7 ms·

Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts. I grew up before computers

by efitz 2y ago

Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts. I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images projected for a fraction of a second one after the other. But no one has the patience for my storytelling style. Congratulations if you got this far, most people gave up if they didn’t grok my point in the first two sentences. Yes slideware is ugly and low information and boring and insulting to the audience, but some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.

wcfrobert 2y ago
The number of books, blogs, papers, textbooks, monograph, tutorials, reports, comments that are worthwhile reading will only ever increase though. Today is as information-lite as we're going to get. I feel like it's only natural to try and condense all this data (usually in a lossy way). I hate PowerPoint but bullet points could be quite information dense. They lose effectiveness past 6 bullets due to readability reasons, but I still prefer them over fluffy low signal prose. I think at the end of the day, it all depends on the writer. I got to the end of your comment just fine. But I cannot and will not get to the end of a corporate jargon filled report or ppt.
OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
> some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions. That caste likes to say, "I have people that do that for me."
mkleczek 2y ago
In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  cf. Doonesbury on Californian/Mellow-Speak: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16 https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16
  - vibrio 2y ago
    Thank you. It’s been a while since I read some Doonesbury. Now, I might go on a bender.
- copperx 2y ago
  What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?
  - nativeit 2y ago
    > What has a higher information density than text? Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.
    - ahartmetz 2y ago
      Many things can only be said in text, though. Video can work as a replacement for the so inclined because they can have narration.
      - MonkeyClub 2y ago
        To add to that, text has more of "authorial intent" (debates on the demise of which notwithstanding) than other media. Consider the visual rebus, for example, which is open to interpretation and depends on commonality of context in both producer and consumer, contrasted to a rigorous argument, which depends onoy on commonality of (technical) jargon. Video ends up conveying information thanks to narration, while the visuals assuage boredom. Like an Adam Curtis documentary: it's essentially an essay read out, with clips and music overlaid to keep the audience from realising they're told, rather than shown, the argument. Having the talking points as aides memoire on screen is nice in that it charts the course of the argument, but the map is not the territory, and we end up with significant information loss and knowledge gap. I think that moving from the message in itself to its summation (i.e. from text to bullets) creates a knowledge divide between the producer (who knows more) to the consumer (who has access to less and can only divine the rest). It's pretty bourgie IMO.
jasdi 2y ago
Its not that they want to be spoon fed, that is the ever decreasing bandwidth available as info and complexity in environment keeps exploding. As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.
- ssivark 2y ago
  Could it be that such increasing specialization (sales, accounting, coder, glue…) is driven in part by decreasing attention spans and ability to focus? Maybe nobody is able to exert significant deliberate cognitive processing on anything beyond a narrow slice that they are already comfortable with.
  - jasdi 2y ago
    It's natural. Rate of change is increasing in all fields. So when teams can't keep up, another team is setup to handle whatever is new and then automatically you get divergence in expertise, between the two groups over time. If you specialize in selling on amazon you learn totally different things, than selling in a store. If you specialize in mobile app development, a gap grows with teams who work on web or desktop. Info Asymmetry and Knowledge Gaps between specialists keeps growing with time. So the glue people naturally emerge.
herghost 2y ago
> I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I've never been able to articulate why I couldn't stand Wired so succinctly! Thankyou
Angostura 2y ago
I can actualy cope quite well with the slides that have 5 words on. But typically in the organisations that I have worked for, people will cram 200 words on a slide and then droningly reads them out. No matter how often I explain that 'people can either listen to what you are saying, or read the slide - pick one' - it doesn't really sink in
- plagiarist 2y ago
  A recent colleague often gave my team feedback like that. But we listened to him and all our presentations were much better afterwards. I hope I've internalized that idea somewhat.

by efitz 2y ago

wcfrobert 2y ago

The number of books, blogs, papers, textbooks, monograph, tutorials, reports, comments that are worthwhile reading will only ever increase though. Today is as information-lite as we're going to get. I feel like it's only natural to try and condense all this data (usually in a lossy way). I hate PowerPoint but bullet points could be quite information dense. They lose effectiveness past 6 bullets due to readability reasons, but I still prefer them over fluffy low signal prose. I think at the end of the day, it all depends on the writer. I got to the end of your comment just fine. But I cannot and will not get to the end of a corporate jargon filled report or ppt.

OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago

> some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions. That caste likes to say, "I have people that do that for me."

mkleczek 2y ago

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
cf. Doonesbury on Californian/Mellow-Speak: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16 https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16
- vibrio 2y ago
  Thank you. It’s been a while since I read some Doonesbury. Now, I might go on a bender.
copperx 2y ago
What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?
- nativeit 2y ago
  > What has a higher information density than text? Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    Many things can only be said in text, though. Video can work as a replacement for the so inclined because they can have narration.
    - MonkeyClub 2y ago
      To add to that, text has more of "authorial intent" (debates on the demise of which notwithstanding) than other media. Consider the visual rebus, for example, which is open to interpretation and depends on commonality of context in both producer and consumer, contrasted to a rigorous argument, which depends onoy on commonality of (technical) jargon. Video ends up conveying information thanks to narration, while the visuals assuage boredom. Like an Adam Curtis documentary: it's essentially an essay read out, with clips and music overlaid to keep the audience from realising they're told, rather than shown, the argument. Having the talking points as aides memoire on screen is nice in that it charts the course of the argument, but the map is not the territory, and we end up with significant information loss and knowledge gap. I think that moving from the message in itself to its summation (i.e. from text to bullets) creates a knowledge divide between the producer (who knows more) to the consumer (who has access to less and can only divine the rest). It's pretty bourgie IMO.

jasdi 2y ago

Its not that they want to be spoon fed, that is the ever decreasing bandwidth available as info and complexity in environment keeps exploding. As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.

ssivark 2y ago
Could it be that such increasing specialization (sales, accounting, coder, glue…) is driven in part by decreasing attention spans and ability to focus? Maybe nobody is able to exert significant deliberate cognitive processing on anything beyond a narrow slice that they are already comfortable with.
- jasdi 2y ago
  It's natural. Rate of change is increasing in all fields. So when teams can't keep up, another team is setup to handle whatever is new and then automatically you get divergence in expertise, between the two groups over time. If you specialize in selling on amazon you learn totally different things, than selling in a store. If you specialize in mobile app development, a gap grows with teams who work on web or desktop. Info Asymmetry and Knowledge Gaps between specialists keeps growing with time. So the glue people naturally emerge.

herghost 2y ago

> I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I've never been able to articulate why I couldn't stand Wired so succinctly! Thankyou

Angostura 2y ago

I can actualy cope quite well with the slides that have 5 words on. But typically in the organisations that I have worked for, people will cram 200 words on a slide and then droningly reads them out. No matter how often I explain that 'people can either listen to what you are saying, or read the slide - pick one' - it doesn't really sink in

plagiarist 2y ago
A recent colleague often gave my team feedback like that. But we listened to him and all our presentations were much better afterwards. I hope I've internalized that idea somewhat.