.
We are experiencing dunning-kruger on a unprecedented scale, fueled by confident ChatGPT users.
Around 10 years ago, I learned to root out people who read reddit based on this principle. My thought at the time was the site made you feel informed. But everyone knew same facts leading to the same incomplete picture and having the same attitude problem of constantly correcting people. “Well actually..” and “that’s misinformation” were thrown around a lot on reddit and the lazy readers end up copying that bad behavior IRL
. But the confidence was high and the picture incomplete. And the worst part of it all, the behaviour was
. But the confidence was high and the picture incomplete. And the worst part of it all, the behaviour was
Came in here looking for a summary. Thank you, moving on.
Lol it's funny that you see my comment as a summary of the article, just because I used the word "summary". Pretty much validates the entire article
humor.
There's too much information in the modern world to function without some degree of compression.
Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.
If someone tells me they did a scientific study that proves that changing the color of my phone background will save some percentage of my battery life per day, should I spend the time to reproduce this experience without compression, or should I take this knowledge and use it to improve my life as I move forward?
Sometimes it is of course dangerous to act on the "compressed data", you need to unpack it to either understand it or evaluate its truthfulness, but just knowing that doesn't magically grant you the time to uncompress all the data you receive, you plainly couldn't function in modern society that way.
Instead we develop heuristics about which information we accept at the summary level and which we need to delve into more deeply. The alternative is never accomplishing anything because you're too busy re-doing all of human history.
Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.
If someone tells me they did a scientific study that proves that changing the color of my phone background will save some percentage of my battery life per day, should I spend the time to reproduce this experience without compression, or should I take this knowledge and use it to improve my life as I move forward?
Sometimes it is of course dangerous to act on the "compressed data", you need to unpack it to either understand it or evaluate its truthfulness, but just knowing that doesn't magically grant you the time to uncompress all the data you receive, you plainly couldn't function in modern society that way.
Instead we develop heuristics about which information we accept at the summary level and which we need to delve into more deeply. The alternative is never accomplishing anything because you're too busy re-doing all of human history.
> Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.
I wouldn't call learning calculus the compression of inventing calculus, any more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel. There's no continuing value in reinventing calculus or rewriting the same novel, but there is continuing value in learning calculus and reading the novel. Compression culture is refusing to do any work, demanding instead a mere summary of calculus or a novel. If you go to class for hours every week, read the calculus textbook all the way through, and do the homework, I wouldn't call that "compression" in the terminology of the article author. On the other hand, if you merely have a summary of calculus, you've actually learned nothing. You can maybe fake your way through a conversation about calc, sound intelligent without being intelligent, at least until someone forces you to do a calc problem and reveals your sham.
I wouldn't call learning calculus the compression of inventing calculus, any more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel. There's no continuing value in reinventing calculus or rewriting the same novel, but there is continuing value in learning calculus and reading the novel. Compression culture is refusing to do any work, demanding instead a mere summary of calculus or a novel. If you go to class for hours every week, read the calculus textbook all the way through, and do the homework, I wouldn't call that "compression" in the terminology of the article author. On the other hand, if you merely have a summary of calculus, you've actually learned nothing. You can maybe fake your way through a conversation about calc, sound intelligent without being intelligent, at least until someone forces you to do a calc problem and reveals your sham.
Conflating the process of discovering something new and learning it after the fact feels like saying "why do I need to know arithmetic when I have a calculator in my pocket?"
Anyone giving real critical thought to either statement knows they are not intending to achieve the same goal. They shouldn't be compared when talking about "compression."
Anyone giving real critical thought to either statement knows they are not intending to achieve the same goal. They shouldn't be compared when talking about "compression."
> Compression culture is refusing to do any work, demanding instead a mere summary of calculus or a novel
This sounds rather tautological. My intent was to give an example of compression that is an obvious good. If we re-define compression to exclude that, pretty quickly we've just reduced the definition to compression = bad things. Bad things are, you know, bad, by definition, so this gives us no guidance for our future decisions.
> more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel
I was just having a conversation over in the jutjusu post about how and why you make commits, when you squash them, when you reorder them, and so on.
What is a "pull request" if not a compression of the work I did to develop the required change? I even include a summary at the top so people don't have to read all of the actual code.
This sounds rather tautological. My intent was to give an example of compression that is an obvious good. If we re-define compression to exclude that, pretty quickly we've just reduced the definition to compression = bad things. Bad things are, you know, bad, by definition, so this gives us no guidance for our future decisions.
> more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel
I was just having a conversation over in the jutjusu post about how and why you make commits, when you squash them, when you reorder them, and so on.
What is a "pull request" if not a compression of the work I did to develop the required change? I even include a summary at the top so people don't have to read all of the actual code.
I never said that compression was inherently bad, and I don't think the article author did either. Here's what I said about the subject in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44649897
My objection wasn't about good vs. bad. I think the distinction is between mastery and superficiality. You can master calculus without starting from complete scratch like Newton did. But you can't master calculus by reading the CliffsNotes (for the older crowd) or AI summaries (for the younger crowd) of a calculus textbook. You have to put in the work. Even standing on the shoulders of giants such as Newton, it still doesn't come easy.
My objection wasn't about good vs. bad. I think the distinction is between mastery and superficiality. You can master calculus without starting from complete scratch like Newton did. But you can't master calculus by reading the CliffsNotes (for the older crowd) or AI summaries (for the younger crowd) of a calculus textbook. You have to put in the work. Even standing on the shoulders of giants such as Newton, it still doesn't come easy.
I think another example of "compression" is car maintenance. Either you learn all there is to your engine, or you follow the manufacturer recommendations and follow the schedule.
Sure, it is better to really know your engine, and you probably know someone who will tell you they know better than the schedule, and sometimes, they do. But maybe you have other things to do than to become a mechanic, so you just follow the schedule. It will cost you more, and maybe you could get a bit more longevity or performance by doing things your way, but it frees you for other things that may be more valuable to you than your car.
Sure, it is better to really know your engine, and you probably know someone who will tell you they know better than the schedule, and sometimes, they do. But maybe you have other things to do than to become a mechanic, so you just follow the schedule. It will cost you more, and maybe you could get a bit more longevity or performance by doing things your way, but it frees you for other things that may be more valuable to you than your car.
50 years ago, people, on average, knew a lot more about maintaining cars. They had to since they broke down far more often.
30 years ago, people knew a lot more about maintaining personal computers.
Knowing more things is always good, but there's finite time in which to learn things so you have to choose between them, as you say, it seems pretty rational to select the more valuable ones.
30 years ago, people knew a lot more about maintaining personal computers.
Knowing more things is always good, but there's finite time in which to learn things so you have to choose between them, as you say, it seems pretty rational to select the more valuable ones.
And if you add understanding of incentives to following the manufacture's schedule - even better. Manufacturer has no interest in your car lasting as long as possible, just enough to stay alive before the warranty expires. Taking this into account, do your oil changes earlier than scheduled and the car will cost you a lot less to maintain. I guess that would be somewhere in the middle between the two extremes
Its interesting, to me anyway, that most people seem to be in agreement that the core problem is that there's too much information in the world. But the common solution from a tech perspective, and downstream to broader culture by default, seems to be to summarise. So that we can digest more (arguably just surface level) information with the same amount of time. Rather than just choosing what you engage in more consciously. Abundance of everything seems to win.
Kinda like how, particularly since Steam, gamers just accumulate more and more games without actually playing most of them at all. Just because its there doesnt mean you need to have it.
Kinda like how, particularly since Steam, gamers just accumulate more and more games without actually playing most of them at all. Just because its there doesnt mean you need to have it.
I think there is a spectrum of compression here, so I find myself agreeing with your overall point but with a caveat. Putting aside "experiences" - travel or emotion - for transmitting information, the level of "desired compression" is based on the background knowledge the receiver brings, and what they consider to be the irrelevant bits.
I will say on historical mathematics - reading the greats shows you the road traveled, and often one realizes the unexplored paths along the way, that lead to brand new continents. This may not be as relevant if one is not trying to innovate.
I would also say reading Newton as a "first book" is positively counter-productive to learning Calculus in high school.
I will say on historical mathematics - reading the greats shows you the road traveled, and often one realizes the unexplored paths along the way, that lead to brand new continents. This may not be as relevant if one is not trying to innovate.
I would also say reading Newton as a "first book" is positively counter-productive to learning Calculus in high school.
> I will say on historical mathematics - reading the greats shows you the road traveled, and often one realizes the unexplored paths along the way, that lead to brand new continents. This may not be as relevant if one is not trying to innovate.
I would consider this a function of specialization, which is of course still good, perhaps even required in this modern world, but we can't specialize in everything.
I would consider this a function of specialization, which is of course still good, perhaps even required in this modern world, but we can't specialize in everything.
Agreed! I often wonder how LLMs will deal with this eventually. It could be their biggest strength. Some people will want tweet-based responses, some will want book-length. It could generate the right level of content for an audience-of-one, knowing what they know, etc.
There was a podcast about this (in Finnish though) how there was a time in the world where you could realistically know _everything_ there is to know.
You just had to be rich enough to not have to work for a living so you could just learn and study all the time.
But it's been a long time since that was possible.
You just had to be rich enough to not have to work for a living so you could just learn and study all the time.
But it's been a long time since that was possible.
Up until maybe the 17th century it was at least possible for a single brilliant, educated person to know the entirety of knowledge in Western civilization. We're way past that now.
I think it was possible for someone from then to think they knew all the knowledge in Western civilization. Even at that point though, it was far too much to keep all in one person's head. They'd only have a surface level familiarity with most topics at best. I mean even one topic like architecture would've been impossible.
You'd have to go back a lot further IMO to get it to fit. Somewhere around the development of agriculture, maybe.
You'd have to go back a lot further IMO to get it to fit. Somewhere around the development of agriculture, maybe.
There's a lot of tacit knowledge in trades that was not documented, and in many ways can't be easily documented. You can't really document how to swim or play an instrument; you need to practice and train your body. Would you brilliant person from the 17th century be competent as a member of a tribe in South America or as part of a steppe clan in Asia?
Sure, I should have been more specific and limited the statement to academic or intellectual knowledge. Stuff like history, natural history, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, major works of literature, etc. The point is that up until that time, a wealthy person who devoted themself to study could conceivably learn it all in a lifetime.
I've heard similar opinions before and considered them plausible in the past, mostly based on this idea that there were people who "invented" in multiple disciplines in a way that seems impossible today.
However, now I wonder if that might be more an effect of the increasing level of communication among humans in general at the time, printing presses, steamships, postal organizations, newsletters, etc, all combined to cause ideas to spread much more widely and more quickly than they did in the past. Perhaps its more a function of being the first (or most popular) person to synthesize certain ideas based on being at the intersection of spreading knowledge.
However, now I wonder if that might be more an effect of the increasing level of communication among humans in general at the time, printing presses, steamships, postal organizations, newsletters, etc, all combined to cause ideas to spread much more widely and more quickly than they did in the past. Perhaps its more a function of being the first (or most popular) person to synthesize certain ideas based on being at the intersection of spreading knowledge.
It's a little weird that, on the one hand, nobody much wants to read anything long, and on the other, hours long podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and one-person YouTube videos on esoteric subjects are all quite popular. There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing.
> Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue.
Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.
> Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue.
Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.
It’s about focus.
Reading a book on a complex topic requires quiet and the ability to focus on a single task.
Listening to a podcast is essentially another form of distraction, even if the listener still retains some information. Although I would bet that reading has dramatically more retention than listening to a podcast…
Reading a book on a complex topic requires quiet and the ability to focus on a single task.
Listening to a podcast is essentially another form of distraction, even if the listener still retains some information. Although I would bet that reading has dramatically more retention than listening to a podcast…
You can have the podcast or documentary or video playing while work... or scroll on your phone.
And then when you're done, you can say, "Oh my god, I listened to this podcast series about this guy who murdered his wife... I'm pretty sure it was his wife, anyway"
And then when you're done, you can say, "Oh my god, I listened to this podcast series about this guy who murdered his wife... I'm pretty sure it was his wife, anyway"
I wonder whether increased desire for long-form video correlates to loneliness. I asked my gf one day why in the world people watch video game streamers, and she responded that it was mostly to hear someone talking. Print doesn't even talk to us, but long-form video provides a friend-substitute who won't abandon us.
Any people out there TV on just so there is “background noise” I think streaming is similar, but it does have an extra social aspect to it.
Reminds me how mukbangs[0] were invented by south koreans who wanted to eat with someone. Or so I heard.
[0]: long videos of people eating a lot
[0]: long videos of people eating a lot
> It's a little weird that, on the one hand, nobody much wants to read anything long, and on the other, hours long podcasts
No, thank you, I'd rather read a long book.
Podcasts are like torture to me, especially in this recent concept of an interview, as popularised by US creators.
Most Netflix content is also of questionable quality.
No, thank you, I'd rather read a long book.
Podcasts are like torture to me, especially in this recent concept of an interview, as popularised by US creators.
Most Netflix content is also of questionable quality.
A lot of articles are not even written by a journalist, they're copy pasted press releases
I think people like podcasts and long videos because we are desperately alone and want an interaction where someone friendly talks at us and we can just listen without being challenged much or taking risks
I think people like podcasts and long videos because we are desperately alone and want an interaction where someone friendly talks at us and we can just listen without being challenged much or taking risks
I mean, I live alone, there's only so many hours you can go without having another voice in the background, so I love a longform podcast.
The problem with podcasts is that you're limited to the subset of people who are willing to have podcasts.
People don't know how to skim a text anymore.
I bet if you grab a random teenager off the street and give them a multi-page document with instructions and ask them to find a specific bit, they'll just quit because they think they have to read it sequentially from start to end.
Skimming the text quickly to find out where the relevant bits are just doesn't exist as a possibility for them
They'd rather listen to a rambling 45 minute Youtube video on how to do something and rewind it constantly and zoom in to see wtf is going on.
I bet if you grab a random teenager off the street and give them a multi-page document with instructions and ask them to find a specific bit, they'll just quit because they think they have to read it sequentially from start to end.
Skimming the text quickly to find out where the relevant bits are just doesn't exist as a possibility for them
They'd rather listen to a rambling 45 minute Youtube video on how to do something and rewind it constantly and zoom in to see wtf is going on.
I think it's the opposite from the other responses you got: I don't listen to podcasts so I can't comment on that one, but for the rest, those are all usually focused on the topic at hand (yes, even the hours long youtube videos) while written articles usually have way way too much useless fluff. Over the years I've become averse to them for just that reason and use comments to see if it's worth reading.
>There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing.
Because reading requires focus and attention on one thing over a prolonged amount of time, something a lot of people aren't able to do. Which speaks to one of the points the author made, what "tldr culture" does to people's brains, it robs them off the ability to focus on anything longer than fits into a handful of tweets.
Because reading requires focus and attention on one thing over a prolonged amount of time, something a lot of people aren't able to do. Which speaks to one of the points the author made, what "tldr culture" does to people's brains, it robs them off the ability to focus on anything longer than fits into a handful of tweets.
> on the other, hours long podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and one-person YouTube videos on esoteric subjects are all quite popular. There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing.
Those are all things that people can put on while doing something else or in the evening when they want to relax. Edutainment used to be the word, but now days it's just flat out entertainment.
Those are all things that people can put on while doing something else or in the evening when they want to relax. Edutainment used to be the word, but now days it's just flat out entertainment.
Although I thought the writer put forward an interesting point, ironically it felt like parts of the writing were overly flowery and repetitive. The paragraphs of similar metaphors got old quickly and started to feel GPT-like.
I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
I like this writing style. I like variety in the things I read. Not everything has to be optimized for efficiency, not everyone thinks like a developer or engineer. I agree with the second half of your comment though, most issues are "in the gray areas", not black/white
I also found the writing style grating, but not for a lack of efficiency; it just felt kind of empty and fake-deep. (Definitely also wondered whether an LLM editor or co-author was part of the equation.)
For contrast, I recently saw this blog post off an HN submission and loved it. Very un-efficient but engaging and full of character.
https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/choose-your-own-radiat...
For contrast, I recently saw this blog post off an HN submission and loved it. Very un-efficient but engaging and full of character.
https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/choose-your-own-radiat...
Totally agree. Editors were used by publishers for a reason, and they very often managed to cut down texts by significant amounts. Most bloggers could use an editor that would make their writing more snappy. The same goes for many of the nowadays popular bestseller non-fiction books that are very clearly stuffed with repetitive writing and random anecdotes to hit some page limit.
On one hand there's the lack of ability to process nuance, on the other there's nearly content free blathering for length. Most everything these days is 5 times as long as it needs to be because there's only that much actual information, not for lack of attention.
>And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression.
Here's the example:
* the productive confusion...
* the generative power ...
* the transformative potential ...
The author did not add anything, they just said the same thing three different ways instead of one. It continues throughout the essay.
The reason everything is tl;dr is that it's too long and not worth reading, it's never worth reading. Write properly. Say the most important things at the top that cover your topic entirely and then go into further depth. If it's worth reading people will read it, if it's not they won't.
>And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression.
Here's the example:
* the productive confusion...
* the generative power ...
* the transformative potential ...
The author did not add anything, they just said the same thing three different ways instead of one. It continues throughout the essay.
The reason everything is tl;dr is that it's too long and not worth reading, it's never worth reading. Write properly. Say the most important things at the top that cover your topic entirely and then go into further depth. If it's worth reading people will read it, if it's not they won't.
Most popular business books are like this. They have an idea that could fit in like a single chapter, but have to write a whole book about it to get paid, so they pad it with numerous anecdotes and their entire life’s story.
I wish there were more reliable ways to monetize for authors between clickbait and published book. I know there are many paid Substacks and newsletters out there, some of which are really great. But I feel like you need a lot of luck or self promotion skills for this to work.
I wish there were more reliable ways to monetize for authors between clickbait and published book. I know there are many paid Substacks and newsletters out there, some of which are really great. But I feel like you need a lot of luck or self promotion skills for this to work.
We need to return to the grand history of the publication of the pamphlet, which is exactly what we want. Short form content, 5 to 50 pages, which is exactly the length that would fit for so many of these business, "popular science", and other kinds of nonfiction books which have good ideas but no business being 250 pages long. Essentially one-off magazines instead of being a periodical, individually published and probably in a smaller format than 8x11/A4-ish sizes for most modern magazines.
https://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/2015/03/30/the-pamphlet...
https://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/2015/03/30/the-pamphlet...
Monetisation: how about a periodical publication? Edited and curated around a theme and then contributors can write to an appropriate length. Spin-off courses and perhaps even individual sessions where a general theme is applied to a specific situation?
https://www.idler.co.uk/
These people seem to be doing OK with that format for er, a different market segment.
https://www.idler.co.uk/
These people seem to be doing OK with that format for er, a different market segment.
I came to the comments to see if anybody else was bothered by this style. Every other paragraph contains a list rephrasing a simple concept. Bit of irony for an article focused on the problem of compression to so easily exemplify where compression would be useful.
[deleted]
> Say the most important things at the top that cover your topic entirely and then go into further depth.
A powerful trick in all forms and contexts of communication.
A powerful trick in all forms and contexts of communication.
I think there's a nuance here that you're missing.
Yes -- so much popular "literature" (if it can be called that) written in the last 50 years has been conversational in tone. If I'm looking for a particular answer to a pressing problem, I don't want to read 10 different people's stories about facing the same problem, I want an information-dense 10-pager that I can slowly pore over. If you have the information, please present it up front!
On the other hand, some books are the product of so much prior thought that it takes a lot of discipline to sit with them long enough to understand what they're saying. Anything by the philosopher Josef Pieper, for example.
And other pieces, like TA, are the product of someone discovering or meditating on an idea as they write. I think we ought to read these not as popular fluff, but perhaps to join the author thoughtfully as they process an idea -- which can be rewarding.
Yes -- so much popular "literature" (if it can be called that) written in the last 50 years has been conversational in tone. If I'm looking for a particular answer to a pressing problem, I don't want to read 10 different people's stories about facing the same problem, I want an information-dense 10-pager that I can slowly pore over. If you have the information, please present it up front!
On the other hand, some books are the product of so much prior thought that it takes a lot of discipline to sit with them long enough to understand what they're saying. Anything by the philosopher Josef Pieper, for example.
And other pieces, like TA, are the product of someone discovering or meditating on an idea as they write. I think we ought to read these not as popular fluff, but perhaps to join the author thoughtfully as they process an idea -- which can be rewarding.
Repetition builds rhythm and emotional resonance. She is not just trying to convey an idea, but a feeling as well. I think you missed that point. There is more to conversation than conveying data.
Repetition can be a powerful rhetorical tool, sure. It is not used effectively here. In this essay it's just lists of mediocre metaphors. Using a technique doesn't make your writing good by default, you have to use it well.
> We've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency.
The opposite is also true though. I'd argue it's even truer: we treat verbosity as depth, or at least as substance.
The opposite is also true though. I'd argue it's even truer: we treat verbosity as depth, or at least as substance.
Fortunately, this isn't sustainable. It's now so trivial to generate as much verbosity as you want with an LLM, verbosity is no longer going to be seen as in indicator of quality or time spent.
why not? because it's easy to doesn't mean it'll be seen a certain way, and "because it's easy to do" isn't actually an argument that it'll likely be seen a certain way.
Nobody is impressed by doing something easy, that's the point.
People are very bad at judging what's easy and what's not.
I've been programming for more than a decade. But if you show me a small tool/library and ask me whether it can be vibe coded, in one shot, by the publicly available LLM on the market, I genuinely can't tell.
I've been programming for more than a decade. But if you show me a small tool/library and ask me whether it can be vibe coded, in one shot, by the publicly available LLM on the market, I genuinely can't tell.
sure they are, happens all the time
The other side of this argument is that we're constantly fed lots of extraneous information along with the actual interesting content. The point about listening to the storyteller is completely valid, but that story teller wasn't full of advertisements, links to other stories or entreaties to smash a like button.
To an extent we're becoming wired to skim content because that content has been so deeply interleaved with items that aren't just extraneous, they're not even from the storyteller. I'd suggest this capability is even a kind of survival skill, akin to not only being able to spot motion in a dense jungle but to also instinctively focus on certain kinds of motion.
To an extent we're becoming wired to skim content because that content has been so deeply interleaved with items that aren't just extraneous, they're not even from the storyteller. I'd suggest this capability is even a kind of survival skill, akin to not only being able to spot motion in a dense jungle but to also instinctively focus on certain kinds of motion.
There are books and post that we should sit down and read for hours and hours, and even reread it from time to time.
There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.
Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.
Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
I have never heard the term “compression culture” before, but speaking as a human experiencing the world in 2025 the tendency to compress things is certainly understandable. There is a contradiction or a tension betweem me as a worker and me as a consumer. Both of which have an insatiable apetite for my time. I don’t see how anyone can blame people for demanding brevity when time is the most precious resource we have any autonomy over.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a summary before committing to reading a book. There are just too many books. In fact this article mentions a bunch of books and summarizes them inline. Good. Gives me more information on whether I should read those books
But the summary rarely captures what makes the book worth reading in the first place, so your decision is based on inadequate information.
Inadequate information is better than zero information.
In fact the value of most information follows an exponential curve. You tell me a movie is sci fi and I immediately know I'm unlikely to be into it. You tell me it's from A24 and I get my hopes up. You tell me both of these pieces of information and I gotta wrestle with competing signals - but either way the absolute value of the expected value of me watching it flattens out and a bit, I no longer expect it to absolutely blow me away nor make me throw my TV out the window.
Hence I'm pro compression culture. Let me decide whether I want to unpack it.
In fact the value of most information follows an exponential curve. You tell me a movie is sci fi and I immediately know I'm unlikely to be into it. You tell me it's from A24 and I get my hopes up. You tell me both of these pieces of information and I gotta wrestle with competing signals - but either way the absolute value of the expected value of me watching it flattens out and a bit, I no longer expect it to absolutely blow me away nor make me throw my TV out the window.
Hence I'm pro compression culture. Let me decide whether I want to unpack it.
> Hence I'm pro compression culture
I think the problem is that this compression culture is lossy and fragmented.
Summaries serve a purpose similar to thumbnails in an image gallery UI - the full picture is always available behind a click.
Imagine if you could only see them as 128x128 JPEGs at 50% quality - after they've been reposted with "deep fried meme" filters a few times. No links to the source, and the next bite-sized truncation pushed right after. Later someone reposts them upscaled to 8K.
This is exactly what I feel is happening with the written word.
I think the problem is that this compression culture is lossy and fragmented.
Summaries serve a purpose similar to thumbnails in an image gallery UI - the full picture is always available behind a click.
Imagine if you could only see them as 128x128 JPEGs at 50% quality - after they've been reposted with "deep fried meme" filters a few times. No links to the source, and the next bite-sized truncation pushed right after. Later someone reposts them upscaled to 8K.
This is exactly what I feel is happening with the written word.
I don't see that as a problem. You can get much stronger compression if you allow it to be lossy. This naturally flows out of information value decreasing exponentially.
What's the alternative? Reading every single book humanity has produced so you can decide which ones to.. actually read?
Maybe there's some kind of a world this is feasible, but in the modern world, just talking about books, there are literally millions published every year. Hell, just trying to decide which movie to watch, there are probably several thousand "Real" movies produced every year, how do you decide which one to spend your precious 3 hours on?
Maybe there's some kind of a world this is feasible, but in the modern world, just talking about books, there are literally millions published every year. Hell, just trying to decide which movie to watch, there are probably several thousand "Real" movies produced every year, how do you decide which one to spend your precious 3 hours on?
The alternative is to find people you trust, or who are widely considered trustworthy, and read what they recommend. The canon was invented to solve this problem.
Sorry, are you arguing that it's better to listen to a "trust worthy person" tell you what to read than to read a summary to determine what to read?
Yes. Because a "trustworthy person" is one who has demonstrated their authority, who has experienced the work in its full form, who has the taste and experience to make a determination as to its quality and usefulness, and who is capable of presenting reasoned arguments that support their opinion. Such people exist.
In the current climate, it may seem odd to trust the opinion of a fellow human instead of AI summaries and your personal predilections, but that is exactly what I am arguing we should do.
In the current climate, it may seem odd to trust the opinion of a fellow human instead of AI summaries and your personal predilections, but that is exactly what I am arguing we should do.
This reminds me a bit of the "philosopher king" from plato. If such a trustworthy person existed and could be found, that would be superior.
"A little person and his friends go for a walk to return a piece of jewellery where it belongs."
>"A little person and his friends go for a walk to return a piece of jewellery where it belongs."
"Fat old man creeps on his girlfriend's teen-aged daughter."
"Rich guy parties with his friends on Long Island."
"Angsty Teenagers kill themselves."
"Fat old man creeps on his girlfriend's teen-aged daughter."
"Rich guy parties with his friends on Long Island."
"Angsty Teenagers kill themselves."
hard disagree because summaries spoil any suspense or intrigue a novel would have
it's the journey, not the destination
it's the journey, not the destination
One study showed people exposed to spoilers enjoyed content more than without, on average.
thank you, came here to say that, i read 5 books on good years so i'd rather know before whether i might enjoy them or not
One of the most rewarding genres for me is the diary / journal, which I think is essentially the exact opposite of the “give me the Wikipedia summary of facts” approach. The typical journal is filled with a ton of information about what the author ate, whom he met, what various activities he did that day, etc. - and for this reason I find it infinitely more historically insightful than a nonfiction summary of facts book.
Writing a journal used to be more of a common thing that educated people did, but nowadays I guess social media is too big of a distraction…not the mention the question of whether anyone would read a journal as opposed to the simplified sloganeered book public figures typically put out today.
For some specific recommendations: I am about halfway through Harry Kessler’s 1890-1915 journals, and I just started George H. W. Bush’s journal on his time in China. Both are pretty insightful so far.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_von_Kessler
2. https://www.amazon.com/China-Diary-George-Bush-President/dp/...
Writing a journal used to be more of a common thing that educated people did, but nowadays I guess social media is too big of a distraction…not the mention the question of whether anyone would read a journal as opposed to the simplified sloganeered book public figures typically put out today.
For some specific recommendations: I am about halfway through Harry Kessler’s 1890-1915 journals, and I just started George H. W. Bush’s journal on his time in China. Both are pretty insightful so far.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_von_Kessler
2. https://www.amazon.com/China-Diary-George-Bush-President/dp/...
I would recommend Samuel Pepys' diary as well, a figure involved in England's Navy in the 1600s. He wrote a diary entry every day with a lot of candor, and there's a site I've been following that posts his diary entry for that day - so every day you can follow along with his life over the span of his ~10 year diary. I find it endlessly fascinating, even when his diary summary is basically "I woke up, worked, then had dinner with my cousins". The way he writes and the details he chooses to include I've found to be very fun
Follow along with us at https://www.pepysdiary.com/
Follow along with us at https://www.pepysdiary.com/
Yep this is the “Ur-Journal” if there ever was one. It’s been on my reading list for too long.
I find it very fun to follow along daily using the site, We're only at year 2 of his diary on this trip around so it's a great time to join. People comment on every entry and there's a nice little community
I agree and for me it ties into the general theory that our brains are narrative engines. The big processes running in our brains are building narratives for sorting fantasy from fiction in history building and prediction for planning and narrative is a major tool. Language has evolved a significant role in transferring narrative between individuals and generations. Immersion matters from that perspective and diaries and narratives are more relatable and effective and useful for feeding that beast.
It's not particularly helpful when your in a more purely fact recall mode, though.
It's not particularly helpful when your in a more purely fact recall mode, though.
haven't noticed compression culture to be honest, but if i may take a second to be stupid and uninteresting myself: i find nothing more stupid and uninteresting than the enormous volume of talking about talking that's done. this is a post about replies to a post about talking about a book, which is probably talking about talking, too. in and of itself that's fine, the problem is that feels like ninety percent of writing.
> -- eyes darting frantically across screens like a rat in a maze searching for the cheese of instant gratification.
I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.
Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.
HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.
This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.
I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.
Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.
HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.
This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.
I've been thinking about physically printing out my articles for the day and reading them in some sort of lounge chair situation.
For me it's something to do with the screen. The more "skim reading" I do on screens, the more the practice becomes habitually embedded and hard to break away from, like my mind is set up to do that when I'm working with a monitor.
Maybe meeting half-way will work, like having a big e-paper e-reader where I (batch-export to PDF) all of the long-form content I want to process that day.
For me it's something to do with the screen. The more "skim reading" I do on screens, the more the practice becomes habitually embedded and hard to break away from, like my mind is set up to do that when I'm working with a monitor.
Maybe meeting half-way will work, like having a big e-paper e-reader where I (batch-export to PDF) all of the long-form content I want to process that day.
Compression is fine for consuming information. But people need to be both consuming and generating knowledge in order to understand concepts beyond summary points.
Generating knowledge is an exercise in compression. It is helpful to deliver insights to readers. Consuming knowledge is important to keep your pulse in your field. Only consuming leads can create an illusion of understanding but no real usable knowledge that can provide value to the community.
The issue is that we live in an information glut and one can now live a life spending all their time consuming, but never creating for themselves.
Generating knowledge is an exercise in compression. It is helpful to deliver insights to readers. Consuming knowledge is important to keep your pulse in your field. Only consuming leads can create an illusion of understanding but no real usable knowledge that can provide value to the community.
The issue is that we live in an information glut and one can now live a life spending all their time consuming, but never creating for themselves.
I totally get the sentiment but I also see the flip side of it.
I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.
I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.
I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.
I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.
I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
The author doesn't touch upon it here, but you can compress experiences along two axes: time, or what I'll call depth. This second type of compression drives the proliferation of overly long TV shows, documentaries, and podcasts. Most of these works are not meant to be watched or listened to alone, but instead present information of limited depth so people can digest them (or at least grasp them at surface level) using only a portion of their attention while they spend the other portion on something else.
You may be spending more time on these kinds of things, but I would argue you're really not much better off than the person reading the headline, and at least giving it their full attention for a tiny bit of time.
You may be spending more time on these kinds of things, but I would argue you're really not much better off than the person reading the headline, and at least giving it their full attention for a tiny bit of time.
I wonder if there is some conservation of effort / "vibe matching" at play. The classic books which another commenter mentioned probably had a lot of thought put into the choices made in each sentence, while shows/YouTube videos/cooking articles etc. today definitely have less effort per second given the amount of filler.
If the creator has "diluted" the amount of thought and information per unit content I don't see why it shouldn't be compressed to reach previous "densities".
If the creator has "diluted" the amount of thought and information per unit content I don't see why it shouldn't be compressed to reach previous "densities".
> I just…don’t have the time
What super important thing would you be doing instead? People say they don't have time yet they blow tons of time aimlessly, myself included.
What super important thing would you be doing instead? People say they don't have time yet they blow tons of time aimlessly, myself included.
Wow, that seems dreamy. Do you have kids, plural?
If you can spend time here on HN then you have free time?
I work on a computer. Right now I'm waiting for a spec suite to finish running, which takes around 1:30min, more than enough to type this answer. Hardly qualifies as free time.
5 minutes writing a comment with one hand while you’re bottle feeding a baby is not the same as time dedication to something that requires undivided attention.
Yes, they blow tons of time endlessly scrolling through bullshit to find something worth spending any time on. They don't have the time for your thing, because your thing is not worth making time for, over the 99999999 other things that are worth about 0.4 microseconds each.
In a related headline:
‘No long sermons’: how influencer Catholic priests are spreading the word of God online
‘No long sermons’: how influencer Catholic priests are spreading the word of God online
Vatican invites 1,000 social media missionaries to digital jubilee conference
I think it's okay if not taken to extreme. There's a difference between writing a book review and writing a tweet. It's hard to say much in a tweet, but I'm in favor of people writing book reviews.
Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest.
A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.
Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest.
A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.
> For centuries, communities gathered around the fire to hear the same saga recited for the hundredth time. The listeners didn't grow impatient with the familiar opening formulas, the elaborate genealogies, the detailed descriptions of weapons and weather.
I generally agree with the broad strokes of this post, but this description gives me pause. How do we know that listeners didn't grow impatient? Though I suppose it would take a good deal of compression to answer this :)
I generally agree with the broad strokes of this post, but this description gives me pause. How do we know that listeners didn't grow impatient? Though I suppose it would take a good deal of compression to answer this :)
Thanks. I came to the a similar realization after trying Blinkist (book summaries) a few years ago. The summaries is no real substitute for reading the whole book.
I don't think that it's that big a deal. It's something that has been said for many generations. Each generation complains that our art has been "lost," by folks without the patience to learn it, etc. In my day, we complained about Cliffs' Notes, and calculators in the classroom.
I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff.
I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well.
She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart.
I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.
I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff.
I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well.
She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart.
I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.
You mildly disagree with a point that a woman you've never met is making, or just how she phrased it, so you sarcastically question her ability to function in a relationship and "wish her luck"?
Perhaps reflect on why you immediately jump to a personal attack to make your argument.
Perhaps reflect on why you immediately jump to a personal attack to make your argument.
You have a point. It was too personal (for me -it got my goat, and I shouldn't have let that come out, here). I’ve already amended it. I can definitely make the point without being snotty (which was my complaint -mote/plank).
But…I didn’t “immediately jump,” as you have … er … compressed from what I wrote. It was the last thing I wrote, and it was pretty mild (my personal feelings about that type of attitude are quite strong -I have reasons). But I have compressed it, if that makes you happy.
Have a great day!
[EDITED TO ADD] Oof. I turned on showdead, to see what others had to say. My comment was nothing, compared to some. I must have hit a nerve. Especially, considering that a throwaway was registered just to swipe at me. I guess I'm "honored"? Wasn't my goal to hurt -sincerely apologize.
But…I didn’t “immediately jump,” as you have … er … compressed from what I wrote. It was the last thing I wrote, and it was pretty mild (my personal feelings about that type of attitude are quite strong -I have reasons). But I have compressed it, if that makes you happy.
Have a great day!
[EDITED TO ADD] Oof. I turned on showdead, to see what others had to say. My comment was nothing, compared to some. I must have hit a nerve. Especially, considering that a throwaway was registered just to swipe at me. I guess I'm "honored"? Wasn't my goal to hurt -sincerely apologize.
I loved this article. Thank you for sharing it.
I felt it put words to an experience I wrote about learning to "play" the piano: https://jondlm.github.io/website/blog/the_joy_of_discovery/
Cheers to all of you out there trying to slow down.
I felt it put words to an experience I wrote about learning to "play" the piano: https://jondlm.github.io/website/blog/the_joy_of_discovery/
Cheers to all of you out there trying to slow down.
I'd say it depends. If someone writes a research paper that can be 2 pages long but make it 8 pages cause that's the requirement, then I rather not spend my time reading all 8 pages and compress it just for the interesting bits. (this is true for almost every prompt engineering paper I've came across).
There a couple different ways of learning calculus. I was lucky enough to have a high school calculus teacher that introduced us to calculus by showing us how it worked. Buoyed by that experience, I took math for math majors as a college freshman. I spent the semester being either extremely enlightened or completely lost. I ended up re-taking the second semester of calculus, but I took calculus for engineers instead of math majors. Not super enlightening, but enough to understand what to do when prompted for a derivative or integral.
Honestly, I think a big part of the difference is simply how concepts are communicated. Richard Feynman really was that good at explaining physics concepts using every day examples.
It's also not always obvious when you need to stop and go into detail, and when a general grasp of a concept will be enough.
Honestly, I think a big part of the difference is simply how concepts are communicated. Richard Feynman really was that good at explaining physics concepts using every day examples.
It's also not always obvious when you need to stop and go into detail, and when a general grasp of a concept will be enough.
I'm not convinced that we started with the right amount of information and then compressed it lossily and now we are missing nuance. We started out with an expansion culture. It wasn't enough to have a succinct idea. You needed to have enough to fill a book or an essay, or something that took up enough physical paper that other people felt like they got something when they bought it.
We started from there, with the economics of book selling dictating how long an idea was supposed to be, and we have moved smaller and smaller, as the economics have changed. Substack actually increased the expected length of writing. If people are paying for a newsletter, they want to feel like they got something. I haven't found any substacks that reliably contain more substance than shorter blog posts by the same author.
We started from there, with the economics of book selling dictating how long an idea was supposed to be, and we have moved smaller and smaller, as the economics have changed. Substack actually increased the expected length of writing. If people are paying for a newsletter, they want to feel like they got something. I haven't found any substacks that reliably contain more substance than shorter blog posts by the same author.
If you want a more philosophical version of some of the ideas posited by the blog post, I can't recommend Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' enough.
He puts forward the position that the medium controls how we interact with information. When the information is scarce (and as a consequence: dense) like books, you have to spend a lot more time interacting with said information to understand it. When it's overwhelmingly abundant and easily accessible (TV, internet) information is entirely discardable. We see the effects of this more intensely in the current internet age where traditional teaching methods (book learning) seems to be oft complained about because we raise a generation to expect education to be packaged in a similar format as what they see on the internet: as entertainment.
He puts forward the position that the medium controls how we interact with information. When the information is scarce (and as a consequence: dense) like books, you have to spend a lot more time interacting with said information to understand it. When it's overwhelmingly abundant and easily accessible (TV, internet) information is entirely discardable. We see the effects of this more intensely in the current internet age where traditional teaching methods (book learning) seems to be oft complained about because we raise a generation to expect education to be packaged in a similar format as what they see on the internet: as entertainment.
I personally "feel" the same way, but at least some mental models suggest otherwise.
As one example, this implies that everything has a high signal-to-noise ratio and we are now bad at paying attention to the signal. But the base rate of SnR I think is much worse. I think there has to be value in being able to skip a lot of the noise with better and better technology.
On "um"s and "uh"s, I read a good article recently how humans are good at turn taking (while AIs struggle) and that ums/uhs/like help signal we are not done with our turn. There is no turn taking when watching a video so I personally value removing these and providing a higher SnR.
So I'm stuck feeling and agreeing with these articles, yet rationally also finding good counter points.
As one example, this implies that everything has a high signal-to-noise ratio and we are now bad at paying attention to the signal. But the base rate of SnR I think is much worse. I think there has to be value in being able to skip a lot of the noise with better and better technology.
On "um"s and "uh"s, I read a good article recently how humans are good at turn taking (while AIs struggle) and that ums/uhs/like help signal we are not done with our turn. There is no turn taking when watching a video so I personally value removing these and providing a higher SnR.
So I'm stuck feeling and agreeing with these articles, yet rationally also finding good counter points.
>compression culture
I don't think it's "%s culture" but just 'culture', a culture which has embraced social media apps prioritizing short forms of communication which lack the nuance as explained in the article. A culture that needs to go faster and faster either for dopamine[0] or profits. Number go up and number go up faster.
It's pretty hard to break this when many of our social signals for success and survival are now wired up like this.
It's also why you need to memorize a bunch of leetcode to get a job as a developer now. Who cares about the nuance that most jobs won't need it? Google is doing it, and so should we.
[0] replace with whatever neurological process that gives instant gratification
I don't think it's "%s culture" but just 'culture', a culture which has embraced social media apps prioritizing short forms of communication which lack the nuance as explained in the article. A culture that needs to go faster and faster either for dopamine[0] or profits. Number go up and number go up faster.
It's pretty hard to break this when many of our social signals for success and survival are now wired up like this.
It's also why you need to memorize a bunch of leetcode to get a job as a developer now. Who cares about the nuance that most jobs won't need it? Google is doing it, and so should we.
[0] replace with whatever neurological process that gives instant gratification
I take my phone when going to the toilet and just scroll hackernews because it is easy to come here click a couple articles, read comments etc.
I would much rather search personal blogs of people to find really interesting and informative content but I just don’t have the will power and time to do it properly.
It is much easier to open hackernews, reddit, youtube or even worse, youtube shorts.
There is an obvious conflict of interest between social media and the consumer.
The platform sees the consumer as cattle, they just want the consumer to click/watch more ads, buy more stuff etc.
They measure success by engagement only.
For example if I want to learn some new thing, it would be nice to be able to tell youtube to occasionally recommend a certain kind of video relating to that thing. Instead of trying to “train the algorithm” by creating artificial engagement. This seems very backwards and practically not many people will have time for this kind of thing.
It could be better if every person had time and power to search the full web and find content that not only is reasonably fun to consume but also leaves a good taste after consuming.
I would much rather search personal blogs of people to find really interesting and informative content but I just don’t have the will power and time to do it properly.
It is much easier to open hackernews, reddit, youtube or even worse, youtube shorts.
There is an obvious conflict of interest between social media and the consumer.
The platform sees the consumer as cattle, they just want the consumer to click/watch more ads, buy more stuff etc.
They measure success by engagement only.
For example if I want to learn some new thing, it would be nice to be able to tell youtube to occasionally recommend a certain kind of video relating to that thing. Instead of trying to “train the algorithm” by creating artificial engagement. This seems very backwards and practically not many people will have time for this kind of thing.
It could be better if every person had time and power to search the full web and find content that not only is reasonably fun to consume but also leaves a good taste after consuming.
If you want to learn something new, don't bring your phone up the toilet. Sit with your own thoughts.
(Or: shit with your own thoughts, as my auto-correct wanted it.)
(Or: shit with your own thoughts, as my auto-correct wanted it.)
If you're sitting for more than ~10 minutes you should really get up and try again later, anyway... unless you want hemorrhoids, which I promise you do not :)
Its definitely part of everyday… I have noticed it a lot at work especially with the younger generations, that have 0 patience for any conversation that is less than a couple of seconds, it feels like they are not able to concentrate or engage. And you can tell by the empty look, where they are clearly already on the next topic before it has even started.
Writer has a point that we have evolved into compressing lot of the information, and the problem is not people it's "abundance". This raises the issue, how do you consume it? compress the it so it's quicker to digest otherwise. Example, how many tabs are open on your browser? why?
compression culture at its best:
here's a summary of this discussion about summarization: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/compression-culture-and-its-i...
here's a summary of this discussion about summarization: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/compression-culture-and-its-i...
I relate to this article but I find that for a moment it confused verbosity with narrative depth. A piece of text can be very small, almost “compressed”, but doesn’t lose narrative power. This is why I feel like we are not losing verbosity, we are losing narrative efficacy!
>`We want the wisdom without the patient work of becoming wise.`
This is how most people use LLMs. But I'll go one step further.
We've optimized these systems towards people believing they have learned, rather than measuring loss against actually delivering on that promise.
This is how most people use LLMs. But I'll go one step further.
We've optimized these systems towards people believing they have learned, rather than measuring loss against actually delivering on that promise.
> We began to believe that the value of an experience could be separated from the experience itself
I think requires some differentiation between type of value.
Some you can certainly separate and condense while others need the lived experience.
Perhaps the split is knowledge vs wisdom…
I think requires some differentiation between type of value.
Some you can certainly separate and condense while others need the lived experience.
Perhaps the split is knowledge vs wisdom…
That's ok because most people are stupid and uninteresting so I'm going to be more successful socially by being closer to the mean <mic drop, flies away>
[deleted]
I also noticed that increasingly more people opted to watch movie/show walk-throughs instead of the original work. That baffles me to no end.
I agree with most of this post, especially the last 2 paragraphs. I would say I think our weaknesses have always been there, modern information transmission just makes the flaws in us more obvious.
Hot take alert: Humans are stupid. We've always been stupid. Our brains simply do not have the capacity - in either long term memory or in throughput - to deal with real life.
To deal with this we have always simplified as much as we can.
Sometimes that means putting things into boxes: "Good" or "Bad", "Left" or "Right", "Rich" or "Poor", "Healthy" or "Unhealthy". Reality is always very murky, but simple boxes like this help us to make decisions quickly.
If we did not do this, you could spend a century deciding what to have for breakfast! Thinking about all the aspects - the companies involved and the way they treat their employees, the effect of various industries on the environment and economy, the various nutrients and how they interact with the rest of your diet, the long-term cost, whether it is sufficient variety, how long it takes to eat and whether time is a factor, how hard it is to clean up after, etc, etc.
Just eating breakfast could turn into nearly endless debate and back and forth if you really explored it.
The reality is, humans are not equipped to deal with reality's level of nuance. So, we take mental shortcuts. We place things into boxes. We make assumptions. We build simple hierarchies so we only need to know about what's below and above. (Part of what governments and companies are structured the way they are)
This is not a modern phenomenon - it has always been true about us. However, now there is much more information blasted at us constantly. Our very limited mental resources are more taxed, so we need to start making more assumptions, taking more shortcuts, simplifying things down more.
A lot of people would point to our technology as evidence otherwise, but I think that's a bit false. We only make real technological progress by having large groups of people slam their head against one tiny aspect of a problem for nearly their entire lives. Sometimes we get lucky and get breakthroughs, but that's the exception and not the rule IMO. These days it can take a good third of our lifetimes just to get familiar with the problem we're trying to solve. It's just not sustainable. Our brains are too weak.
Hot take alert: Humans are stupid. We've always been stupid. Our brains simply do not have the capacity - in either long term memory or in throughput - to deal with real life.
To deal with this we have always simplified as much as we can.
Sometimes that means putting things into boxes: "Good" or "Bad", "Left" or "Right", "Rich" or "Poor", "Healthy" or "Unhealthy". Reality is always very murky, but simple boxes like this help us to make decisions quickly.
If we did not do this, you could spend a century deciding what to have for breakfast! Thinking about all the aspects - the companies involved and the way they treat their employees, the effect of various industries on the environment and economy, the various nutrients and how they interact with the rest of your diet, the long-term cost, whether it is sufficient variety, how long it takes to eat and whether time is a factor, how hard it is to clean up after, etc, etc.
Just eating breakfast could turn into nearly endless debate and back and forth if you really explored it.
The reality is, humans are not equipped to deal with reality's level of nuance. So, we take mental shortcuts. We place things into boxes. We make assumptions. We build simple hierarchies so we only need to know about what's below and above. (Part of what governments and companies are structured the way they are)
This is not a modern phenomenon - it has always been true about us. However, now there is much more information blasted at us constantly. Our very limited mental resources are more taxed, so we need to start making more assumptions, taking more shortcuts, simplifying things down more.
A lot of people would point to our technology as evidence otherwise, but I think that's a bit false. We only make real technological progress by having large groups of people slam their head against one tiny aspect of a problem for nearly their entire lives. Sometimes we get lucky and get breakthroughs, but that's the exception and not the rule IMO. These days it can take a good third of our lifetimes just to get familiar with the problem we're trying to solve. It's just not sustainable. Our brains are too weak.
The second half of this post is behind paywall, in case you didn't notice.
There’s too much low-quality information. Compression/summarizing is a defense against getting mired in slop. The challenge is to switch out of skim/compression mode when truly meaningful content is found.
It's a symptom of too much information. Each individual has to determine how to spend their time. A summary is one of the best tools we have now for doing that. Also, people are just lazy. We need better ways to filter. AI will be able to do this. Probably already can, someone just needs to build it and let people fine tune it to their tastes.
[deleted]
ironically, this reads like it was written with assistance from an LLM
[deleted]
Its very likely that you're entire existence of cognitive thought is the result of layered compression of the recorded learnings of all life before us, from instinct all the way up to the complex topics this author is somewhat ironically... compressing.
So, uh... caveat emptor.
So, uh... caveat emptor.
maybe we are delegating knowledge, we feel we don't need to remember everything, we just need the headlines ?
I completely disagree with this article. It's romanticizing the past and ignoring obvious benefits of summarizing.
In fact, I'd argue that the entire world is built on abstraction and summarization. It has been ever since humans started to specialize.
What good does it do a baker to understand the entire supply chain of wheat berries? To know the fertilization procedures? To know the kreb cycle? Certainly all of these specific details go into the process of making bread yet none of them are useful for a baker. It's why we could bake bread long before we knew exactly what made plants grow. It's why we've been able to do selective breeding long before we understood exactly what DNA was.
The power of specialization and "compression" is that rather that you the learner can choose what to spend your days learning. That has even caused a rise in symbiotic specializations. For example, a biologist can find a new bone and compare it's structure to the structure of other bones in similar species building out the family tree. A geologist can work with the biologist if they say "I want to look for bones roughly from roughly 600,000CE, where should I be looking?". They have a compressed understanding of what the geologist is capable of just like the geologies has a compressed understanding of what the biologist is doing.
What this article fails to understand is there is simply too much information for any one individual person to know. Compression is a natural outcome of that. The modern world works because we compress our understanding on topics that don't interest us while expanding and decompressing the topics that do.
And, if you want someone to decompress your specific article. To dive in and truly engage with it. Then it's your job to write a good summary that hooks people. You need to give people a reason to want to decompress. If that seems burdensome, maybe it's because you yourself have not taken the time to decompress knowledge of how to write good summaries. That is, you put low value on a summary.
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"
In fact, I'd argue that the entire world is built on abstraction and summarization. It has been ever since humans started to specialize.
What good does it do a baker to understand the entire supply chain of wheat berries? To know the fertilization procedures? To know the kreb cycle? Certainly all of these specific details go into the process of making bread yet none of them are useful for a baker. It's why we could bake bread long before we knew exactly what made plants grow. It's why we've been able to do selective breeding long before we understood exactly what DNA was.
The power of specialization and "compression" is that rather that you the learner can choose what to spend your days learning. That has even caused a rise in symbiotic specializations. For example, a biologist can find a new bone and compare it's structure to the structure of other bones in similar species building out the family tree. A geologist can work with the biologist if they say "I want to look for bones roughly from roughly 600,000CE, where should I be looking?". They have a compressed understanding of what the geologist is capable of just like the geologies has a compressed understanding of what the biologist is doing.
What this article fails to understand is there is simply too much information for any one individual person to know. Compression is a natural outcome of that. The modern world works because we compress our understanding on topics that don't interest us while expanding and decompressing the topics that do.
And, if you want someone to decompress your specific article. To dive in and truly engage with it. Then it's your job to write a good summary that hooks people. You need to give people a reason to want to decompress. If that seems burdensome, maybe it's because you yourself have not taken the time to decompress knowledge of how to write good summaries. That is, you put low value on a summary.
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"
Isn't the diminishing attention span the more conventional term to express the authors point, rather than "compression"? I think it was in culture of narcissism, a book from the late 1970s, that the author (Christopher Lasch) showed some research that the American attention span was rapidly diminishing since the 1960s or something. Its an old phenomenon and has predictably gone much worse the more attention-sucking tech we get.
I see people of all ages saying stuff like "I don't have the patience to watch a full movie uninterrupted". I think its the same thing.
PS. didn't have time to read the huge article, can you summarise?
I see people of all ages saying stuff like "I don't have the patience to watch a full movie uninterrupted". I think its the same thing.
PS. didn't have time to read the huge article, can you summarise?
tldr summary of the article for those who need compression:
- Compression culture reduces rich experience to bullet points, treating depth as inefficiency. It ignores how oral traditions, medieval manuscript copying and university disputations built understanding through immersion, repetition and shared struggle.
- Today’s attention economy rewards fast consumption and skimming, reshaping our brains for distraction. True growth—skill, wisdom, character—emerges only through patient repetition, sitting with complexity and the struggle that resists compression.
- Compression culture reduces rich experience to bullet points, treating depth as inefficiency. It ignores how oral traditions, medieval manuscript copying and university disputations built understanding through immersion, repetition and shared struggle.
- Today’s attention economy rewards fast consumption and skimming, reshaping our brains for distraction. True growth—skill, wisdom, character—emerges only through patient repetition, sitting with complexity and the struggle that resists compression.
I think this sentiment has probably been echoed through the ages.
It feels like there's an assumption that we've reached some kind of a complexity ceiling and compressing complexity below us will just make us dumb? What if we've black-boxed complexity below us so we can explore more complexity above us?
Maybe the argument is that the rate of compressing complexity below us is faster than expanding the complexity space above us? And the result is that it makes us run out of knowledge of digest and explore? Perhaps the answer to that is to make people more curious to go out and explore the complexity above us so we can generate that knowledge.
It feels like there's an assumption that we've reached some kind of a complexity ceiling and compressing complexity below us will just make us dumb? What if we've black-boxed complexity below us so we can explore more complexity above us?
Maybe the argument is that the rate of compressing complexity below us is faster than expanding the complexity space above us? And the result is that it makes us run out of knowledge of digest and explore? Perhaps the answer to that is to make people more curious to go out and explore the complexity above us so we can generate that knowledge.
There are two kind of person who ask for a tldr:
Someone who doesn't understand or care about the depths of works and only want the information because of this.
And people who appreciate it but lacks time.
If I see the markers of something I judge bad, or if I dont have enough time right now, I wont consume this content in depth.
Maybe it is a subset of people who lack time. But, I think there’s also sometimes an attack built into the tldr: “you don’t know this material very well, here’s how you could express it better.” Like any attack it is sometimes wrong, sometimes right.
I think it's just a symptom of too much stress/work and too little time. If you want people to slow down, you need to back the usual suspects: work-life balance, 4-day work week, affordable housing, unions, high taxes (countering inequality), sustainability, basic income, etc etc European-style socialism.
I have definitely felt a dramatic downturn in reading comprehension and the ability to deal with nuance in the past few years. I have learned to be extremely explicit in my communication to ward off getting sucked into an argument with someone who didn't understand the point I was trying to make.
This isn't just needing to be better at "effective communication", which I accept is something I'm not great at. What has surprised me instead is the level at which I feel I have to aim has been consistently lowered.
There has always been a risk on the internet of getting dragged into an argument of semantics, but what feels new and fresh, is the risk of getting dragged into an argument with someone who couldn't comprehend the point at all.
I also despair at the crowd who desire to absorb all knowledge (often via summary), rather than enjoy the journey. The crowd who think a novel like "Consider Phlebas" is better handled by reading,
> A shape-shifting agent allied with the Idirans, is sent on a mission to retrieve a fugitive AI Mind that has gone missing on a forbidden, war-ravaged planet. His journey takes him through a series of perilous encounters—including space battles, cannibal cults, and a doomed mercenary crew—as he races against time and enemies to complete his objective in the midst of a vast interstellar war.
Than reading the novel itself. Content with their summary they move on to devour the next knowledge-goal.
I do kind of get it. I get that it's easier to get along in life having a wide basis of knowledge-hooks with a few niches of real interest. It's easier to feel smart if you feel you have context for conversations, rather than risk appearing "ignorant" by asking the conversation partner to themselves expand and inform you.
I also look at my own impatience. My own diminishing attention span, and my ever decreasing ability to juggle work without distraction and constant consumption of the HN news ticker.
I recently got a new laptop. Firefox informs me I've visited HN 7,765 times. That's not healthy. Many of those is simply opening and immediately closing it, or navigating to and from comments, but it's a very unhealthy habit, born of a desire to constantly consume information without actually putting in what would be hard work and effort of fully reading all the articles.
Including this one. I managed a few paragraphs and skimmed the rest.
This isn't just needing to be better at "effective communication", which I accept is something I'm not great at. What has surprised me instead is the level at which I feel I have to aim has been consistently lowered.
There has always been a risk on the internet of getting dragged into an argument of semantics, but what feels new and fresh, is the risk of getting dragged into an argument with someone who couldn't comprehend the point at all.
I also despair at the crowd who desire to absorb all knowledge (often via summary), rather than enjoy the journey. The crowd who think a novel like "Consider Phlebas" is better handled by reading,
> A shape-shifting agent allied with the Idirans, is sent on a mission to retrieve a fugitive AI Mind that has gone missing on a forbidden, war-ravaged planet. His journey takes him through a series of perilous encounters—including space battles, cannibal cults, and a doomed mercenary crew—as he races against time and enemies to complete his objective in the midst of a vast interstellar war.
Than reading the novel itself. Content with their summary they move on to devour the next knowledge-goal.
I do kind of get it. I get that it's easier to get along in life having a wide basis of knowledge-hooks with a few niches of real interest. It's easier to feel smart if you feel you have context for conversations, rather than risk appearing "ignorant" by asking the conversation partner to themselves expand and inform you.
I also look at my own impatience. My own diminishing attention span, and my ever decreasing ability to juggle work without distraction and constant consumption of the HN news ticker.
I recently got a new laptop. Firefox informs me I've visited HN 7,765 times. That's not healthy. Many of those is simply opening and immediately closing it, or navigating to and from comments, but it's a very unhealthy habit, born of a desire to constantly consume information without actually putting in what would be hard work and effort of fully reading all the articles.
Including this one. I managed a few paragraphs and skimmed the rest.
Honestly I read the first couple paragraphs and then clicked away because that's just the attention span I have for reading online.
[deleted]
See also "Is Rushing Making Us Dumber?" by LindyMan.
https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/rushing-making-us-dumb...
https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/rushing-making-us-dumb...
The reason I want summaries is so that I can decide whether to invest time in reading the whole thing. This may seem insulting to the writer, but sorry, I'm inundated with articles asking me to read them. If they don't begin with some kind of summary of what the point is and why it's important, I just move on.
There is a reason why scientific papers have abstracts at the beginning: because in order to have time to do deep thinking, scientists need to be able to triage the always-enormous pile of papers that have come across their desks and decide if they're worth reading.
I want this now for basically every link in HN. If I open an a link and after a paragraph I'm still asking WTF is this about?, then I ask Safari to summarize it for me and decide from that point whether I want to read the rest or not. Sorry, but HN's curation is not good enough to determine that for me, and almost every other automated or crowdsourced system is worse.
Of course, I would not have commented to the author that I wanted him to provide a tl;dr. I would have just moved on silently. This is probably good for him, because it provides a selection bias in his readers that they are (somehow) interested in what he has to say.
There is a reason why scientific papers have abstracts at the beginning: because in order to have time to do deep thinking, scientists need to be able to triage the always-enormous pile of papers that have come across their desks and decide if they're worth reading.
I want this now for basically every link in HN. If I open an a link and after a paragraph I'm still asking WTF is this about?, then I ask Safari to summarize it for me and decide from that point whether I want to read the rest or not. Sorry, but HN's curation is not good enough to determine that for me, and almost every other automated or crowdsourced system is worse.
Of course, I would not have commented to the author that I wanted him to provide a tl;dr. I would have just moved on silently. This is probably good for him, because it provides a selection bias in his readers that they are (somehow) interested in what he has to say.
> Because it felt like asking someone to summarize a kiss. Like requesting the bullet points of grief.
This is dumb. No matter how many thousands of pages you write you cannot convey the feeling of these without experiencing it. So might as well as summarize it.
This is dumb. No matter how many thousands of pages you write you cannot convey the feeling of these without experiencing it. So might as well as summarize it.
This article is literally the reason why people crave summary, because it was so content-free that it was a waste of my time to have read it all. It was a lecture extolling the virtues of repetition while simultaneously displaying none of them.
Our world is burdened with SEO filler, AI slop, writers who shouldn't or worse can't, the summary is all you have to see if something is worth going further than the title.
tl;dr- Write better, stop abusing the privilege of our time.
tl;dr- Write better, stop abusing the privilege of our time.
The writing felt like it was deliberately long-winded as though being so would complement the point it was trying to make. IMO, the author did not make a compelling case that their wordiness was worth the time spent reading it.
wow, rude
I never saw tl;dr. as this made-up compression culture. It was almost always used as an insult to someone writing a paragraph block of drivel.
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"Everybody wants to have written, nobody wants to write". Attributed to Mark Twain. I also use this quote for books and movies. Everybody wants to have read the book, people just don't want to actually read.
Most people are already uninteresting. They're not trying to be interesting; that simply isn't their goal (nor need it be). Most people follow trends and shudder at the thought or creating trends themselves.
It's always been like that and always will be.
It's always been like that and always will be.
opposite :)
It's honestly depressing how many of the comments seem to completely miss the point of the post and respond with something along the lines of "there is too little signal and too much noise in stuff".
The entire point of the article is that you're not a humanoid robot whose entire purpose is to process signals for some utilitarian purpose in the borg collective, it's that you're a human being who engages with culture to develop your own mind.
If you're being spoonfed information at the highest rate you can handle, when do you actively engage with what is happening in front of you? The reason why a priest in a mass is giving you ample silence and not the "tldr" version of the sermon is because that silence is productive, it's when you use the active part of your mind, rather than just absorbing information like a machine.
The fact that people can't even comprehend this any more and just want things to be fed to them, completely passive recipients, not engaged in any contemplation, which requires there to be "little signal" at times so there's space is what the author is getting at.
The entire point of the article is that you're not a humanoid robot whose entire purpose is to process signals for some utilitarian purpose in the borg collective, it's that you're a human being who engages with culture to develop your own mind.
If you're being spoonfed information at the highest rate you can handle, when do you actively engage with what is happening in front of you? The reason why a priest in a mass is giving you ample silence and not the "tldr" version of the sermon is because that silence is productive, it's when you use the active part of your mind, rather than just absorbing information like a machine.
The fact that people can't even comprehend this any more and just want things to be fed to them, completely passive recipients, not engaged in any contemplation, which requires there to be "little signal" at times so there's space is what the author is getting at.
No. Although I appreciate the spotlight being put on slow experiences like storytelling, this article is fundamentally wrong.
> We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless.
This is a reduction. Consider the opposite statement: We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can *never* be whittled down, that difficulty can *never be avoided*, that transformation *must be slow and painful*. Now you see the monster that is being fought when one is learning to summarize, learning to distill, learning to quicken the pace of understanding.
> It's the logical endpoint of an attention economy that treats human focus as a finite resource to be optimized and monetized.
Yet another cheap jab at social media.
> Podcasters are celebrated for "actionable insights" while wandering conversations that might actually lead somewhere unexpected are dismissed as waste.
Thank you for bringing up podcasts. Are they not a counter example to the point of this article? We've gone from quick-hit interviews on news programs and late night talk shows, to slow meditative discussions in the form of podcasts.
"Compression culture" is a deliberate pushback against the gatekeepers. They sit in their coffee shops discussing new ways to create barriers between the peasants and themselves. *Read more books on the subject.* | *Read longer books on the subject.* | *Get certified.* | *Reach tenure.* ... And on and on.
Many works of non-fiction are largely fluff. They take a simple concept and dress it up as elaborately as possible until the reader is completely intimidated and regretful. Sometimes this is done for word count, sometimes this is done because the author lacks the ability to be concise, and sometimes this is done deliberately, to make the author's small insights seem bigger and more important. Rarely is it justified. Compression culture to the rescue.
Compression culture is optimistic. It's inclusive. It's there to overcome problems we were told were impossible. If that's "the transformation without the time" then so be it.
> We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless.
This is a reduction. Consider the opposite statement: We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can *never* be whittled down, that difficulty can *never be avoided*, that transformation *must be slow and painful*. Now you see the monster that is being fought when one is learning to summarize, learning to distill, learning to quicken the pace of understanding.
> It's the logical endpoint of an attention economy that treats human focus as a finite resource to be optimized and monetized.
Yet another cheap jab at social media.
> Podcasters are celebrated for "actionable insights" while wandering conversations that might actually lead somewhere unexpected are dismissed as waste.
Thank you for bringing up podcasts. Are they not a counter example to the point of this article? We've gone from quick-hit interviews on news programs and late night talk shows, to slow meditative discussions in the form of podcasts.
"Compression culture" is a deliberate pushback against the gatekeepers. They sit in their coffee shops discussing new ways to create barriers between the peasants and themselves. *Read more books on the subject.* | *Read longer books on the subject.* | *Get certified.* | *Reach tenure.* ... And on and on.
Many works of non-fiction are largely fluff. They take a simple concept and dress it up as elaborately as possible until the reader is completely intimidated and regretful. Sometimes this is done for word count, sometimes this is done because the author lacks the ability to be concise, and sometimes this is done deliberately, to make the author's small insights seem bigger and more important. Rarely is it justified. Compression culture to the rescue.
Compression culture is optimistic. It's inclusive. It's there to overcome problems we were told were impossible. If that's "the transformation without the time" then so be it.
Ran this through Kagi's Summariser for you:
The author argues that modern "compression culture" undermines deep, meaningful experiences by prioritizing efficiency and instant gratification. This culture treats depth as inefficiency, leading to a loss of valuable human experiences like confusion, difficulty, and transformation. The text highlights how historical practices, such as oral traditions and early universities, valued immersion and communal struggle for knowledge. The author criticizes the illusion of knowledge created by consuming compressed information, which leads to superficial understanding and a lack of true wisdom. The document emphasizes that meaningful growth, whether in skills, relationships, or personal development, requires patience, repetition, and engagement with complexity, which cannot be achieved through compression.
Time saved reading: 10min /s
The author argues that modern "compression culture" undermines deep, meaningful experiences by prioritizing efficiency and instant gratification. This culture treats depth as inefficiency, leading to a loss of valuable human experiences like confusion, difficulty, and transformation. The text highlights how historical practices, such as oral traditions and early universities, valued immersion and communal struggle for knowledge. The author criticizes the illusion of knowledge created by consuming compressed information, which leads to superficial understanding and a lack of true wisdom. The document emphasizes that meaningful growth, whether in skills, relationships, or personal development, requires patience, repetition, and engagement with complexity, which cannot be achieved through compression.
Time saved reading: 10min /s
They are called Medium posts because they are neither rare nor well-done.
Soo.. Are you Stadtler or Waldorf? :D
For anyone unfamiliar with the quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/192273-television-is-often-...
the permutations are older than that https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/07/24/tv/
savage
Nailed it
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Here’s a quick rundown of Maalvika’s “Compression Culture Is Making You Stupid and Uninteresting”:
- *The frustration with “TL;DR” mentality*
- *The frustration with “TL;DR” mentality*
Asking for summaries of profound experiences (like a life‑changing book) feels absurd—akin to bullet‑pointing a kiss or grief.
Industrial efficiency and attention capitalism taught us that depth is “inefficient.” We’ve come to expect instant transformation and hacks in all areas—fitness, music, friendship—skipping the messy real work of mastery and character.
Social platforms reward bite‑sized content; creators chase clicks with “5 key takeaways” instead of nuance.
True growth—love, wisdom, skill—resists being Amazon‑Prime’d. You can’t shortcut the slow alchemy of becoming.
TLDR can someone post a summary of this summary please? ;)
tldr
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Are comments like this productive? What is the point of just vaguely guessing that someone used AI to write something, with 0 proof other than some dim pattern-recognition comment? Is it possible that the opposite is true, ChatGPT was trained on writing (like this) and now mimics how good writers speak?
This seems far more likely than anything else. Every technique in the article is practically textbook "writing". Very little personality, but a whole lot of "academic phraseology".
Comments like these are like hearing a baroque harpsichord and thinking "gee, that sounds just like my synthesizer..."
Sweet, bro! Seems like a nice synth!
Comments like these are like hearing a baroque harpsichord and thinking "gee, that sounds just like my synthesizer..."
Sweet, bro! Seems like a nice synth!
These "that seems like AI" comments are extremely interesting. Seems like the "singularity" crap is overhyped; we should be talking about ai-powered solipsism.
Definitely seems like the whole thing has been given the AI treatment, but who knows, maybe people have just internalized the way it sounds by having too much dialectic with it. The sad thing is most people (even here) cannot detect AI writing anymore. In fact, I've seen some glaringly obvious posts which people in the comments even called the best writing they've seen. I guess ease of transmission is the basis for good writing now. I prefer for writing to have life in it, but I suppose I'm a dying breed.
It would be astonishingly hypocritical if the author (https://www.maalvikabhat.com/ who btw does academic research on societal influences of AI) wrote the following using AI (a quote from beyond the paywall follows). If anything I wonder whether she picked up a ChatGPT speech pattern herself from so much exposure to it.
"This is why AI can write but cannot create. It can remix existing patterns with mechanical precision, but it cannot sit in the fertile void where genuinely new ideas are born. It cannot endure the months of terrible drafts that make you question your sanity, the years of failure that feel like slow starvation, the decades of practice that transform a human into an artist through accumulated scar tissue and hard-won wisdom. AI has never stared at a blank page at 3 AM, coffee cold, wondering if anything will ever come. It has never had to choose between the easy metaphor and the one that makes your chest tight with recognition. It has never experienced the moment when disparate ideas suddenly fuse into something that didn't exist before, something that surprises even its creator. It can simulate the surface of creativity (the clever turns of phrase, the familiar structures), but it cannot access the underground rivers of human experience that feed genuine innovation. It writes like someone who has read about love but never been heartbroken, someone who can describe the ocean but has never tasted salt water."
"This is why AI can write but cannot create. It can remix existing patterns with mechanical precision, but it cannot sit in the fertile void where genuinely new ideas are born. It cannot endure the months of terrible drafts that make you question your sanity, the years of failure that feel like slow starvation, the decades of practice that transform a human into an artist through accumulated scar tissue and hard-won wisdom. AI has never stared at a blank page at 3 AM, coffee cold, wondering if anything will ever come. It has never had to choose between the easy metaphor and the one that makes your chest tight with recognition. It has never experienced the moment when disparate ideas suddenly fuse into something that didn't exist before, something that surprises even its creator. It can simulate the surface of creativity (the clever turns of phrase, the familiar structures), but it cannot access the underground rivers of human experience that feed genuine innovation. It writes like someone who has read about love but never been heartbroken, someone who can describe the ocean but has never tasted salt water."
This is such a good summary of what I feel like I've been observing (including in myself) for the last 15 years or so