Huh, the chapters thing doesn’t feel especially sad to me. Or, it’s sad in the sense that it’d be better if all humans were immune to all disease and could fly and twice as smart, but given the general shape of the world and our brains, it seems reasonable to take into consideration…
1) working memory
2) how much time people have to read a thing at a time
3) expectations about how long a given thing will take
Like, if I start reading a blogpost, I expect it to be blogpost length, and that’s how much time I’m budgeting for it. If it’s longer than blogpost length, then once I run out of time I start thinking “okay, is this worth putting in the effort to remember to read later, and to remember where I was when I left off, or to postpone whatever I was going to do next instead of finishing it?”
Designing a post to accomodate seems quite reasonable to me.
((Again, assuming this is all stuff Eliezer knows and generally takes into account, and that the issue here was that this post was coming out of the “off hours bucket”))
A thing that feels sad to me (in the vein of chapter sections being necessary): the fact that the majority of all long form content that I and anybody I know takes in, is SSC, WaitButWhy, and John Oliver—the only stuff where the hedonic hit rate is at least once per paragraph/breath. I can’t remember the last time I read a book (yes I can, it was 4 months ago when I read InEq in a single sitting. But I really can’t remember before that.).
I get the sense that in the past many people read books, and now I know very few people who read whole books. I remember as a teenager I used to read many non-fiction books. I have maybe read one a year for the past three years.
Quick Googling says that your experience was below average as of a few years ago, with the median person reading six books, 72 percent reading at least one, 60 percent reading at least one fiction and 60 percent reading at least one non-fiction, so one per year is well below the implied mean. So this seems like a ‘local’ problem. I’d definitely call it a problem, and consider myself to be reading far fewer full books than I should versus too much other stuff (and to not be writing enough reviews even of the ones I do read).
Reviews are definitely worthwhile, as are quote blogs like this one. The more books you review and quote, the more books we can add to common knowledge (because the reviews/quotes recommend them to enough people that the contents of the book catch on with them and they use them and recommend them to other people and so on) and the fewer books we have to read (because they either can be distilled to a review/series of quotes or are found to be not worth reading).
As for actually reading, take a book with you on your commute if your commute doesn’t involve driving, and leave another in the bathroom.
(The people who read the most of anyone I know share a certain health issue with Martin Luther, and that’s why they read so much.)
Having it be about providing bookmarks makes me feel a little better, I guess? Although ‘keep the tab open until later even on a phone’ seems perfectly reasonable. And you can use the scroll bar’s size to quickly estimate length and get an alert that it might be long (comments can mess with this a little, but it’s quick to check for rough length when you get worried).
I agree that expecting a 10k word thing to be harder to get through than a 2k thing, and therefore read less, isn’t sad, but that we’re clearly doing too little long-form due to the incentives on the modern internet (and the karma system here makes this worse).
Although ‘keep the tab open until later even on a phone’ seems perfectly reasonable
Dunno. I regularly just close my browser completely.
I’m super pro long-form stuff, but longform stuff still should be optimized for being longform. A 10k blogpost without sections suffers from even being able to find/trust where you left off, even if you’re just looking for comments)
Huh, the chapters thing doesn’t feel especially sad to me. Or, it’s sad in the sense that it’d be better if all humans were immune to all disease and could fly and twice as smart, but given the general shape of the world and our brains, it seems reasonable to take into consideration…
1) working memory
2) how much time people have to read a thing at a time
3) expectations about how long a given thing will take
Like, if I start reading a blogpost, I expect it to be blogpost length, and that’s how much time I’m budgeting for it. If it’s longer than blogpost length, then once I run out of time I start thinking “okay, is this worth putting in the effort to remember to read later, and to remember where I was when I left off, or to postpone whatever I was going to do next instead of finishing it?”
Designing a post to accomodate seems quite reasonable to me.
(See also Scott’s post on writing nonfiction)
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/
((Again, assuming this is all stuff Eliezer knows and generally takes into account, and that the issue here was that this post was coming out of the “off hours bucket”))
A thing that feels sad to me (in the vein of chapter sections being necessary): the fact that the majority of all long form content that I and anybody I know takes in, is SSC, WaitButWhy, and John Oliver—the only stuff where the hedonic hit rate is at least once per paragraph/breath. I can’t remember the last time I read a book (yes I can, it was 4 months ago when I read InEq in a single sitting. But I really can’t remember before that.).
I get the sense that in the past many people read books, and now I know very few people who read whole books. I remember as a teenager I used to read many non-fiction books. I have maybe read one a year for the past three years.
Quick Googling says that your experience was below average as of a few years ago, with the median person reading six books, 72 percent reading at least one, 60 percent reading at least one fiction and 60 percent reading at least one non-fiction, so one per year is well below the implied mean. So this seems like a ‘local’ problem. I’d definitely call it a problem, and consider myself to be reading far fewer full books than I should versus too much other stuff (and to not be writing enough reviews even of the ones I do read).
Reviews are definitely worthwhile, as are quote blogs like this one. The more books you review and quote, the more books we can add to common knowledge (because the reviews/quotes recommend them to enough people that the contents of the book catch on with them and they use them and recommend them to other people and so on) and the fewer books we have to read (because they either can be distilled to a review/series of quotes or are found to be not worth reading).
As for actually reading, take a book with you on your commute if your commute doesn’t involve driving, and leave another in the bathroom.
(The people who read the most of anyone I know share a certain health issue with Martin Luther, and that’s why they read so much.)
Having it be about providing bookmarks makes me feel a little better, I guess? Although ‘keep the tab open until later even on a phone’ seems perfectly reasonable. And you can use the scroll bar’s size to quickly estimate length and get an alert that it might be long (comments can mess with this a little, but it’s quick to check for rough length when you get worried).
I agree that expecting a 10k word thing to be harder to get through than a 2k thing, and therefore read less, isn’t sad, but that we’re clearly doing too little long-form due to the incentives on the modern internet (and the karma system here makes this worse).
Dunno. I regularly just close my browser completely.
I’m super pro long-form stuff, but longform stuff still should be optimized for being longform. A 10k blogpost without sections suffers from even being able to find/trust where you left off, even if you’re just looking for comments)