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Please read the paper before you comment

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301–310 of 341 posts

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#301
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying that you have to be cool and smart to vote. Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease in their program to be sure that a voter is able to at least read and understand the damn booklet before putting their [V] into the bin. But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0. That would be fair — you didn't care to inform your…

> But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0. Unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem - because spending money in the town with lots of people with a full vote will produce more votes than spending the same amount of money in the town with lots of people with half a vote. > Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease in their pro…

Maybe I'm wrong with election math, sure have to check it, but the point is not that some towns are completely dumb forever. The point is that voters would be more aware of candidates plans intellectually rather than emotionally.

>Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?

Not more important. Important thing is voters would better realize what a program actually is and in future elections vote a little more for programs than for candidates to be sure that their votes count as 1. It is $subj idea — "please read on the paper before you comment". By looking for tariff rates you have to read the paper at least until these numbers.

Ed: as a politician you also cannot be sure if that town would or would not read their plan this time. You can agitate them to do that and convert 0.5 to 1 for you (and not for others). Isn't it a positive feedback all things considered?

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#302
post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

From that story's author, they added it after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Doesn't change your point for later ones.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot...

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas, this time you haven’t read far enough! The author, on page four of the comments: https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... > yak8998 wrote: >> Haha, bravo Mr. Timmer. If IE search is working right, then apparently I am the first. I think its well over 90%... >> "bananas" > That was added after publication, so the first few dozen commenters wouldn't have seen it. Idea credit goes to our edi…

But isn't that like 'forcing' the readers to the full length of the article? It's fine if the content is very compelling. I think it has to have something to do with reading online. It's really challenging to get readers glued to the page while traditionally physical books and magz have an easier environment (less distractions).

> But isn't that like 'forcing' the readers to the full length of the article?

Yes. Personally I don't see a problem with that if you are trying to achieve a certain level of good response.

Maybe an alternative would be to let the presence of the "magic" word/phrase alter the ordering of the comments displayed to other users, or even "shadow delay" responses without it for fifteen minutes.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#304
post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

We were given a test like this in school once. The first instruction was to not do anything until you'd read all the questions. The 'questions' were all stuff like poke holes in the corner of the paper, some math problems stuff like that. At the end of the test, the last question was, don't do questions 1-9, simply write your name in the corner and turn the test over.

The test was supposed to be about your ability to read and follow instructions, few people in my class passed the test. As soon as the test started you could see people poking holes and writing things.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#305
post #33

As 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…

This is a thing I've been pondering recently, and I don't have the same takeaway as you. My thought is: The context doesn't always matter, and a quotation can mean different things in different contexts, and that's not a bad thing. For example, with the Knuth quote, both interpretations can be valuable? There are people who need to be told "don't optimise yet", and there are people who need to be told "there are crit…

So in general I'm OK with using someone's words to illustrate a different point than they were originally making. But when I do this I prefer to explicitly state the original context and explain how I am reusing their work -- I try to point out what next information changes their idea, or where I disagree with them.

This helps in a few ways:

(1) Improves communication. When I use a quotation, some readers or listeners will know the whole context (or think they do). If I use it in a dissonant way and explicitly acknowledge the contradiction, that part of the audience will be more likely to trust that I have understood the person I am quoting. I won't be dismissed as ill-informed or as deliberately misinterpreting my sources.

For example I might say "yes, this part of the code is hard to read. Here is the deal. Knuth said that premature optimization was the root of all evil, and that you should understand what your code's slow parts are before you try to optimize it. But in this specific case I cannot easily modify my code after I deploy it and cannot easily test it on all kinds of real-world data I am expecting it to encounter pre-production, so we are defensively making this function very complex but also very performant on a diverse variety of inputs. That is why this function is so complicated up front."

(2) Improves understanding. For audience members who don't know the original context of the quotation, explaining it will help them learn something new. I thought the idea was interesting enough to quote, so probably it's worth at least a footnote about what the idea originally meant? Often if you beyond the one sentence there is a rich tapestry of prior context that is worth understanding. Humans spread our thoughts via the fragile web of written language and reiterating what has been said before can help reinforce those links and make our knowledge more durable.

For example I might say "You may have heard that Knuth said that premature optimization was the root of all evil. But it's worth reading the full three paragraphs from his paper, 'Structured Programming With Go To Statements' (1974), because he develops an entire nuanced argument that today is settled wisdom in software engineering practice. He argues that optimizations can be a great idea on the core inner loop of your program, even if they significantly hurt readability and maintainability. This still holds true with complex networked software -- you should always know what your system's slow inner loops are and you should be willing to go to unusual lengths to speed up the slowest parts. Here are some ways that distributed tracing can help with that…"

(3) Knowing what the original author was getting at seems to help me form my thoughts better.

In particular, reading the whole paper before I quote it helps me avoid re-discovering an idea that Knuth already had, and it helps me think more clearly about "given what he knew then and what I know now, what are the next logical steps? What can we learn?"

Overall the rule of thumb I use of reading/watching an entire work before quoting from it is … not for everyone. It can be exhausting. But it helps me learn and (I can't prove this) it feels like it improves the quality of discussion.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#306
post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

We were given a test like this in school once. The first instruction was to not do anything until you'd read all the questions. The 'questions' were all stuff like poke holes in the corner of the paper, some math problems stuff like that. At the end of the test, the last question was, don't do questions 1-9, simply write your name in the corner and turn the test over. The test was supposed to be about your ability to…

I had something similar and failed and thought it was the dumbest thing ever.

I'm not an automaton. You didn't tell me at the beginning that the point was to follow every single thing exactly to the letter. Of course I could play that game, but you spend my entire career as a student telling me to happily skip problems and go on the next and then you want to act as if it's a problem with me that I engaged in the test in good faith.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#307
post #48

Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the…

We were given a test like this in school once. The first instruction was to not do anything until you'd read all the questions. The 'questions' were all stuff like poke holes in the corner of the paper, some math problems stuff like that. At the end of the test, the last question was, don't do questions 1-9, simply write your name in the corner and turn the test over. The test was supposed to be about your ability to…

Although it's point is good, I hate this test because--at least in most versions I have seen--nothing tells you to skip questions 1-9. The directions say, "Read all the questions first." OK fine. Then question 10 says, "Just write your name on the paper and turn it over."

But why should question 10 be the only one you follow?

"Read all the questions" is the only direction you have. There is never a "skip 1-9", except in number 10, but why would you start with that one?

It's a decent idea, but needs better execution.

Re: Please read the paper before you comment

#308
post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The readability of lot of web articles tend to be quite poor as they are written from viewpoint of SEO rather than readability. I rarely can read complete web article unless it was published in a paper magazine or newspaper. HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on controversial topics. The HN quality of discu…

I would have given Reddit a chance if they were not constantly screwing around with the UI. The new UI is sluggish and really affects the reading experience negatively. I love that HN has not made any changes to its UI for a long time and a fast and convenient reading experience remains top priority on HN. If there are more HN-like forums, that would be something I would be interested in.

It's frustrating, but utilizing old.reddit.com / Reddit Enhancement Suite (https://redditenhancementsuite.com/) goes a long way in making it a more enjoyable experience.
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