>You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a traditional, long-form article that presents a rewarding read.
I didn't downvote but reading an unknown article with unknown or non-existent payoff is not the same premise as The Marshmallow Test because the Stanford experiment explicitly specifies the "reward" upfront: ">, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time."
In contrast, reading unfamiliar articles to _maybe_ get a "reward" is a Bayesian Probability. As the one reads each sentence that's not engaging, the expectation that there might be a "reward" at the end is tainted by the fact that most long articles in the past that reader forced themselves to finish didn't present a worthwhile reward at the end.
Now, if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end of the long article before the reader started it, then the test of that patience would be closer to The Marshmallow test.
> It’s not a random article. It’s been upvoted to the HN front page.
Time is precious, and I choose not to waste mine on the unnecessarily slow consumption of annoyingly-formatted articles.
I came across this hypothesis recently:
"A lot of the magic of ChatGPT is nothing to do with AI, it’s just nice to consume high-quality internet content without ads or whacky custom formatting."[0]
> Time is precious, and I choose not to waste mine
We’re both commenting on a thread about the value of time against about three seconds of scrolling. It’s safe to say nobody here, myself included, is particularly constrained in terms of time and energy.
At the risk of stating the obvious, you wrote that reply to gp ctenb's comment _after_ he already gave up on the article and not _before_. You'd have to tell him before he considered reading the article for it to be more analogous to The Marshmallow Test. In other words, he can't "fail" your Marshmallow Test if you never set up the proper conditions for the test.
>It’s not a random article. It’s been upvoted to the HN front page.
Yes, being on the front page is one potential signal of quality but HN audience is diverse in reading preferences.
Because you happen to like this article and the front page upvotes confirms your bias, I just want to go meta and point out how some others on HN would dislike this type of "long-form human interest" article. My previous comments about that
This thread's article is not a fast-moving explanation about undersea cable logistics (e.g. Wendover Productions style). Instead, it frames the narrative around people such as Mitsuyoshi Hirai with long biographical sentences such as this:
>, Hirai’s mind leapt to what would come next: a tsunami.
Hirai feared these waves more than most people. He had grown up hearing the story of how one afternoon in 1923, his aunt felt the ground shake, swept up her two-year-old brother, and sprinted uphill to the cemetery, narrowly escaping floods and fires that killed over 100,000 people. That child became Hirai’s father, so he owed his existence to his aunt’s quick thinking.
[...]
Hirai’s career path is characteristic in its circuitousness. Growing up in the 1960s in the industrial city of Yokosuka, just down the Miura Peninsula from the Ocean Link’s port in Yokohama, he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife. Six years later, his English proficiency got him called back to KDDI headquarters to help design Ocean Link for KCS, a KDDI subsidiary.
A lot of readers prefer not to slog through text like that if they're really just interested in the undersea cables. It's not just the dynamic sliding photos that would dissuade potential readers to finish the article but the style of writing itself.
EDIT reply to >Lots of people don’t like dense books either.
Well, this subthread you replied to was literally complaining, ">, since the information density is too low"
> lot of readers prefer not to slog through text like that
Sure? Lots of people don’t like dense books either. That’s fine. It’s weird that it prompts long-form complaint comments, but I admit that’s more fun than reading.
I didn't downvote but reading an unknown article with unknown or non-existent payoff is not the same premise as The Marshmallow Test because the Stanford experiment explicitly specifies the "reward" upfront: ">, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time."
In contrast, reading unfamiliar articles to _maybe_ get a "reward" is a Bayesian Probability. As the one reads each sentence that's not engaging, the expectation that there might be a "reward" at the end is tainted by the fact that most long articles in the past that reader forced themselves to finish didn't present a worthwhile reward at the end.
Now, if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end of the long article before the reader started it, then the test of that patience would be closer to The Marshmallow test.