I think this can be worse than ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge coupled with the confidence that comes from thinking you understand something you've never actually encountered. These people walk around armed with headlines masquerading as insights, ready to deploy half-digested talking points in conversations that require actual thought. They've become human echo chambers, amplifying signals they never bothered to decode.
This is such a good summary of what I feel like I've been observing (including in myself) for the last 15 years or so
I have thought of this as knowing _about_ things, as opposed to knowing things, and not having the self-awareness to be able to differentiate between the two.
I've seen this most notably in a former coworker who enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially when the rest of the team was hard at work, but that was another point of contention entirely). He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points, but if you asked him about second-order effects, or implicit simplifying assumptions, or how X from the video would be different if Y and Z were different, it was obvious how surface-level his "understanding" was.
I just finished up some freelance (hardware/embedded software) where I had to talk to a “software” engineer who was sort of the “lead”. Every time we hit an interface problem he would say “if you don’t understand the error feel free to use ChatGPT”. Dude it’s bare metal embedded software I WROTE the error. Also, telling someone that was hired because of their expertise to chatgpt something is crazy insulting.
It was such a strange interaction - like this guy who thought he knew everything because he could leverage AI and anyone not doing that instantly was wasting their time. People are already offloading having a single thought to AI and then turning around and acting like they know everything because they have access to this tool.
Also weird to watch someone in the web-sphere act like AIs knowledge and understanding is the same for all fields because their field was so heavily trained on. No, AI will not know the answer for this one register in this microcontroller correctly or understand a hardware errata for this device or fully understand the pin choices I made on the device and the system consequences of those choices.
There is definitely a truth to it. And then there's also this increasingly complex world that you can not possibly deeply know in all important ways, where I believe having ambient knowledge about a lot of things really does useful stuff.
Donald Rumsfeld didn't do much good during his life, but this quote by him lives in my head rent free like the kids say:
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.
My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.
Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.
If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
I used to try services like Blinkist. Did anyone have similar experience as I had: I simply couldn't remember what I read, let alone what I listened to. The summaries, despite being reasonably detailed and having key points and representative examples, were still bland and boring, to the point that they left little impression on me.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but those who think humans walking around armed with half an understanding and making claims about reality is a recent thing would, on face, seem naive to thousands of years of history. Nearly every scientist was persecuted in their time (worse as you go further back in time) because the entire world thought they knew better. Wouldn’t you consider climate exchange advocates to be in an echo chamber? What about Nazis, or towns with high klan membership? Were they not living in their own echo chambers too? Every “movement” and belief system is a de facto echo chamber; no one has a meeting to promote their ideals by spending the entire time sharing contrary facts. In fact, wouldn’t it have been even worse the further you go back in time because contrary information was primarily distributed by singular people? People weren’t exposed to thousands of contradictory facts that went against their beliefs; they just ignored what Tommy had to say because they knew better. They had their one set of facts they believed and judged whether what another person said was truth mostly by character and how it aligned with their beliefs, and rarely because it was truth. This is still true today. Change only came as the number of people they encountered who were saying the same thing increased; again, not because they were right, but because they were saying the same thing. Young Margret had no way of calculating the trajectories of planets or evaluating the science of gravity; she just had to trust others explanations of how things we can plainly see are the result mystical magical forces. The only thing that has changed is the number of people we are exposed to who are saying the same things, right or wrong, but what hasn’t changed is the number of people who were believed things and repeated them…right and wrong.
Around 10 years ago, I learned to root out people who read reddit based on this principle. My thought at the time was the site made you feel informed. But everyone knew same facts leading to the same incomplete picture and having the same attitude problem of constantly correcting people. “Well actually..” and “that’s misinformation” were thrown around a lot on reddit and the lazy readers end up copying that bad behavior IRL
. But the confidence was high and the picture incomplete. And the worst part of it all, the behaviour was
There's too much information in the modern world to function without some degree of compression.
Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.
If someone tells me they did a scientific study that proves that changing the color of my phone background will save some percentage of my battery life per day, should I spend the time to reproduce this experience without compression, or should I take this knowledge and use it to improve my life as I move forward?
Sometimes it is of course dangerous to act on the "compressed data", you need to unpack it to either understand it or evaluate its truthfulness, but just knowing that doesn't magically grant you the time to uncompress all the data you receive, you plainly couldn't function in modern society that way.
Instead we develop heuristics about which information we accept at the summary level and which we need to delve into more deeply. The alternative is never accomplishing anything because you're too busy re-doing all of human history.
> Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.
I wouldn't call learning calculus the compression of inventing calculus, any more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel. There's no continuing value in reinventing calculus or rewriting the same novel, but there is continuing value in learning calculus and reading the novel. Compression culture is refusing to do any work, demanding instead a mere summary of calculus or a novel. If you go to class for hours every week, read the calculus textbook all the way through, and do the homework, I wouldn't call that "compression" in the terminology of the article author. On the other hand, if you merely have a summary of calculus, you've actually learned nothing. You can maybe fake your way through a conversation about calc, sound intelligent without being intelligent, at least until someone forces you to do a calc problem and reveals your sham.
I think another example of "compression" is car maintenance. Either you learn all there is to your engine, or you follow the manufacturer recommendations and follow the schedule.
Sure, it is better to really know your engine, and you probably know someone who will tell you they know better than the schedule, and sometimes, they do. But maybe you have other things to do than to become a mechanic, so you just follow the schedule. It will cost you more, and maybe you could get a bit more longevity or performance by doing things your way, but it frees you for other things that may be more valuable to you than your car.
Its interesting, to me anyway, that most people seem to be in agreement that the core problem is that there's too much information in the world. But the common solution from a tech perspective, and downstream to broader culture by default, seems to be to summarise. So that we can digest more (arguably just surface level) information with the same amount of time. Rather than just choosing what you engage in more consciously. Abundance of everything seems to win.
Kinda like how, particularly since Steam, gamers just accumulate more and more games without actually playing most of them at all. Just because its there doesnt mean you need to have it.
I think there is a spectrum of compression here, so I find myself agreeing with your overall point but with a caveat. Putting aside "experiences" - travel or emotion - for transmitting information, the level of "desired compression" is based on the background knowledge the receiver brings, and what they consider to be the irrelevant bits.
I will say on historical mathematics - reading the greats shows you the road traveled, and often one realizes the unexplored paths along the way, that lead to brand new continents. This may not be as relevant if one is not trying to innovate.
I would also say reading Newton as a "first book" is positively counter-productive to learning Calculus in high school.
Up until maybe the 17th century it was at least possible for a single brilliant, educated person to know the entirety of knowledge in Western civilization. We're way past that now.
It's a little weird that, on the one hand, nobody much wants to read anything long, and on the other, hours long podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and one-person YouTube videos on esoteric subjects are all quite popular. There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing.
> Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue.
Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.
Although I thought the writer put forward an interesting point, ironically it felt like parts of the writing were overly flowery and repetitive. The paragraphs of similar metaphors got old quickly and started to feel GPT-like.
I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
I like this writing style. I like variety in the things I read. Not everything has to be optimized for efficiency, not everyone thinks like a developer or engineer. I agree with the second half of your comment though, most issues are "in the gray areas", not black/white
Totally agree. Editors were used by publishers for a reason, and they very often managed to cut down texts by significant amounts. Most bloggers could use an editor that would make their writing more snappy. The same goes for many of the nowadays popular bestseller non-fiction books that are very clearly stuffed with repetitive writing and random anecdotes to hit some page limit.
On one hand there's the lack of ability to process nuance, on the other there's nearly content free blathering for length. Most everything these days is 5 times as long as it needs to be because there's only that much actual information, not for lack of attention.
>And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression.
Here's the example:
* the productive confusion...
* the generative power ...
* the transformative potential ...
The author did not add anything, they just said the same thing three different ways instead of one. It continues throughout the essay.
The reason everything is tl;dr is that it's too long and not worth reading, it's never worth reading. Write properly. Say the most important things at the top that cover your topic entirely and then go into further depth. If it's worth reading people will read it, if it's not they won't.
Fortunately, this isn't sustainable. It's now so trivial to generate as much verbosity as you want with an LLM, verbosity is no longer going to be seen as in indicator of quality or time spent.
The other side of this argument is that we're constantly fed lots of extraneous information along with the actual interesting content. The point about listening to the storyteller is completely valid, but that story teller wasn't full of advertisements, links to other stories or entreaties to smash a like button.
To an extent we're becoming wired to skim content because that content has been so deeply interleaved with items that aren't just extraneous, they're not even from the storyteller. I'd suggest this capability is even a kind of survival skill, akin to not only being able to spot motion in a dense jungle but to also instinctively focus on certain kinds of motion.
There are books and post that we should sit down and read for hours and hours, and even reread it from time to time.
There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.
Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
I have never heard the term “compression culture” before, but speaking as a human experiencing the world in 2025 the tendency to compress things is certainly understandable. There is a contradiction or a tension betweem me as a worker and me as a consumer. Both of which have an insatiable apetite for my time. I don’t see how anyone can blame people for demanding brevity when time is the most precious resource we have any autonomy over.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a summary before committing to reading a book. There are just too many books. In fact this article mentions a bunch of books and summarizes them inline. Good. Gives me more information on whether I should read those books
One of the most rewarding genres for me is the diary / journal, which I think is essentially the exact opposite of the “give me the Wikipedia summary of facts” approach. The typical journal is filled with a ton of information about what the author ate, whom he met, what various activities he did that day, etc. - and for this reason I find it infinitely more historically insightful than a nonfiction summary of facts book.
Writing a journal used to be more of a common thing that educated people did, but nowadays I guess social media is too big of a distraction…not the mention the question of whether anyone would read a journal as opposed to the simplified sloganeered book public figures typically put out today.
For some specific recommendations: I am about halfway through Harry Kessler’s 1890-1915 journals, and I just started George H. W. Bush’s journal on his time in China. Both are pretty insightful so far.
haven't noticed compression culture to be honest, but if i may take a second to be stupid and uninteresting myself: i find nothing more stupid and uninteresting than the enormous volume of talking about talking that's done. this is a post about replies to a post about talking about a book, which is probably talking about talking, too. in and of itself that's fine, the problem is that feels like ninety percent of writing.
> -- eyes darting frantically across screens like a rat in a maze searching for the cheese of instant gratification.
I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.
Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.
HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.
This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.
Compression is fine for consuming information. But people need to be both consuming and generating knowledge in order to understand concepts beyond summary points.
Generating knowledge is an exercise in compression. It is helpful to deliver insights to readers. Consuming knowledge is important to keep your pulse in your field. Only consuming leads can create an illusion of understanding but no real usable knowledge that can provide value to the community.
The issue is that we live in an information glut and one can now live a life spending all their time consuming, but never creating for themselves.
I totally get the sentiment but I also see the flip side of it.
I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.
I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.
I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
The author doesn't touch upon it here, but you can compress experiences along two axes: time, or what I'll call depth. This second type of compression drives the proliferation of overly long TV shows, documentaries, and podcasts. Most of these works are not meant to be watched or listened to alone, but instead present information of limited depth so people can digest them (or at least grasp them at surface level) using only a portion of their attention while they spend the other portion on something else.
You may be spending more time on these kinds of things, but I would argue you're really not much better off than the person reading the headline, and at least giving it their full attention for a tiny bit of time.
I wonder if there is some conservation of effort / "vibe matching" at play. The classic books which another commenter mentioned probably had a lot of thought put into the choices made in each sentence, while shows/YouTube videos/cooking articles etc. today definitely have less effort per second given the amount of filler.
If the creator has "diluted" the amount of thought and information per unit content I don't see why it shouldn't be compressed to reach previous "densities".
I think it's okay if not taken to extreme. There's a difference between writing a book review and writing a tweet. It's hard to say much in a tweet, but I'm in favor of people writing book reviews.
Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest.
A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.
> For centuries, communities gathered around the fire to hear the same saga recited for the hundredth time. The listeners didn't grow impatient with the familiar opening formulas, the elaborate genealogies, the detailed descriptions of weapons and weather.
I generally agree with the broad strokes of this post, but this description gives me pause. How do we know that listeners didn't grow impatient? Though I suppose it would take a good deal of compression to answer this :)
Thanks. I came to the a similar realization after trying Blinkist (book summaries) a few years ago. The summaries is no real substitute for reading the whole book.
I don't think that it's that big a deal. It's something that has been said for many generations. Each generation complains that our art has been "lost," by folks without the patience to learn it, etc. In my day, we complained about Cliffs' Notes, and calculators in the classroom.
I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff.
I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well.
She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart.
I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.
[+] [-] ashwinsundar|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jcalx|8 months ago|reply
I've seen this most notably in a former coworker who enjoyed watching YouTube videos (especially when the rest of the team was hard at work, but that was another point of contention entirely). He thought himself very knowledgeable on various topics because he could readily regurgitate talking points, but if you asked him about second-order effects, or implicit simplifying assumptions, or how X from the video would be different if Y and Z were different, it was obvious how surface-level his "understanding" was.
[+] [-] polalavik|8 months ago|reply
It was such a strange interaction - like this guy who thought he knew everything because he could leverage AI and anyone not doing that instantly was wasting their time. People are already offloading having a single thought to AI and then turning around and acting like they know everything because they have access to this tool.
Also weird to watch someone in the web-sphere act like AIs knowledge and understanding is the same for all fields because their field was so heavily trained on. No, AI will not know the answer for this one register in this microcontroller correctly or understand a hardware errata for this device or fully understand the pin choices I made on the device and the system consequences of those choices.
[+] [-] garciasn|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jstummbillig|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] theshrike79|8 months ago|reply
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.
My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.
Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.
If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
[+] [-] paleotrope|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] darkwater|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] g9yuayon|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] benjaminclauss|8 months ago|reply
1. introduction to epistemic humility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_humility
Your knowledge is limited and fallible. Other people may know things you don’t. Reality is complex.
Though, it makes any political discussions difficult.
2. first principles thinking
3. Zettelkasten note-taking
What is a web browser? What is HTTP? What is an IP address? Link on and on IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
[+] [-] therealpygon|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] 0points|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] goalieca|8 months ago|reply
. But the confidence was high and the picture incomplete. And the worst part of it all, the behaviour was
[+] [-] twiclo|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] wredcoll|8 months ago|reply
Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.
If someone tells me they did a scientific study that proves that changing the color of my phone background will save some percentage of my battery life per day, should I spend the time to reproduce this experience without compression, or should I take this knowledge and use it to improve my life as I move forward?
Sometimes it is of course dangerous to act on the "compressed data", you need to unpack it to either understand it or evaluate its truthfulness, but just knowing that doesn't magically grant you the time to uncompress all the data you receive, you plainly couldn't function in modern society that way.
Instead we develop heuristics about which information we accept at the summary level and which we need to delve into more deeply. The alternative is never accomplishing anything because you're too busy re-doing all of human history.
[+] [-] lapcat|8 months ago|reply
I wouldn't call learning calculus the compression of inventing calculus, any more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel. There's no continuing value in reinventing calculus or rewriting the same novel, but there is continuing value in learning calculus and reading the novel. Compression culture is refusing to do any work, demanding instead a mere summary of calculus or a novel. If you go to class for hours every week, read the calculus textbook all the way through, and do the homework, I wouldn't call that "compression" in the terminology of the article author. On the other hand, if you merely have a summary of calculus, you've actually learned nothing. You can maybe fake your way through a conversation about calc, sound intelligent without being intelligent, at least until someone forces you to do a calc problem and reveals your sham.
[+] [-] GuB-42|8 months ago|reply
Sure, it is better to really know your engine, and you probably know someone who will tell you they know better than the schedule, and sometimes, they do. But maybe you have other things to do than to become a mechanic, so you just follow the schedule. It will cost you more, and maybe you could get a bit more longevity or performance by doing things your way, but it frees you for other things that may be more valuable to you than your car.
[+] [-] cal_dent|8 months ago|reply
Kinda like how, particularly since Steam, gamers just accumulate more and more games without actually playing most of them at all. Just because its there doesnt mean you need to have it.
[+] [-] dkural|8 months ago|reply
I will say on historical mathematics - reading the greats shows you the road traveled, and often one realizes the unexplored paths along the way, that lead to brand new continents. This may not be as relevant if one is not trying to innovate.
I would also say reading Newton as a "first book" is positively counter-productive to learning Calculus in high school.
[+] [-] theshrike79|8 months ago|reply
You just had to be rich enough to not have to work for a living so you could just learn and study all the time.
But it's been a long time since that was possible.
[+] [-] nradov|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] roywiggins|8 months ago|reply
> Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue.
Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.
[+] [-] Liftyee|8 months ago|reply
I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
[+] [-] ashwinsundar|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] matusp|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|8 months ago|reply
>And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression.
Here's the example:
* the productive confusion...
* the generative power ...
* the transformative potential ...
The author did not add anything, they just said the same thing three different ways instead of one. It continues throughout the essay.
The reason everything is tl;dr is that it's too long and not worth reading, it's never worth reading. Write properly. Say the most important things at the top that cover your topic entirely and then go into further depth. If it's worth reading people will read it, if it's not they won't.
[+] [-] raincole|8 months ago|reply
The opposite is also true though. I'd argue it's even truer: we treat verbosity as depth, or at least as substance.
[+] [-] badgersnake|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rnxrx|8 months ago|reply
To an extent we're becoming wired to skim content because that content has been so deeply interleaved with items that aren't just extraneous, they're not even from the storyteller. I'd suggest this capability is even a kind of survival skill, akin to not only being able to spot motion in a dense jungle but to also instinctively focus on certain kinds of motion.
[+] [-] ksec|8 months ago|reply
There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.
Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
[+] [-] stanleykm|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] dosinga|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Veen|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] JTbane|8 months ago|reply
it's the journey, not the destination
[+] [-] croisillon|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] keiferski|8 months ago|reply
Writing a journal used to be more of a common thing that educated people did, but nowadays I guess social media is too big of a distraction…not the mention the question of whether anyone would read a journal as opposed to the simplified sloganeered book public figures typically put out today.
For some specific recommendations: I am about halfway through Harry Kessler’s 1890-1915 journals, and I just started George H. W. Bush’s journal on his time in China. Both are pretty insightful so far.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_von_Kessler
2. https://www.amazon.com/China-Diary-George-Bush-President/dp/...
[+] [-] pasquinelli|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] praash|8 months ago|reply
I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.
Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.
HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.
This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.
[+] [-] j7ake|8 months ago|reply
Generating knowledge is an exercise in compression. It is helpful to deliver insights to readers. Consuming knowledge is important to keep your pulse in your field. Only consuming leads can create an illusion of understanding but no real usable knowledge that can provide value to the community.
The issue is that we live in an information glut and one can now live a life spending all their time consuming, but never creating for themselves.
[+] [-] dangus|8 months ago|reply
I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.
I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.
I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
[+] [-] nluken|8 months ago|reply
You may be spending more time on these kinds of things, but I would argue you're really not much better off than the person reading the headline, and at least giving it their full attention for a tiny bit of time.
[+] [-] Liftyee|8 months ago|reply
If the creator has "diluted" the amount of thought and information per unit content I don't see why it shouldn't be compressed to reach previous "densities".
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|8 months ago|reply
What super important thing would you be doing instead? People say they don't have time yet they blow tons of time aimlessly, myself included.
[+] [-] defrost|8 months ago|reply
‘No long sermons’: how influencer Catholic priests are spreading the word of God online
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/22/its-like-going...[+] [-] skybrian|8 months ago|reply
Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest.
A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.
[+] [-] chiwilliams|8 months ago|reply
I generally agree with the broad strokes of this post, but this description gives me pause. How do we know that listeners didn't grow impatient? Though I suppose it would take a good deal of compression to answer this :)
[+] [-] arnejenssen|8 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|8 months ago|reply
I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff.
I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well.
She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart.
I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.
[+] [-] jondlm|8 months ago|reply
I felt it put words to an experience I wrote about learning to "play" the piano: https://jondlm.github.io/website/blog/the_joy_of_discovery/
Cheers to all of you out there trying to slow down.