Depends on the comment. Mine are almost all rewrites, so anything that’s not a short answer to a simple factual question takes me at least a couple of minutes. The upper bound is probably ≈2 hours.
If I remember rightly, this one took almost that long, and would’ve taken longer if I’d tried to polish it and not have it end in disjointed bullet points. There are quite a few reasons why that comment was so time-consuming: it was lengthy; it was a response to criticism, so I wanted to make it very obviously correct; I wanted to refer to lots of examples and sources, which means deciding which bits of which sources to quote, and hitting up Google & Wikipedia; I wanted to cover quite a lot of ground so I had to spend more time than usual squeezing out verbiage; and I had to stop & think periodically to check everything I was saying came together coherently.
Sometimes I write a few paragraphs, realize I’ve written myself into a corner, then decide to tear everything down and start over from a different angle. (Or I decide it’s not worth the effort and refrain from saying anything.) That happened with this comment, so it wound up taking something like an hour.
This comment, by contrast, has only needed about half an hour to write because it’s mostly based on introspection, isn’t that long, isn’t communicating anything complex, won’t be controversial, isn’t optimized for transparency, and turns out not to have needed any full-scale rewrites.
I also think I’m a slow writer by LW standards. (Unsurprisingly?)
Depends on the comment. Mine are almost all rewrites, so anything that’s not a short answer to a simple factual question takes me at least a couple of minutes. The upper bound is probably ≈2 hours.
If I remember rightly, this one took almost that long, and would’ve taken longer if I’d tried to polish it and not have it end in disjointed bullet points. There are quite a few reasons why that comment was so time-consuming: it was lengthy; it was a response to criticism, so I wanted to make it very obviously correct; I wanted to refer to lots of examples and sources, which means deciding which bits of which sources to quote, and hitting up Google & Wikipedia; I wanted to cover quite a lot of ground so I had to spend more time than usual squeezing out verbiage; and I had to stop & think periodically to check everything I was saying came together coherently.
Sometimes I write a few paragraphs, realize I’ve written myself into a corner, then decide to tear everything down and start over from a different angle. (Or I decide it’s not worth the effort and refrain from saying anything.) That happened with this comment, so it wound up taking something like an hour.
This comment, by contrast, has only needed about half an hour to write because it’s mostly based on introspection, isn’t that long, isn’t communicating anything complex, won’t be controversial, isn’t optimized for transparency, and turns out not to have needed any full-scale rewrites.
I also think I’m a slow writer by LW standards. (Unsurprisingly?)