I read for work, but I also read in my spare time. I love reading about things that I know very little about. Books still generally live up to their synopsis and respect your time, if you choose them well. I mostly stick to books for my leisure reading.

Long-form articles have become like opening a box of chocolates in the Forest Gump sense. "You never know what you're going to get." That half-nonsensical title that somehow got you to click isn't going to be explained, clarified, or elaborated on until you're fifteen minutes in, and its a coin-toss if the article will even answer the questions it pretended to ask. The odds are high that the author will go off on a tangent and never return.

When you're baited into reading a rambling, unfocused longform article that has nothing to do with it's title, it often feels like you've been swindled out of your time. That's because you have been swindled. I heartily encourage people to use AI to produce abstracts of long-form articles before reading them. It's like installing an alarm system. Don't let long-form thieves steal your time.

"Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, about fading memories of World War II, originally published in 1997:

https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm

I re-read it every couple of years. It's a hazard to my time just pulling up the link again because it's so long yet compelling.

Some of these articles are definitely more about the author being able to say they write than it is shedding light on anything or providing any kind of insight. It's all just gross to me

It's an art form, and it's about exploring the people behind the ideas as well as the ideas themselves.

I used to love reading the Saturday and Sunday magazines that came with the paper, this was back in the 1990s. Many of those were always of this long form, rambling, structure.

If you can see the pattern it's obvious once you start reading.

There's a sort of teaser at the beginning. Then they dive into a person's history like this:

Super Bionics is an exciting new form of prosthetic that's revolutionising lives.

Steve Jones was sitting on his porch when he first thought of super-bionics. Steve had always been fascinated by robotics when he was growing up. At 3 years old.........

5 paragraphs later they'll finally do a bit more about the super-bionics.

Then each section gradually moves the story forward in exactly the same way. They intro the subject. They introduce a new person behind the subject and explore them and their motivations. Then they say a bit more about the actual subject.

You're mistaking a writing style with time wasting.

I don't have the patience for it any more, but lots of people do.

Rhyming ending.

There are different ways of summarizing a text. Odyssey (another poem) could be summarized bluntly:

Homer's The Odyssey follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his perilous journey home after the Trojan War. For ten years, he faces trials, including the Cyclops Polyphemus, the witch Circe, and the deadly Sirens, while angering the sea god Poseidon. Meanwhile, in Ithaca, his wife Penelope fends off persistent suitors, awaiting his return. With the help of the goddess Athena, Odysseus finally returns, disguised as a beggar. He reveals himself, defeats the suitors in a contest of skill and battle, and reunites with Penelope.

Or it can be summarized as I summarized Roses Are Red:

The Odyssey, attributed to Homer, is a richly layered epic that follows Odysseus’ tumultuous journey home after the Trojan War. It explores themes of heroism, identity, loyalty, and human frailty through encounters with gods, monsters, and mortals. The narrative intertwines adventure with moments of introspection, revealing a tension between fate and agency. Penelope’s endurance, Telemachus’ coming-of-age, and Odysseus’ cunning invite reflection on resilience and transformation. Yet, its moral ambiguities—violence, deception, and divine caprice—resist tidy resolution. The epic’s power lies in its openness to interpretation, offering a timeless meditation on the complexities of human experience and the longing for home.

Obviously very different approaches.

Even with a perfect summary, the source is still going to give something more. Nobody is arguing against that.

While the former one is quick plot review.

- it's possible to transfer knowledge, as demonstrated by the fact that human civilization exists. It's not always easy, doesn't always succeed, and reading is a part of that, but it's possible and happening. I'm confused about your intended meaning in claiming otherwise.

- It's very difficult to distinguish between (especially one's own) understanding and a false impression thereof. To an overwhelming degree, the main realistic way is applying the knowledge, which is easiest when far removed from the activity of reading.

- One's upbringing, environment, social circle, etc., strongly influence one's propensity for reading, both for work and for pleasure. People change, especially as long as they're young, but even adults do in a major way according to conditions.

Before most people could read, you would learn a trade from your father or as an apprentice. Knowledge was handed down but you pretty much learned "the way it has always been done" and improvements were slow.

Once we all could learn from books and publish our discoveries, the spread of knowledge and the pace of advancement exploded. We went from farming with animal labor to walking on the moon in under a century.

IIRC (I don't recall where I read about this), there are two problems:

1. "transfer" gives the impression that a person can copy their knowledge to another person, but that is not the case. The teacher says, writes the words or even demonstrates, but the brain in the student is making its own connections and tries to explain it in its own frame of reference. It may click, or may not, or may even click in the wrong way, leading to learning a different lesson from the one being taught.

2. The teacher may have tacit knowledge they do not know they have to teach, or convey by some other means. Most teachers don't even realize that this tacit knowledge is not present in their students.

So, maybe nitpicking a bit, but "transfer" is not the right word for it.

Maybe long form content solved a need back in the day when things were printed on paper and figured out well in advance, crossing their fingers on the relevance, and with where we are now we can suss it out without all the reading-as-middleman-to-knowledge

"Reading" an article through its comments makes the assumption that those commenting actually read and understood the article. This seems like a risk though, as there is an entire ecosystem of people who are just knowledgeable enough to be listened to by those with the same or slightly less knowledge of the content or field.

How many times have you sent a meme or made a referential comment about some piece of media that you've never even seen? Big Lebowski, Breaking Bad, and American Psycho memes are completely intelligible across the internet even though many people have never actually seen them.

I think the argument of the person that you're responding to is that these dilettantes would exist regardless of the tools that were out there, LLMs or otherwise. There have always been people that prefer to talk about things than to read and consume them.

The assumption that long form content is a relic and that reading is no longer necessary for knowledge seems absolutely crazy to me, but it does seem to be a common enough mindset that I've run into it with students that I mentor. It seems logical to me that if you could learn something in one hour, then by definition your knowledge in that subject can not be deep. But it seems like there are plenty of people that I work with and talk to that think a crash course or podcast is all you need to be an expert in something.

Of course, there's also commenters posting uninformed bullshit on the submission topic without actually reading the submission. But, again from experience, those comments have tell-tale smells, which you learn to recognize.

I have this experience too, until I remember the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. There are certain forums where there appear to be loads of high value takes, people discussing with confidence and conviction. And then you run into those same types of comments on a topic you’re actually a relative expert in, and they prove to be quite low value perspectives, but said with the same confidence and conviction. That tends to temper my feelings that any low-effort medium can be generalized as high-value.

- Comments are conversations -- in a quality community, low-value perspectives will get taken apart, and you can kind of get a feel from the conversation itself whether or not any of the participants actually know what they're talking about;

- Communities transcend individual discussions -- hang out in a community long enough, and you start to recognize other participants; over time, you'll learn who's an expert in what, and then those people become your reference points.

Say, e.g., I look at a subthread where some X, Y and Z talk deeply about cybersecurity, above my level of comfort. Normally I wouldn't be able to tell who, if anyone, is right, but over the years I've seen many comments of Y and learned that they're an actual domain expert on cybersec - so now the way Y responds to X and Z, and how the two react to Y's comments, give me a way to indirectly determine whether X and Z know what they're talking about.

And so on. Lots of natural, fuzzy human reputation tracking stuff - but that works in communities (like HN), not in one-off interactions (like a random article submitted to HN).

A rush to “get to the point” when dealing with art feels very much like the tech-obsessed productivity porn that can miss the forest for the trees.

Exactly. Understanding the plot is a level-1 read through. Identifying the effects achieved by the author is a subsequent level, and then exploring how they achieve those effects is where a literary-level read starts.

Alan Watts

That said, I do also think you can apply it to the enjoyment of prose in that you don't need to read it, tapping your fingers, waiting for some climax and then a minor denouement, expressing frustration if "the point" seems to be taking to long to get to. Certainly there is a lot of bad writing that can be overly verbose/messy/in need of editing/etc. and, depending on the nature of the writing, attempting to write "artful" prose can be a misstep. But, often, I find that you can find great pieces of prose in an essay/article/novel/etc. that are well-composed, sometimes profound, and a general joy to read. Though, judging by many of the comments in this thread, many don't care to read that way.

A passage from E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" springs immediately to mind.

"... 'Beware of first-hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation seraphically free From taint of personality, which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'

Tremendous applause greeted this lecture, which did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men ..."

Or perhaps what Terry Pratchett wrote about the river Ankh may apply: "Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed." One has to wonder if people are thinking "Any idea that has passed through so many layers of minds has to be thoroughly refined indeed."

It’s like trying to explain what one may see hear or feel when their on vacation at an exotic new location by talking about the train tracks that brought you there.

So when you’re reading you’re not downloading packets that add up to some kind of point. Instead, in the absolute best case scenario, you’re simulating the experience, according to the author’s recommended doses, of someone else “acquiring” knowledge. This “someone else” is the nameless reader the book was written for but they are not you.

This seems extremely detached from reality. Just to give you an anecdotal example, I used to love reading books as a kid, but you'd be extremely hard pressed to find me reading one now. Clearly my reading habits have changed, and so it cannot be some intrinsic property written in my fate (which seems to be assumed to exist in the quoted framing).

Conversely, book purchases wouldn't fall or rise, especially over long timeframes, if there weren't changes in reading habits. It just doesn't make sense to portray people as these immovable objects, whose desire to read has been inscribed into them at birth.

> Summarizers start with the default assumption that reading is an obstacle standing between the reader and some kind of reward.

When reading novels for pleasure is not among your hobbies, it most likely will be. You bet I don't often want to read e.g. documentation: I just want to get my hands on the magic incantations or magic phrases / values required, and move on with my day.

But this is true even for literature class, with its mandatory readings. I was one of the more naive folks in my class, so I'd make an earnest attempt at reading through those things. At the end, that only mattered to the extent that I can now tell you it was a complete chore. And the "reward" at the end of those was good test scores of course - something others could replicate by just relying on, then manually written, summaries.

> one might be left with the false impression of understanding where there is none.

It is at most only an opinion that there is no understanding there, and so is that the impression the person would have about their understanding is false. Understanding is not a binary property, despite what e.g. the anti-AI crowd would make one believe, and you're no mind reader. I think that's pretty agreeable at least.

I don't understand why more people don't get this. I've told everyone who will listen in my org that implementing LLM's isn't going to solve the problem of people wasting our time reaching out to us with questions that have already been answered in our KA system. If someone was going to type something into an LLM, they could have typed it into a search bar. People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read! They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!

I was correct. Now we have a costly LLM implementation and have our time wasted with questions that are already answered.

None of the KB systems I've ever encountered, from orgs big and small, reputable or otherwise, had in them any useful information whatsoever. It's all just bullshit, roundabout sales, and a lot of answers to questions no actual human being would ever ask.

Whether or not to put LLM in the KB's search bar is immaterial. Myself, when I see a KA syste, I immediately close the tab and "bounce" back to the search engine.

> People don't skip the documentation because they can't find it; they skip because they don't want to read!

Yes, but also because they don't trust you to provide enough information to diagnose and solve their problem. There's no point wasting the time when experience tells you most customer-facing KBs are nothing but false hope and misleading headlines.

> They want to bug a live a person (and make it their problem)!*

Yes, but not because they hate that random support person - it's because it's the only remotely reliable way to solve the problem itself. Companies shouldn't complain, not after standardizing knowledgebases and phone menus, which are all implicitly and often explicitly designed to keep customers away from support staff - and instead of providing a solution, they're optimized to make the user think the solution exists somewhere and they're just too dumb to find it (therefore, user's own fault, not company's fault; customer's brand perception unaffected).

As for making it the support person's problem - that's literally their job. That's what they're paid for.

These 25 screens of text are not for you, they are for Google.

i still like reading the adapted books into chapters from the walrus too. i havent been a subscriber in a while, but they tend to be nice reads that dont require me to commit to reading the same thing for the next couple weeks on the toilet

It's bad for the individual, but even worse for the collective. The AI summary reader isn't just convinced they understand, they also share that incorrect understanding in discussion. They effectively inject LLM slop into real life conversations and forget the subjectivity of reading.

This leads to what I consider more harmful. Discussions where the particiants themselves don't even believe in the stuff they are arguing. Where human beings, devoid of their own subjectivity, sling summaries and empty "facts" at each other. As if what 1984 textually said is important in any way beyond how you and I, the humans, connected with it.

I do think your point that some people wouldn't read regardless is bad. People will waste time doing things that are available to them. If less forms of entertainment are available, picking up a book becomes more commonplace. I often wonder how much humanity's rate of progress will slow (or regress) in the coming decades.