The lost hope of self-help

Re:The lost hope of self-help by ff_ on Thursday February 25, 2016 @02:52AM (#11172994)

TL;DR: 'habits books' market is huge. Then the author goes through a looong comparison in the recent literature and sums up what every author says. Conclusion: differently from the past, in modern times there isn't basically any moralising tendency when teaching about breaking habits, and this is worrying for the development of society, or maybe not.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by jessriedel on Thursday February 25, 2016 @08:44AM (#11174331)

Highly useful.

I'll keep saying it: HN should have a short abstract (aka tl;dr) attached to each article, written and updated by user submission like comments. Maybe minimal GitHub-like version control with pull requests accepted by vote.

The abstract would be more valuable than comments, so accepted modifications could get extra karma.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by mkrfox on Thursday February 25, 2016 @10:46AM (#11175147)

Some of the better subreddits require a "submission statement," which is pretty much this.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by jessriedel on Thursday February 25, 2016 @11:52AM (#11175693)

Neat. I'd never seen this. Some links in case others are interested:

https://www.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/3yh1ll/introdu...

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1p4gqg/new_poli...

Note that there is no support by the reddit software, so this just shows up as regular comment and can't be edited by the crowd. I'm still impressed that enough folks have recognized the value of the general idea. (Too often, asking for a tl;dr is considered ADD/low-class/impatient/etc.) And it also emphasizes that this could be useful not just to save time, but also to keep article quality higher, if submitters are required to justify the intellectual value of the submission.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by ryandrake on Thursday February 25, 2016 @11:09AM (#11175326)

Fully agree. When I have 15 minutes, I'd love to get the gist of maybe 10 articles or so. Wall Of Text = I'll be skipping that one. A TL;DR summary is always appreciated!

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by amykhar on Thursday February 25, 2016 @07:19AM (#11173912)

I agree that it is quite long, but if you are interested in these types of books at all, skimming it yields some interesting stuff on habits as virtue. I confess I enjoy seeing how successful people strive to improve themselves.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by edem on Thursday February 25, 2016 @03:14AM (#11173063)

Thanks for not making me read 10 pages of wall of text.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by talles on Thursday February 25, 2016 @10:34AM (#11175067)

Maybe you have your reasons, but I'm glad I did.

For me, a long reading about an abstract thing such as habit is all about going philosophical while reading it. To wonder about it in other words. You can't get that with a TLDR.

TLDRs are great for filtering what it's worth reading or not (maybe that's your reason), but I would never just stop it there if it's a subject that I hold interest in.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by edem on Friday February 26, 2016 @04:19AM (#11180556)

I've read a lot about habits lately and I just wanted to know whether this is new information for me or not. It turned out that it is the latter in this case, thus my comment.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by platz on Thursday February 25, 2016 @11:13AM (#11175356)

> wall of text

There used to be thing called `literature`. Not everything has to be a 10-second sound-byte #TLDR.

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Re:The lost hope of self-help by mkrfox on Thursday February 25, 2016 @10:47AM (#11175156)

My go-tos are Lifehack (not Lifehacker) and Tiny Buddha. The advice is often very practical and has little/no moralizing.

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