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I’ve found that much high-brow literature (such as that found in The Atlantic which I like to read a lot) enjoys taking multiple sentences and paragraphs to exp
by gurumeditations 8y ago
I’ve found that much high-brow literature (such as that found in The Atlantic which I like to read a lot) enjoys taking multiple sentences and paragraphs to explain an idea that only needs 10% of the words that are actually used. AKA fluff to give the appearance of intellectualism. It’s why I skim.
- tw1010 8y agoOn the other hand, that's probably a good sign you should select your inputs more carefully. Try reading some time tested classics or a bunch of books that you know have a great signal-to-noise ratio. You'll probably find your noise ignorer starved soon enough.
- robax 8y agoThis comment hits the nail on the head for me. I’m mostly a non-fiction reader and so many authors dance around their point or reiterate it over and over. Robert Greene is the first offender to come to mind for me but I’m also reading Sapiens and feel the same there. If anyone has any low-fluff book recommendations I’d love to hear them!
- josephjrobison 8y agoRepetition of the core concepts from multiple different angles is a great way to reiterate the lessons over and over. I also don’t like when they beat around the bush, but repetition increases retention.
- mirimir 8y agoThe classic form is 1) summarize what you're going to say; 2) say it; and 3) summarize and discuss what you've said. But this piece repeats the same arguments, in different words, just a few paragraphs apart. And that annoys me. But maybe it's written for people who just skim. Also, when reading nonfiction, I typically read the beginning and the end, and then skim the rest. If it seems worth the time, then I read the whole thing.
- goostavos 8y ago>I typically read the beginning and the end, and then skim the rest. If it seems worth the time, then I read the whole thing. I saw this advice for reading papers, and it has been extremely useful to me for deciding if something is worth reading. For whatever reason though, I have some kind of aversion to doing it with books. Some form of childhood engrained "eat your vegetables" kind of conditioning about finishing books cover to cover. I should really try it though. I've slogged through many non-fiction books with little beside annoyance to show for it.
- bathMarm0t 8y agoIs the counter-swing of low-fluff incomprehensible density? I think if you want to avoid fluff, read something that was written more than 20 years ago. Time has a means of eroding away the pop-sci books (Will anyone read Gladwell in 20 years?). I personally like reading the pivotal pieces of a field / founding texts. Jung and Nietzsche come to mind. Maybe another question you could ask (a fluff test if you will): Could you see a college course using the text as a primary source?
- whatshisface 8y ago>I think if you want to avoid fluff, read something that was written more than 20 years ago. Time has a means of eroding away the pop-sci books (Will anyone read Gladwell in 20 years?). I personally like reading the pivotal pieces of a field / founding texts. Jung and Nietzsche come to mind. Historical philosophers are not even remotely comparable to present-day popular authors, a more fair comparison would be to present-day philosophers. Present-day popular authors are best compared to old popular authors, like the ones who wrote books on manners for 1800s Americans who wanted to use their affluence to become more like old-world elites, or the 1950s authors that wrote manuals on how to "be a man."
- emodendroket 8y agoEven if we stick to fluffier stuff, if it's been around for a while it's probably got some merits (for instance, Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler are not exactly challenging authors, but they're really good at what they do).
- FabHK 8y agoFWIW, I’d consider both authors you cite peddlers of mistaken (and potentially dangerous) ideas. Read early psychoanalysis and German idealism out of historical interest, by all means (certainly very influential), but please don’t appropriate that way of thinking.
- Swizec 8y agoIf you want low fluff non fiction, go for business books. They're often short and to the point because they're written for busy people and aim to convey real information. A lot of for-the-masses nonfiction books suffer from the incentives problem. They're not selling information, they're selling the feeling of being smart, intellectual, and well informed. They don't aim to teach you anything, they aim to give you ammunition to impress your friends with at a dinner party. As such they have to be large and voluminous so you can feel good about yourself just by buying them. Then they have to convey the core point in the first 30 pages because you're not going to read more than that probably. The rest is there to give you cool anecdotes and supporting arguments so you can impress your friends further should they probe (and you actually read that far).
- majos 8y agoWhat? This is the opposite of my experience, every business book I've read has mostly consisted of bullet-point platitudes. Short doesn't mean informative. Do you have recommendations that might be different?
- barry-cotter 8y agoThe Personal MBA, Josh Kauffman The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz
- Tycho 8y agoNN Taleb’s books. He has said that books should surprise the reader every single page or else it’s not real writing.
- telltale123 8y agoI read parts of a couple of Taleb’s books, Black Swan and Antifragile. There are a few original ideas in each and then they are reapplied again and again in different domains. I often get how the applications go after reading the section titles, thus I think it can still be more concise. That said, the two books have much better signal-to-noise ratio than some high-brow journalistic pieces.
- DenisM 8y agoI found the black swan to be 80% fluff. Still a worthwhile reading, though.
- jl2718 8y agoCould not tolerate. I read hundreds of nonfiction books, and this is one of the few I could not get through.
- DenisM 8y agoI found it worth the struggle in the end. One of the most influential books in my life, I’d probably put it as #3.
- nottorp 8y agoBlack Swan could have been a pretty good book at 15% of it's current size. I got tired of being told the same thing in at least 5-6 different ways every time and never finished it.
- canhascodez 8y agoTaleb has often been accused of lacking rigor in his arguments. He does write well, though.
- 8y ago
- FabHK 8y agoCounterpoint: You only really grasp a point when you hear it many times, and see it applied (or even better apply it yourself). There is this online service selling summarised versions of popular books. I’ve read many of those summaries, and undoubtedly the key points are all contained in there. But: you read it, and then you forget. The complete book takes time to lay out the key points and arguments, puts them in context, explains various aspects, gives many examples, challenges you to apply them, and, yes, repeats them. And that’s what you need to actually take them on board. It’s a whole web of beliefs. As an extreme example: you could give the basic definitions and axioms of, say, group theory on one page, and say “the rest follows”. No fluff. But somebody that’s only read that page has no idea about group theory. For that you need the book, with fluff.
- nine_k 8y agoReiterating and showing from different angles and in various contexts = good. Not getting to the point, or giving relevant context and precursor ideas, while dwelling on unrelated subjects = fluff. I like my non-fiction the way I like science articles: starting with a summary, and diving into all necessary details later.
- readcarefully 8y agoTechnical writing must be this way. However using poetic language in writing that's trying to communicate scientific understanding to everyone, I find, is useful and appropriate. Look at Carl Sagan's popular writings, or some of Asimov's more science related works for good examples.
- gymshoes 8y ago> There is this online service selling summarised versions of popular books. It's blinkist
- FabHK 8y agoThe one I had in mind was getAbstract.
- LanceH 8y agoThere is the trend on so many articles linked from HN to not get to the point until 8+ paragraphs in. They don't even reference the headline and the main point. Then when the address the point briefly they flashback to the subject's childhood and talk about some formative event that shaped everything to put him into the place where he might take on this problem. I skim because I trust very few sources to actually deliver on the promise of a headline and I don't care to invest a page or two reading before the article actually starts and I can make a judgement.
- SerLava 8y agoAbsolutely. I have spent a good amount of time writing and editing professionally. The absolute worst writing happens when someone believes they are owed attention simply because they wrote something. The gall! Maybe people would skim less if so many writers weren't cramming tomes down our throats to serve their own interests. Even then, skimming is a fundamental reading skill and I simply cannot imagine how ignorant I would be if I never did it.
- LanceH 8y agoI really don't even mind tons of extra words. It just seems to be some new style (last 10 years especially) that deliberately avoids touching on the theme as long as possible. Also hard-jumping away from the theme frequently to tell other stories. It's beyond digression or elaboration IMO.
- newsbinator 8y agoAnd that's when Steven realized what had been causing the illness in tens of thousands of people for over a decade... - - - Two poplar trees stood in the backyard of the house where Steven was born in 1958. Not so much a "back yard" as a "back lawn", one of the trees, nearly 200 years old...
- SerLava 8y agoIs this a real article or just brilliant satire?
- majos 8y agoCan't speak for The Atlantic, but I think The Economist qualifies as "high-brow" and pretty dang information-dense. Just reading and remembering like 30% of the articles gets me far. At this point I just read the weekly (print) issue and only go deeper on things that interest me. I am of course missing things, but it's been much less stressful and more informative than skimming the NYT every morning.
- martinpw 8y agoAnother benefit to reading a weekly news source versus a daily is that the average quality is higher, since the most important N stories in a week are going to be a better overall sample than the most important N/7 stories each day integrated over the same week. The Economist also has great round-the-world coverage, which is more than can be said for most news sources.
- FabHK 8y agoCouldn’t agree more. Read books and The Economist, skip the dailies.
- detuur 8y agoThe Economist is definitely a high-brow, low-fluff, high-density publication. I love it. Articles are usually short enough that you can get through them in a just a minute and they have a good graphics department that makes clear, readable graphs that actually provide an added value instead of filling in some empty space. Shows that it is possible to stick to the message. For political reporting it seems like Politico is sticking to the same formula (at least Politico.eu), which explains their popularity.
- ivm 8y agoTheir writing style is also great, it feels very British: slightly sarcastic and with lots of clever puns.
- emodendroket 8y agoIn my opinion, if a book doesn't deserve close reading it likely doesn't deserve reading at all. I'll make an exception for purely informational texts, I suppose, but for the most part if I've chosen a book-length work I'm looking for something engaging, not something to skim.
- mathattack 8y agoMost non-fiction too. Frequently it’s one idea dumbed down and then stretched to a couple hundred pages.
- apatters 8y agoGoogle incentivizes all kinds of online content to engage in this behavior as well. Articles that rank well are long and filled with keyword-rich exposition. Concise, bulleted summaries of facts don't give Googlebot as much information and consequently tend to show up in fewer searches. (And Google is trying to be your main source for fact lookup anyway)
- goostavos 8y agoAlso, why recipe sites are among the most annoying on the internet. Life story with a hidden recipe injected somewhere on the body
- onion2k 8y agoI enjoy the writing in The Atlantic precisely because of the use of language there. That 'fluff' is what makes it interesting and entertaining. If I wanted to just have an idea explained I'd read Wikipedia.
- natmaka 8y agoIn some (most?) cases those 10% of the words that are actually used are not the same for all readers. What is fluff to you may not be to me. When it comes to be sure to be understood many express the same idea in multiple ways (discourse levels) consecutively. Many (most? at the very least "more and more") consumers buy printed matter "by weight", they somewhat "score" by dividing the number of pages by the price. It may be considered adequate for entertainment material, and may be adopted (for many/all types of goods) because it is our standard way of scoring goods. AFAIK there is no well-known generic method to a priori appreciate whether a good is adequate (adequacy being a part of "quality", which is always hard to evaluate). It's quantity/quality, all over again. Only the former seems absolute to us, and a good scoring method delivers an absolute result. IMHO there is a way to pepper a text with anecdotes/useless details, or even to structure it thanks to them, which gained traction in US newspaper material and now seems pervasive to me (thanks to our "global culture"?). It may sometimes be used as a trick to give life or credibility (fake news ahead! Liars tend to pile details up) to a story, or to appeal to some readers' empathy ("Wow, he uses a kettle pot similar to mine, so we are similar!"). A perfect thing "lacks nothing and nothing can be added" (Vitruvius). Aiming at perfection slows the building process, and most written material sold is short-lived ("long tail"). For a publishing company the editorial process (<=> refining contents by adding what is missing and also cutting fluff, in an often painful and always lengthy back-and-forth between the author and an editor) leads to more loss (an enraged author quits) and time-to-market (competing products are first on the market). Paying the author according to the amount of written material he produces simplifies. It's "good enough" and "on time", all over again. A piece of text without repetition and rephrasing will only content the focused reader. Misread or misunderstand something and you are lost. Focused people are rare (and may even be more and more so), and even them often cannot read continuously in a proper (calm) environment for a long time. Therefore nearly all of us always skim. Most products are not completely devoid of contents, therefore upon skimming one will probably find some material interesting him, albeit skimming over dense material leads to a total failure. Theoretically footnotes and the hypertext approach may alleviate part of this, but many readers just get lost in those links.
- mshenfield 8y agoThe majority (2/3) of the piece is evidence to back up an idea. This includes a grouchy anecdote, along with 4 or 5 studies linking screen reading to reduced comprehension, empathy, and critical thought. I didn't find the evidence in the article compelling. But I'm glad it was there and don't think it was fluff.
- goodmachine 8y agoDefinitely so: but you're missing something too. I've found that STEM grads and philosophers often take this point of view, perhaps because they find nuanced arguments challenging or redundant: they see no value in the telling itself, in indirection or deliberate ambiguity. A philosopher friend of mine, for example, refuses to read novels because he claims the basic propositions of most fiction can be more concisely expressed. Why read a whole book to learn that love is hard? This is true: his loss.
- jplayer01 8y agoMost philosophers I know are perfectly happy reading books.
- scarejunba 8y agoWhy texts are so long these days When I was a child, my father and I would go fishing in summer. In summer, the fish feed on all the insects that ... 54 pages of unrelated anecdotes later Irrespective of whether or not you think texts are too long these days, what's clear is that both long and short texts are here to stay. Fucking brilliant, mate. Five stars. Good show. And then people will link this nonsense everywhere. The question posed will not be answered, the writer will have performed some puerile creative writing exercise, and you'll be left wondering why you bother reading this stuff.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoWhich days are "these days"? Do you remember serials? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)
- scarejunba 8y agoHaha, sorry, that was a fictional title for the fictional story I have there. I would probably hate 98% of serials. Fortunately, time has winnowed the set down to the good ones.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoSometimes I'll skip just to see if the article's worth reading and go back and read it for real if it seems to be. Sometimes I'll just skim because, as you say, a lot of articles take forever to get to the point. Reading the first sentence of each paragraph seems to work well. There are a lot of reason we skim, some good and some bad. The nature of articles, etc., on the Internet encourages skimming. It's like reading the newspaper used to be, except the newspaper is a million times larger and of much more uneven quality. I read fewer books than I did 30 years ago before I was regularly online, but probably read as much, or more. Of course, a lot of what I read is fluff or crap (or both), which concerns me, but oftentimes comment sections can be informative and insightful.
- sytelus 8y agoLot of journalists/reporters are still trained and required to write stories such that it fills X pages. This could have been necessity on print media but its outrageous on electronic screens. My hypothesis is that people skim on electronic screens more because there is always something else available if current piece is on some word count rampage. This article itself is so fluffy and the reporter could have explained core idea and results in one paragraph but instead they like to play this game where reader must spend a lot of time and attention before secret is revealed.