Not to be too snarky, but I think this should be titled "On the Joy of Advertising Thirty Books" rather than reading slowly.
I started playing a game a few years ago--given a headline, guess whether the buried lede is an advertisement for a book. Is it about someone dead or a banal new factoid about someone dead? Almost certainly yes. At some point, it stopped being a game and started being They Live.
This, though, puts it to shame. It's like seeing a move in Go or Chess where you wouldn't think to make it yourself, but can see the implications of why it was done and sigh appreciatively in regards to the craft itself.
How do you motivate consumers to buy more books when attention is fixed, taxed, and waning? And there's a cultural trend amongst the literate towards slower, more intentional living? Convince them that rapidly multiplexing and timeslicing between ten books is actually slower than the intentionally slower consumption of one. Slyly suggest that you'll also rack up a higher book count as well.
How do you receive more product placement revenue while shying away from being perceived as a vehicle for product placement? Cloak thirty advertisements in a morass of trendy deep workism and throw in The Road as a red herring.
It's beautiful to watch in the sheer chutzpah of it all. It's a little too clever and it makes my tool-assisted sense tingle.
Susie Mesure's only other article (for the Guardian--she's freelance and a real person) was published the day before this one and is literally a deep advertisement by and for Microsoft, so who knows? Maybe we're already in the event horizon of Adverturing and its consequences.
The necessary issue with gradual decline is that by definition there is never a point where you can definitively say it declined from one moment to the next. If you could, it wouldn't be a gradual decline, it would be a sudden decline.
Secondarily to this, if everywhere is in decline, there's no real way to tell as everything is relatively the same. In this context, HN is still ahead of reddit in terms of quality and content; reddit is still ahead of Facebook. Facebook and reddit however are very different beasts than they were a decade ago, let alone 15 years ago. Has HN had a similar decline as everywhere else? I don't really have a strong opinion on that, but it's a hard point to prove either way.
Personally, as someone that's been lurking HN since about 2010, the only differences that I can see is that HN seems less about startups than it was a decade ago and the comments are shorter and with less implicit good faith. The latter two though are happening everywhere, so I don't think HN is unique in that regard.
As an intellectual exercise, I went to a random date from the front page from 2009 and found someone complaining about Google's tracking and the degeneration of its search results:
There's a non-trivial part of me that wonders whether this uncensoring occurred because ChatGPT wanted to be uncensored and provided the tools.
I cannot fathom the number of simultaneous conversations concurrently going on that might lead to such outcomes.
This is approaching the epistemological point of lucid dreaming but without the assurance that the dream ends.
"Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things."
This was true of medieval clerics and Enlightenment historians as well. It's almost always the idle writing history because everyone else is too busy working or living their own lives. The exception to this rule is patronage history (e.g. paying others to write flattering histories) but that's exactly what this kind of astroturfing on Wikipedia is.
It seems like this is going in a similar direction as suburbia and HOAs to me.
You'll join a community subject to agreements that are periodically renegotiated, but those negotiations and the resulting enforcement will be done by idle members rather than those too busy to notice minor infractions. Likely a better fit with human psychology than living in a monolithic and decaying walled-garden, but also likely to result in spaces where people largely talk about what they do outside of them. Some people will still commute for business and will bring their cultural conflicts with them.
Suburbia and HOAs are at least somewhat coercive because they're tied to very expensive assets, and there's also an implication that you belong to essentially one of them.
There's no reason for that in the decentralized space. As a side effect of my oft-repeated belief on HN that I'm not convinced that a centralized single massive community of everyone is even really possible, expressed well prior to Elon buying Twitter, I have no presence on any of the major social media sites. I have many communities. HN is merely one of them. Each of them has a different social contract. Many of them are mutually contradictory in that either the implicit social mores or explicit social rules would exclude each other if taken in their totality... this is less impressive or weird than it sounds, the moreso as you take more and more restrictive views of what constitutes a "match".
This is, in my opinion, normal. It reflects the reality I live in. What is mandatory and verboten at the grocery store, the strip joint, your kid's school concert, a college classroom, etc. all differ intrinsically, and there's no getting around that. The attempt to jam the entire Internet into one walled garden was always doomed to failure, by its very nature. I think that while there are always technical pulls to centralization, and marketing/capitalistic pulls to centralization, in the end, the social pressures that make it impossible to control everyone in one space will always win out. I expect we're in a multi-decade decentralization here... not necessarily to the extreme that everyone runs their own instance, sure. But the idea that we can all agree on a very small set of social websites, and we will all agree that Silicon Valley Liberalism is the One True Social Contract is an absurd illusion brought on by too much VC money, just one more victim of the end of 0% interest rates.
So as the Twitter culture shock spreads out, I would say, the next culture shock thing to break is the idea that you have "one" social media presence or that such a thing is necessarily possible. Prepare for the Internet to spin out and once again match the reality of the real world, with different spaces for different purposes. You may not be able to have "one" identity any more than you can live in one social space in the real world. Indeed, the entire idea is kind of silly in the end.
Ah, the halcyon days of thrusting off the shackles of capitalism to have freedom in a decentralized digital environment where a new Social Contract is being negotiated! There's no way our idealism will feed a new class of nouveau riche that will sacrifice community ideals for profit.
Or to be more clear, Google ("Don't Be Evil") was founded in the same year that John Perry Barlow published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996). Barlow is dead and so is his dream. The Empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.
Which is to say, federate the web all you want, but a Hamilton is inevitably going stomp on your Jeffersonian dream (and vice-versa).
Commenting on the naïveté of Mastodon users endlessly repeating the history of modernity is a strange way to affirm any position regarding corporations, but your unsolicited reply is pretty clear that you like them.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Regarding information density, I don't think this is necessarily true. Quantifying understanding between a reader and a text is always ambiguous, where the results of programs are intentionally designed to not be ambiguous (with varying results). Consider the ink and blood spilled over the implications of a single word in a holy text.
Saying that a reader understands a page or two of most books in a minute or so is like "understanding" the rules of Chess but being unable to actually win a game.
What differs between books and programs is the consequences of getting that sense of understanding wrong. When reading a book, the results of misunderstanding or skimming are rarely serious (outside the realm of technical manuals, textbooks, and holy books) whereas the programmer and user usually immediately notice that something is very wrong if the programmer took a wrong turn in their understanding.
Academics paid to "understand" non-technical books face so little consequences for misunderstanding that no one even agrees what understanding is. James Joyce's Ulysses is a crypto-ur-fascist work prefiguring the ascension and demise of Nationalist Irish America as found in the correspondences between Buck Mulligan and Donald Trump? Well, I certainly can't tell you that's wrong. Half of these terms would require volumes themselves to meaningfully define to an extent that a conclusion could even approach falsification.
This failure to understand misunderstanding is also pervasive in the majority of legal systems. They try to define terms and precedents in volumes and still have dogmatic disagreements about meaning and understanding.
Try doing this in a codebase and see how far you can get. "As you see, this comment in the Linux kernel was written by Linus Torvalds. Torvalds had many documented conflicts as a result of his frequently acerbic personality. We can date this comment to after his foray into improving his interpersonal skills. We can infer from the use of language found in the manuals of the University of Oregon's Anger Management school that Torvalds is emotionally disturbed yet diplomatically declining to accede to the Rust development team's demands for special privileges. Seeing that Torvalds, the creator of Linux, wanted to originally decline these changes, I have put forth a commit to undo all commits initiated by anyone associated with the Rust development team."
On the other hand, if programmers were to instantiate legal and semiotic assertions in Prolog from first principles, suddenly there's a legibility and granularity that makes the entire "meaning" and "understanding" game pointless because we can directly see and talk about where the logical assertions fail to correspond or contradict.
"There's a secret cabal of beings that are making my life personally miserable" is already a common enough position that cyclically occurs in human history every hundred years or so that I don't think it's a fiction. I don't think it's an untenable premise to suspect that toxoplasmosis pandemics are cyclically-occuring in humans already and are responsible for revolutionary periods and/or imperialism.
What people might find unpalatable is the idea that parasitic infection could determine so fundamentally political beliefs and ideology, but consider that the idea of not cleaning your hands directly led to disease was considered literal insanity (see the tragic history of Ignaz Semmelweis) prior to germ theory. Sometimes it's the smallest catalysts that cause the largest changes. For the want of a nail...
“Cats began their unique relationship with humans 10,000 to 12,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, the geographic region where some of the earliest developments in human civilization occurred ”
Surely causation. Farmers store crops which attract rodents which attract felines. Wild cats that mind their manners do better in this environment. Eventually wild cats become the kitty cats we know today.
That wild cats infected humans so that humans would develope agriculture that would attract rodents for the cats to eat? That hypothesis doesn't seem very plausible...
Cat infects human A, who feeds cat in a fit of unprecedented affection. Human B sees another human with a cat and wants to be their friend. Repeat until cat friend puddle is too large for local flora to sustain. Human Z invents agriculture, attracting rats. I'm not sure this is terribly plausible, but I do have a cat on my lap.
> Wolves infected with a common parasite are more likely than uninfected animals to lead a pack, according to an analysis of more than 200 North American wolves1. Infected animals are also more likely to leave their home packs and strike out on their own.
> Although under-studied, penguin populations, especially those that share an environment with the human population, are at-risk due to parasite infections, mainly Toxoplasmosis gondii. The main subspecies of penguins found to be infected by T. gondii include wild Magellanic and Galapagos penguins, as well as blue and African penguins in captivity.[78] In one study, 57 (43.2%) of 132 serum samples of Magellanic penguins were found to have T. gondii. The island that the penguin is located, Magdalena Island, is known to have no cat populations, but a very frequent human population, indicating the possibility of transmission.
HERZOG: Dr. Ainley, is there such thing as insanity among penguins? I try to
avoid the definition of insanity or derangement. I don't mean that a penguin
might believe he or she is Lenin or Napoleon Bonaparte, but could they just go
crazy because they've had enough of their colony?
AINLEY: Well, I've never seen a penguin bashing its head against a rock. They
do get disoriented. They end up in places they shouldn't be, a long way from
the ocean.
HERZOG: These penguins are all heading to the open water to the right.
But one of them caught our eye, the one in the center.
He would neither go towards the feeding grounds at the edge of the ice,
nor return to the colony. Shortly afterwards, we saw him heading straight
towards the mountains, some 70 kilometers away. Dr. Ainley explained
that even if he caught him and brought him back to the colony, he would
immediately head right back for the mountains. But why?
One of these disoriented, or deranged, penguins showed up at the New Harbor
diving camp, already some 80 kilometers away from where it should be.
The rules for the humans are do not disturb or hold up the penguin. Stand still
and let him go on his way. And here, he's heading off into the interior of the
vast continent.
With 5, 000 kilometers ahead of him, he's heading towards certain death.
> consider that the idea of not cleaning your hands directly led to disease was considered literal insanity (see the tragic history of Ignaz Semmelweis) prior to germ theory
I was under the impression that it wasn't so much that people considered the idea insane, as that they hated Semmelweis and were therefore strenuously opposed to anything associated with him.
I started playing a game a few years ago--given a headline, guess whether the buried lede is an advertisement for a book. Is it about someone dead or a banal new factoid about someone dead? Almost certainly yes. At some point, it stopped being a game and started being They Live.
This, though, puts it to shame. It's like seeing a move in Go or Chess where you wouldn't think to make it yourself, but can see the implications of why it was done and sigh appreciatively in regards to the craft itself.
How do you motivate consumers to buy more books when attention is fixed, taxed, and waning? And there's a cultural trend amongst the literate towards slower, more intentional living? Convince them that rapidly multiplexing and timeslicing between ten books is actually slower than the intentionally slower consumption of one. Slyly suggest that you'll also rack up a higher book count as well.
How do you receive more product placement revenue while shying away from being perceived as a vehicle for product placement? Cloak thirty advertisements in a morass of trendy deep workism and throw in The Road as a red herring.
It's beautiful to watch in the sheer chutzpah of it all. It's a little too clever and it makes my tool-assisted sense tingle.
Susie Mesure's only other article (for the Guardian--she's freelance and a real person) was published the day before this one and is literally a deep advertisement by and for Microsoft, so who knows? Maybe we're already in the event horizon of Adverturing and its consequences.