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Perhaps an essay arguing that Twitter flamewars, "...emerged from the fact that we’ve taken a medium, text, which is already bad at conveying emotion and sentim

by mundo 9y ago

Perhaps an essay arguing that Twitter flamewars, "...emerged from the fact that we’ve taken a medium, text, which is already bad at conveying emotion and sentiment and high-bandwidth nuance, and [by limiting message length] made it even worse, and the net result is a lot of outrage and indignation" is not the best one to summarize with a tl;dr?

alexandercrohde 9y ago
I don't see any merit to that other than as a cute irony. Joel criticizes twitter's forced summarization because it leads to oversimplification and resentment. I don't think he's arguing that all forms of summary lead to oversimplification and resentment. Think of it as bullet-point abstract to journal article.
- mundo 9y ago
  It is fair to say that the irony was the reason I commented, rather than downvoting and moving on, but the point stands that summarizing a brief, non-technical article distorts the author's views (as Spolsky said, you lose nuance when summarizing your own thoughts - how could it be otherwise when your thoughts are summarized by a stranger?) and leads to pointless, flame-bait-y semantic argments of the kind he complained about (cf: this post , and the 3 above it, and (god forbid) those below it). And by the by, any time you find yourself using words like "all", "always" or "never" in describing someone else's position is a good time to pause and reflect on whether you're honoring the Principle of Charity, as paraphrased in the HN comment guidelines thusly: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. The good faith interpretation of my post was that I was complaining about your summary, not about summaries generally and certainly not about summaries in wildly different contexts like journal abstracts. However, just to reiterate: please understand that I'm not attacking you, or saying that you mis-characterized anyone's position on purpose, or out of malice or incompetence. The whole point of the essay we're discussing is that conveying a complex and nuanced position through a short block of text is hard, and that when someone tries, a distorted view of the author's position is the expected outcome.

by mundo 9y ago

alexandercrohde 9y ago

I don't see any merit to that other than as a cute irony. Joel criticizes twitter's forced summarization because it leads to oversimplification and resentment. I don't think he's arguing that all forms of summary lead to oversimplification and resentment. Think of it as bullet-point abstract to journal article.

mundo 9y ago
It is fair to say that the irony was the reason I commented, rather than downvoting and moving on, but the point stands that summarizing a brief, non-technical article distorts the author's views (as Spolsky said, you lose nuance when summarizing your own thoughts - how could it be otherwise when your thoughts are summarized by a stranger?) and leads to pointless, flame-bait-y semantic argments of the kind he complained about (cf: this post , and the 3 above it, and (god forbid) those below it). And by the by, any time you find yourself using words like "all", "always" or "never" in describing someone else's position is a good time to pause and reflect on whether you're honoring the Principle of Charity, as paraphrased in the HN comment guidelines thusly: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. The good faith interpretation of my post was that I was complaining about your summary, not about summaries generally and certainly not about summaries in wildly different contexts like journal abstracts. However, just to reiterate: please understand that I'm not attacking you, or saying that you mis-characterized anyone's position on purpose, or out of malice or incompetence. The whole point of the essay we're discussing is that conveying a complex and nuanced position through a short block of text is hard, and that when someone tries, a distorted view of the author's position is the expected outcome.