that sentence is semantically dense and grammatically complicated. I have to put in some work to break it down into noun phrases and such and figure out how it fits together. requiring cognitive work of potential readers before they’ve even decided if they want to read your thing is extremely anti-memetic
Sorry, but I call bullshit on this being a problem for you, or any other LW reader.
Now you are probably right that if you take the general population, for a significant number of people parsing anything but the simplest grammatical structures is going to impart noticeable extra cognitive load, lowering overall memetic fitness.
So if you are worried about someone bouncing off the title because of its grammatical complexity, you better also write the article with simple grammar (and simple content). Are there situations where your main goal is to reach as many people as possible? Sure, but for that you probably want to optimize both the title and content with that in mind. And at this point what you are doing is probably more like “political communication” than “writing something for like-minded people”.
the tone of it sounds like a dry academic paper. those are typically not very fun to read. it signals that this will also not be fun to read
For me it signals more positive things like seriousness and better epistemics[1], but you probably have a point that there is space to signal the tone of the article in the title. Still, I don’t think reducing its information density is the right way to do it.
Well, on blog posts at least. On actual academic papers everyone is expected to write in a serious sounding academic style, so there is much less signal there.
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.)
Sorry, but I call bullshit on this being a problem for you, or any other LW reader.
Now you are probably right that if you take the general population, for a significant number of people parsing anything but the simplest grammatical structures is going to impart noticeable extra cognitive load, lowering overall memetic fitness.
But as the post outlined, we are not optimizing for the number clicks, we are optimizing for something like P(loves article|clicked). See also https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vidXh2DJtnqH5ysrZ/a-blog-post-is-a-very-long-and-complex-search-query-to-find
So if you are worried about someone bouncing off the title because of its grammatical complexity, you better also write the article with simple grammar (and simple content). Are there situations where your main goal is to reach as many people as possible? Sure, but for that you probably want to optimize both the title and content with that in mind. And at this point what you are doing is probably more like “political communication” than “writing something for like-minded people”.
For me it signals more positive things like seriousness and better epistemics[1], but you probably have a point that there is space to signal the tone of the article in the title. Still, I don’t think reducing its information density is the right way to do it.
Well, on blog posts at least. On actual academic papers everyone is expected to write in a serious sounding academic style, so there is much less signal there.
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.