Twitter is a machine for removing intelligence from communication
Please read the paper before you comment
31–40 of 341 posts
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#32I appreciate the author's rant. It touches on the larger problem of the 'telephone game'[0] in media, news, youtube, twitter. Syndication of syndications of summaries of abstracts of research.
Any abstraction or simplification runs into the risk of having its underlying meaning changed. It is our duty as humans to be willing to chase the core of truths or to change our minds given new evidence pointing to truths.
It was said well in Hamilton - "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers
Also, i hate that it's called Chinese Whispers... I digress.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#33As a rule of thumb, I try not to quote from media unless I have seen the whole book/story/article/movie myself and am sure I understand the quotation in context.
Part of that comes from the kind of frustration Hillel Wayne voices here:
> People will offhand use famous quotes to support their arguments, when the context the quote was given in has nothing to do with it.
I spent a lot of hours in high school debate listening to people misattribute quotes or misconstrue them to mean the opposite. This was frustrating at the time but in retrospect this was a valuable lesson -- if EVERYONE is gonna say that Voltaire said that thing about disagreeing with what you say, what else is everyone wrong about?
I'm also pretty sure I had this idea reinforced by an Asimov book where he argues that intellectual societies decay as they begin to rely on secondary-source research (going to the library and reading what people have written about others' experiences, instead of going out there yourself and looking at stuff). But I can't find the source now, ha ha.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#34As a rule of thumb, I try not to quote from media unless I have seen the whole book/story/article/movie myself and am sure I understand the quotation in context. Part of that comes from the kind of frustration Hillel Wayne voices here: > People will offhand use famous quotes to support their arguments, when the context the quote was given in has nothing to do with it. I spent a lot of hours in high school debate list…
Quote about societal decay sounds like something from Foundation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(Asimov_novel)
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#35I mean, this applies to many of the discussions on HN too. I've noticed that there's so many people getting the facts around the topic completely wrong, and quite a few will push some simplistic narrative or long-standing grievances, instead of the relevant point which often is subtle and nuanced. I suppose that's just being human.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been considering doing something similar, except with plain CSS: a.paper ~ a.comments { display: none; } a.paper:visited ~ a.comments { display: inline; }
Some users (including myself) disable the :visited command.
Thinking of reasons one would want to disable that caused me to do a Google search and find this:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and...
I guess it can't be observed from a script? That would be a neat way to get potentially sensitive info.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#37When I first learnt to program the thing that I really enjoyed was learning to make a terminal app that took in the users input and used it as a conditional. I’d make all these little toy apps where my family had to type in the right word to continue. Eg “Who is the leader of the autobots?” => “Well done. Transform and roll out!!” It strikes me we could encourage better discourse with one word locked comments that th…
I can't help but think the top comment will always be the answers to the prompts.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#38People read the headline. The small words beneath it are there for the headline to rest upon. Sometimes a picture also rests on the small text. That small text is pretty useful.
When I worked at a newspaper a lot of work went into headlines and pictures, in relation to the rest of the copy. We knew what we were doing, and we also knew what are readers weren't doing.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#39> I have about as much ignorance of these domains as all the people mocking the paper on Twitter. But there’s one big difference between me and them: I actually read the paper. All of this information is on the first page. Even if you don’t know about sci-hub, you could still read the abstract and check out the researcher bios! Nobody read the paper before dunking on it. Nobody read the abstract either. About half th…
Without wishing to downplay the fact that this is a major issue, it’s hard to read scientific literature from a field you haven’t previously studied. Layman summaries are a great way to get a sense of what the paper is actually saying, though summaries made by random commenters are unreliable.
Many papers in general are just not well written, even if the subject is interesting. I wish it were seen as a social requirement that if you publish a paper, then you accompany it with a blog post—even if it's the only thing on your blog. With multiple authors, each author would write their own blog post. I'd rather read three different takes on the same subject, generally, than to slog through any given paper even once. Sprinkle in the not-minor accessibility problems around the tendency to publish exclusively in PDF, and there are good reasons to seek out a digest instead of looking through the real thing. Heck, most abstracts verge on being almost unreadable, for that matter.
Re: Please read the paper before you comment
#40The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes. In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise…
So you're saying we need a platform with both characters/post and post/day limits?!
I mean... that's beautiful, because I created a second twitter account just so I can follow a select few people for the pretty much the same reason you gave without having to worry they're getting lost to the noise.