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I can't stand these articles. Why does it have to start with: > As railways expanded across America in the 19th century, there was little law enforcement. Tha

I can't stand these articles. Why does it have to start with: > As railways expanded across America in the 19th century, there was little law enforcement. That immediately tells me this is going to be a filler of 20 pages, followed by 1 page of actual content. I just can't read this, it's actively destroying all willingness on my end to make the effort of skipping all that filler part until the substance pops up. Are journalists paid by the word on these websites?

ioblomov 2y ago
If you read just to the middle of that same paragraph, the thesis becomes pretty clear. The Economist, in my experience, has perhaps the highest signal:noise in the mainstream press.
- beacon294 2y ago
  Yet still so low that I had to cancel my paper subscription. Their ratio is too skewed towards noise.
anothernewdude 2y ago
Paid by the token I think might be more correct.
matthewmacleod 2y ago
This is a piece of medium-form journalism in the Economist, a generally well-respected outlet. The purpose is not to directly funnel as much raw news into your brain as possible, but to provide a little bit of context around an issue being discussed. This quote you cited is directly relevant and the reason for mentioning it is obvious in the literal next sentence. There are lots of nonsense filler articles out there on the internet; this is not one of them.
MattGaiser 2y ago
The Economist is a high-context interpretive analysis source. It isn't meant to be a typical news article. And why they are adding that becomes evident by sentence 3.
navigate8310 2y ago
You were right. I just the read the whole article and found nothing worthy of a highlight. Open-source intel is creating challenges and opportunities for traditional clandestine operations. That's it.
namaria 2y ago
Except this is a 2 page article and the point of starting the first paragraph like that is clear 2 sentences down the line. It just seems like you judged the whole thing based on the first sentence and decided to invent a bunch of grievances about it.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  > Except this is a 2 page article Except this article is paywalled which hides the article length. I also suspect a lot of people are jaded from years of blogspam now weaponized with AI. I can half understand the rant.
  - squigz 2y ago
    Weaponized... Rather strong word.
  - namaria 2y ago
    So bogus claims are alright when fact checking is inconvenient...
    - orev 2y ago
      If you take this statement at face value without sarcasm, it’s a pretty apt description of how most people actually consume content, and it explains a lot about what’s going wrong on the Internet / the world.
highcountess 2y ago
I am not certain how it is now (AI and all), but I have seen that it was precisely a word length requirement for article assignments in the past where ad revenue was increased through page views. I think it has been a consequence of responding incorrectly to the digitization pressures due to a word inflating culture of verbosity in at least the American education system, where the “quality” of academic output is largely measured in quantity, i.e., an x page or y word length requirement. There is actually also a physical manifestation of that effect in the physical size of our education textbooks. In Europe, the textbooks that at least used to be used (in a bit out of that phase of life) were very high information density and very compact books to facilitate transporting them, probably also largely due to utilitarian concerns since people didn’t and still do not drive everywhere as much. When I first ever came in contact with American textbooks, I was extremely shocked and surprised at just how utterly hollow and voluminous and heavy they were, page after page of concepts that would have been stated in a single sentence, if not a clause, in a European textbook of 1/10 the size and a 1/4 the cost. I cannot ignore the sense that this culture/system that took hold in America at some point is a heavy contributor to the reason we have arrived at this point that produces such a foam article. All that lends itself to this kind of fuzzy fluff that looks impressive in a culture where we know that the vast majority of people only read headlines and the opening at best and digital words are cheap to “print”, which serves ad revenue and image/identity brand management purposes, i.e., the economist is still a venerated outlet, because “it has big impressive looking articles so I must be important and smart for reading the headlines”. In contrast, in a world where paper is expensive and so is printing and distribution, and the primary source of information exchange is reading, not ADD attracting TikTok shorts, the incentive is article density to pack as much information as possible into expensive print real estate to produce actual value that someone is willing to pay for with expensive, un-inflated money. What you “can’t stand” is actually an effect of the degradation of our civilization as a function of technological development and offsetting all our human reason for being, the very need for humanity in the function of life for the ruling class. Frankly, I don’t see journalists and journalism, or the written word, for that matter (somewhat ironically), surviving this latest technological onslaught of AI precisely because at some point the current low grade state of journalism can easily be replaced by AI and I do not see a path for journalism to recover from the grave it is already in. Even if someone were to start re-adopting high grade, high information density writing styles; it would be done in a void in an ever degrading readership quality environment as the general education level of our societies degrades into the “communist” uniformly gray mush without distinction that comes from normalization. It is a classic negative feedback loop for humanity in general from here on out; not to be confused with the feedback loop for technology or the ruling class.

ioblomov 2y ago

If you read just to the middle of that same paragraph, the thesis becomes pretty clear. The Economist, in my experience, has perhaps the highest signal:noise in the mainstream press.

beacon294 2y ago
Yet still so low that I had to cancel my paper subscription. Their ratio is too skewed towards noise.

anothernewdude 2y ago

Paid by the token I think might be more correct.

matthewmacleod 2y ago

This is a piece of medium-form journalism in the Economist, a generally well-respected outlet. The purpose is not to directly funnel as much raw news into your brain as possible, but to provide a little bit of context around an issue being discussed. This quote you cited is directly relevant and the reason for mentioning it is obvious in the literal next sentence. There are lots of nonsense filler articles out there on the internet; this is not one of them.

MattGaiser 2y ago

The Economist is a high-context interpretive analysis source. It isn't meant to be a typical news article. And why they are adding that becomes evident by sentence 3.

navigate8310 2y ago

You were right. I just the read the whole article and found nothing worthy of a highlight. Open-source intel is creating challenges and opportunities for traditional clandestine operations. That's it.

namaria 2y ago

Except this is a 2 page article and the point of starting the first paragraph like that is clear 2 sentences down the line. It just seems like you judged the whole thing based on the first sentence and decided to invent a bunch of grievances about it.

MisterTea 2y ago
> Except this is a 2 page article Except this article is paywalled which hides the article length. I also suspect a lot of people are jaded from years of blogspam now weaponized with AI. I can half understand the rant.
- squigz 2y ago
  Weaponized... Rather strong word.
- namaria 2y ago
  So bogus claims are alright when fact checking is inconvenient...
  - orev 2y ago
    If you take this statement at face value without sarcasm, it’s a pretty apt description of how most people actually consume content, and it explains a lot about what’s going wrong on the Internet / the world.

highcountess 2y ago

I am not certain how it is now (AI and all), but I have seen that it was precisely a word length requirement for article assignments in the past where ad revenue was increased through page views. I think it has been a consequence of responding incorrectly to the digitization pressures due to a word inflating culture of verbosity in at least the American education system, where the “quality” of academic output is largely measured in quantity, i.e., an x page or y word length requirement. There is actually also a physical manifestation of that effect in the physical size of our education textbooks. In Europe, the textbooks that at least used to be used (in a bit out of that phase of life) were very high information density and very compact books to facilitate transporting them, probably also largely due to utilitarian concerns since people didn’t and still do not drive everywhere as much. When I first ever came in contact with American textbooks, I was extremely shocked and surprised at just how utterly hollow and voluminous and heavy they were, page after page of concepts that would have been stated in a single sentence, if not a clause, in a European textbook of 1/10 the size and a 1/4 the cost. I cannot ignore the sense that this culture/system that took hold in America at some point is a heavy contributor to the reason we have arrived at this point that produces such a foam article. All that lends itself to this kind of fuzzy fluff that looks impressive in a culture where we know that the vast majority of people only read headlines and the opening at best and digital words are cheap to “print”, which serves ad revenue and image/identity brand management purposes, i.e., the economist is still a venerated outlet, because “it has big impressive looking articles so I must be important and smart for reading the headlines”. In contrast, in a world where paper is expensive and so is printing and distribution, and the primary source of information exchange is reading, not ADD attracting TikTok shorts, the incentive is article density to pack as much information as possible into expensive print real estate to produce actual value that someone is willing to pay for with expensive, un-inflated money. What you “can’t stand” is actually an effect of the degradation of our civilization as a function of technological development and offsetting all our human reason for being, the very need for humanity in the function of life for the ruling class. Frankly, I don’t see journalists and journalism, or the written word, for that matter (somewhat ironically), surviving this latest technological onslaught of AI precisely because at some point the current low grade state of journalism can easily be replaced by AI and I do not see a path for journalism to recover from the grave it is already in. Even if someone were to start re-adopting high grade, high information density writing styles; it would be done in a void in an ever degrading readership quality environment as the general education level of our societies degrades into the “communist” uniformly gray mush without distinction that comes from normalization. It is a classic negative feedback loop for humanity in general from here on out; not to be confused with the feedback loop for technology or the ruling class.