4 ms·
This is motivated reasoning taking to extremes. "LaTeX users being more satisfied than Microsoft Word users and (2) KN claiming that Microsoft Word is more eff
by IfOnlyYouKnew 6y ago
This is motivated reasoning taking to extremes.
"LaTeX users being more satisfied than Microsoft Word users and (2) KN claiming that Microsoft Word is more efficient"
There is no conflict in this statement, despite the author's claim. People who walk to work (for reasonable distances) will also tend to feel better, even though it took them longer.
Efficiency and satisfaction are different things. One is subjective ("how do you feel?"), the other objective (amount of work done per time). You are free to assign any relative value you like to these objectives, neither one is objectively "more important" than the other in all cases.
But entirely denying a measurable result while being offended by the idea that, maybe, the measurable satisfaction LaTeX gives you could also, theoretically, possibly, cloud your judgement, is silly. It's literally a textbook example of a cognitive bias!
I suspect the root cause here may be how much the tech scene loves to pretend to be "objective" / "neutral" / "scientific". If people were to consider the idea that they are just bundles of emotions, like everyone else, and, most importantly that there's nothing wrong with that, it would vastly improve some parts of the discourse.
You chose LaTeX because (a) you prefer to spend an hour with a keyboard to spending 30 min with a mouse, because (b) it's part of the identity you've chosen for yourself, because (c) it gives your work that cool Bell Labs vibe, because (d) your peers would judge you, because (e) your peers chose it for you, because (e) you didn't invest a month into learning it to abandon it, because (f) you built this really cool continuous integration pipeline from your lab to Nature, or because (g) you're the type of person that noticed I used (e) twice, and those people just tend towards LaTeX.
Some of these are emotional reasons. That doesn't mean they are invalid! You don't need to rationalise them. Be irrational and proud of it–it's been cool among a majority of numbers for a long time.
- robertlagrant 6y agoI'm pretty sure most of the world considers themselves objective and neutral, with occasional emotions. It's not just the tech scene.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zzless 6y agoThe author does not say 'conflict', he uses 'contrast' instead which is perfectly justified. Your subtly offensive (a)-(g) list seems to imply that the reasons for this contrast are rooted solely in the emotions of those who use LaTeX. I am fine with that but I am not sure I would agree with your (a): for me it is more like 10 min with a keyboard vs 2 hrs with a mouse.
- rsfern 6y agoI agree that subjective and emotional reasoning are perfectly valid in choosing a tool, but disagree a bit with your take on efficiency. Efficiency isn’t a measure of how long a task takes, it’s about how much additional work is performed relative to the optimal path. Waking vs driving to work is an interesting example because it depends on what you count as work when you frame the problem. Driving requires your body to less work, but walking costs less energy overall because you don’t have to accelerate and move a heavy vehicle. I prefer LaTeX (specifically via org mode) because it feels like there is less cognitive overhead to me. References are magical (especially with org-ref), I don’t have to fight with the layout algorithm to keep my train of thought as i move my cursor around and edit text, emacs keybindings.... This is all in tension with collaborative writing, since most people in my field don’t use LaTeX or org mode. Here I prefer GDocs to Word in large part because at least my browser understands some basic emacs keybindings.
- sidpatil 6y ago> (c) it gives your work that cool Bell Labs vibe If you wanted your work to have a Bell Labs vibe, wouldn't you use troff? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff
- im3w1l 6y agoDon't forget fomo. Everyone else is building skills with Latex and here I sit using Word.