Yeah, the TL;DR thing really grates on my nerves. Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, and instead need it condensed to a list appropriate for Twitter? Is there really no other value in the entire essay other than the list items themselves?
For me, the TL;DR summary helps me get the gist of the article and then decide whether I should read the whole thing or not.
If I just go ahead and read, and after 1200 words, the author promotes inhaling magnet dust or sleeping 4 hours each night as a way to improve intelligence, the entire article is a complete waste of time and I will be annoyed.
The summary, as presented here, firmly places the article in my "read when I get home" queue.
Go read How to Read a Book. The second level of reading is about skimming, picking up the general point of something, then deciding if it's worth a careful, analytical (and perhaps synoptic) reading. I don't think this article deserves it, so I didn't give it the full time to read everything, and since I've read other stuff in this area before, I think the bullet points really do sum it up.
The article focuses on the motivations behind these advices and how to apply them in practice. A big part of thevalue of the article comes from this and your bullet list fails to account for that.
Are we so not-interested in other things that we take several other articles' worth in time to read a single one, when a concise summary could get the point across just as well?
Why stop at using 4500 words? Why not put it in an hour-long Youtube video, and not provide a description / transcription?
I had absolutely zero idea what TL;DR meant until I saw it here and looked it up. I agree with you, this article was extremely well-written and I feel that just summarizing the key points doesn't really help you to understand what the author was trying to convey. It's unfortunate that we've trained ourselves as a society to participate in info-snacking (gorging ourselves on as many tiny bits of info as possible). This is why there's so much short-form content. As opposed to circulating great content like this article (and subsequently discussing it), we go out of our way to publish less-circumstantial lists ad nausea that make us feel like we've done/learned something.
Ultimately, you will be the only person capable of deciding whether a particular thing was worth your time or not, and you can only decide that in hindsight, having experienced it. The finest accumulation of the greatest reviews of a work will not make up for the fact that you might glean some valuable tidbit from it that nobody else noticed.
You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose. Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject?
For example: I'm sitting here thinking about my argument and wondering if I'm really just full of shit, but then I suddenly remembered a bit of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", where Feynman talks about some of his experiences in Brazil, and how the teaching at the time resulted in students that had memorized everything but understood very little.
And it strikes me that this relatively recent addiction to summaries is very similar to that kind of Brazilian education.
You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. You seem to be arguing against something nobody (certainly not me) said.
We all know that only by actually reading something will you know if it was worth the effort. The problem is that, for any non-trivial subject, there is more material available, and more material being generated, than anyone can cover in endless lifetimes.
Some form of curation is needed just to even know what exists, let alone to know what's worth reading.
Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject?
Where does this false choice come from? I do not want to memorize a pile of summaries, and it's in fact impossible to consume a complete discourse on a (non-trivial) subject. Those are not the only options.
What I want are some heuristics to help guide me on what to read. Summaries are one tool; recommendations are another. HN discussion threads yet one more. Few people would pretend that any of these substitute for reading the source material.
I'll grant that there are people who consume summaries as a ploy to feign erudition, but honestly I don't think that's the motivation on HN when people ask for a tl;dr.
In fact, if someone were to try to read everything and not use summaries, etc. as a guide they would end up with very little understanding because, odds are, they would be consuming a fair amount of shoddy material to the exclusion of better content.
An interesting comparison. Largely accurate, I think, but I do want to make a counter-point:
reading a summary != memorization
The problem with students who only memorize is that they are incapable of creation. They can answer a set of questions, but not use what they know to respond to something new. A summary, in the best cases (far from always achieved, of course), is all that is needed to get a thinking brain from zero to the conclusions the full text would bring you to. Any gaps can be logically deduced and filled through mental effort, ideally more quickly than it could be told. Especially if one already has experience in the area.
Memorization, meanwhile, creates gaps, and provides no tools to fill them.
I'm not sure about the counter-point. I'm trying to think of the cases where I might agree, and about the only one I can think of is the summaries of papers in scientific journals, where the reader is already pretty familiar with that specific subject. (And I'm really undecided about even that.)
I think context -- all of the nuances and subtleties and justifications and reasonings surrounding a statement -- is pretty important, and without that context, you still end up with gaps. They're just, maybe, slightly different gaps than you get from memorization.
I tried to spring a trap on some unsuspecting HN'r downthread to make this point. If you just take the bullet points -- say, "2. Challenge yourself" -- by themselves, then you miss out on the point that repeatedly doing the same challenging activity doesn't get the desired result. And if you get that point by reading some of the comments here, then you might miss out on why it's important to take on different challenges, and therefore what kind of challenges would be most beneficial. And, if you skim the article, you might miss out on the author's justifications for these suggestions in the first place, which would leave you stumped if someone asked you why novelty mattered.
It's true that you could go back and fill in these gaps, or possibly even derive answers to them on your own, but if you're going to expect to do that, why not just read the thing in its entirety to begin with?
Why only scientific journals, and not scientific blog posts? Or anything of a technical nature, really? The only major differences there are degrees of implied legitimacy based on the source. And once you've reached "anything technical", is art technical? Opinion with supporting arguments? An enormous amount of HN news falls into that category.
For this one in particular, I'm pretty familiar with the recommendations - reading the article was generally a waste of time, though I admit it was well made. The main useful chunk to me was the news of supporting studies, the link to multimodal techniques, and the list itself, as I've read everything else a dozen other places. As can be said, likely, for many other people who have actually researched intelligence-improving techniques.
I'll wrap up with an anecdote, as that's all that this line of debate can really sustain: for this article, the list really did tell me the most important parts. I would have found the other info eventually, and I have no urgent need for it, so not finding it here by skipping the article wouldn't have significantly changed anything for me.
> I think context -- all of the nuances and subtleties and justifications and reasonings surrounding a statement -- is pretty important, and without that context, you still end up with gaps. They're just, maybe, slightly different gaps than you get from memorization.
And indeed the larger problem is that sometimes summaries take on a life of their own, independent of the context which grounded them.
Not every summary is necessarily a TL;DR. Even for the most diligent reader, a cogent explanation of what exactly the author believes to be the most important information can help clarify and distill knowledge.
Its called an abstract and I'm glad that you can't publish any peer reviewed science paper without it. You can only read a mind blogging tiny fraction of all the information out there. Even in a narrow field of specialization its hard to read everything relevant.
Whats better? Reading 10 articles in depth or reading 9 articles in depth and 10 abstracts? I'm pretty sure, the latter is better for point 4.
I really wish, abstracts where standard for longer online posts. Maybe, there should be a field for abstracts in the HN submission form.
In fact that exact strategy is specifically addressed in the article. The answer is yes, but only until you get good at it. Then you need to move on to something else.
I wanted to see if I could hook anyone into responding who hadn't bothered to read the whole article, because they read the summary points instead. I was hoping to make a point in a sneaky, underhanded way.
If somebody were to have read only the summary points and agreed with your post, you would have caught somebody who misunderstood the article because they didn't read it...but how do you plan to "hook" the people that skim articles and extract the summary points themselves? Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well?
I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both.
> Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well?
Yep! The only distinction between skimming and reading a summary is that skimming at least gives you the opportunity to spot something interesting, stop, and read it fully.
I also wouldn't confuse speed-reading with skimming, so long as the speed-reading gleaned as much from the text as slower reading would.
> I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both.
I disagree. I think that they are dangerous tools -- useful occasionally, but too easy to abuse. I'm being more vocal about it nowadays because "TL:DR" has recently become a "thing", and I'm concerned that larger numbers of people seem to be considering it acceptable to skip reading a 10-minute article in favor of reading a 10-second summary of it. Rather than debate that here though, I'd just point to my comments elsewhere on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563051
1. Seek Novelty
2. Challenge Yourself
3. Think Creatively
4. Do Things The Hard Way
5. Network