Another part of what happened is that the comment section feels more succinct and insightful than the actual article. Articles have to be long form, comments get to the point. It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along. And now we can personalize our reading and have a more meaningful outcome.
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
It seems like you're saying almost the exact opposite of the person you're responding to.
"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.
My personal experience tells me that places like HN and some higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides. Often it's tangents (and plenty of submissions are posted just to start and anchor a conversation; reading submission is literally not the point), but often enough it's actual experts, or people with first-hand knowledge of the submission's topics, even people talked about in the submission, popping in and thoroughly debunking all the bullshit the submission itself has.
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.
>higher-quality subreddits nearly always have much more value in comments than the submission itself provides.
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.
That's a good point, and a thing to remember. However, wrt. to what I wrote, my experience is mostly based on hanging out in places and reading comments on topics I understand to some degree - somewhere between an informed amateur and a relative expert, depending on specific topics. There are also some factors that help compensate for Gell-Mann amnesia effect:
- 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).
I think that makes sense, but it implies the quality is really a function of the curation. That’s true regardless of the forum, though; I can have a high quality Twitter feed by carefully curating it, but that doesn’t mean Twitter is an inherently high-quality forum.
I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading, but misses that reading (as a process, a verb) can be the goal in itself, at least in terms of recreational reading. Summarization misses all that experience, just like reading the synopsis of a movie isn’t the same as viewing the art. I don’t want everything in my life to be just a rush to the ends, anymore than I’d want to trade the human experience of hugging my child to be reduced to simply understanding “an increase in reading oxytocin creates bonding leading to higher resource investment and survivability.”
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.
“No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.“
I think you've missed the point of the quote. It's not an analogy to prose, per se, but merely stating that you don't need to just "get to the point" and, instead, can enjoy a work throughout. A symphony isn't inherently good, it was just the metaphor of choice Alan Watts chose to convey that we should be able to enjoy living our lives without constantly thinking of constant improvement.
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.
> I think this comment mistakes “understanding the plot” as the main goal of reading
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.
> "It's sort of like your comment is the LLM response I wanted all along."
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."
I mean, the insurmountable problem is - and will always be - that true knowledge lies beyond words. You can communicate and articulate and pontificate and these are all good things, but even at their best efforts they will never be more than a mechanical process that will never quite get you there. In other words, there will never be the right words to “get it” because what there is to get is fundamentally unexplainable.
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.
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