Agreed -- a recent blog post on HN (I can't seem to find it now) mentioned how an author had to turn a 500-page book into a 700-page one to make it seem "author

Agreed -- a recent blog post on HN (I can't seem to find it now) mentioned how an author had to turn a 500-page book into a 700-page one to make it seem "authoritative". This thinking basically games our heuristics -- if all else is equal (which is never the case), then the longer book has more useful content. And given the way we're conditioned in school, a 20-page paper must be more valuable/important than a 5 page one.