Sorry, but I call bullshit on this being a problem for you, or any other LW reader.
What? I am telling you it is. Not in the sense that I can’t parse it, but in the sense that I notice the cognitive effort involved, and preferentially read things that take less cognitive effort (all else equal, of course). If I’m skimming a bunch of titles and trying to pick which thing to read, the difference between titles that lodge their meaning into my brain as soon as my eyes fall on them vs. titles that take an extra couple seconds to parse is going to matter. (Similarly, I prefer Cooking For Engineers recipe layouts to recipe blogs that require me to extract the instructions from longer-form text—not that I can’t do that, but I don’t prefer to.)
Maybe this means you don’t want me to read your post! But I don’t think that’s right. Titles are usually the most optimized-for-memeticness part of a post; I typically assume that the rest of it will be denser, and that’s fine—if I’m reading your post I am probably sold on being interested in what you’re saying. (Still better all things equal to make stuff easier to parse, when that doesn’t trade off against other desiderata.)
What? I am telling you it is. Not in the sense that I can’t parse it, but in the sense that I notice the cognitive effort involved, and preferentially read things that take less cognitive effort (all else equal, of course). If I’m skimming a bunch of titles and trying to pick which thing to read, the difference between titles that lodge their meaning into my brain as soon as my eyes fall on them vs. titles that take an extra couple seconds to parse is going to matter. (Similarly, I prefer Cooking For Engineers recipe layouts to recipe blogs that require me to extract the instructions from longer-form text—not that I can’t do that, but I don’t prefer to.)
Maybe this means you don’t want me to read your post! But I don’t think that’s right. Titles are usually the most optimized-for-memeticness part of a post; I typically assume that the rest of it will be denser, and that’s fine—if I’m reading your post I am probably sold on being interested in what you’re saying. (Still better all things equal to make stuff easier to parse, when that doesn’t trade off against other desiderata.)
Sorry, no offense meant, I am just genuinely surprised. But I believe you now, I guess our experiences are just very different in this regard.