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lucb1e

Title: LHC nightmare

First paragraph: "I finished highschool in ..."

Second paragraph: "Little did I realize"

Third paragraph: "Since I entered physics"

Fourth paragraph: "During my professional career"

Fifth paragraph: "When I look at"

Sixth paragraph: "For the last ten years you’ve been told that the LHC must see some new physics besides the Higgs because otherwise nature isn’t “natural” - [...]. I’ve been laughed at when I explained that I don’t buy into naturalness"

Seventh paragraph: "The idea of naturalness"

Eighth paragraph: "we’ve entered what has become known as the “nightmare scenario” for the LHC: The Higgs and nothing else."

Ah, the article starts in the eighth paragraph. Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9.

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Some of us enjoy reading and writing like this. Writing especially in non-expository formats is more than just communicating the thesis of an article. Background and personal touch are often entertaining.

Take your comment for example. Your comment's thesis is the last sentence "Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9", but delaying that to the end yields a different effect for the reader than if you began with the thesis and then supplied examples.

> Take your comment for example..

This is not analogous. If parent had begun the comment with a personal history of experience in reading verbose articles with clickbait-y headlines that then meander to the actual meat of the bait, then it'd be similar.

The parent comment is instead succinctly presenting evidence /observations which build to a conclusion. Not the same thing.

Except lucb1e's critique was actually entertaining, because I stopped reading the post myself because it was just so much fluff. All that high school college la-di-da stuff.

I understand your viewpoint completely, I used to enjoy these articles too. Thousands of words on a single topic, no problem.

But time went on and I got tired of it. I discovered time is not infinite even when I have about sixty years ahead of me. I don't read mainstream news because knowing about the latest terror attack (or even positive news, like the latest rare animal being born in a zoo) doesn't help me in any way. Most of the time it just makes me feel bad for or angry about something that I can do nothing about nor affects me in any way.

I still read fiction as a past time activity and as I said, I used to enjoy these articles too, so I understand your point. It's just not the format I like to read for news.

(As for my own comment, burying the main thing, in my defense: it has structure that you can skip past very easily until the last sentence. But again, I see your point.)

This isn't a news article. It's the electronic equivalent of some person's diary. If you want something more formal, you'll probably be better served by skimming arXiv or subscribing to Nature.

i avoid most news also, meant to make me feel bad or angry to support someone else's gain.

also with time, it should be common practice to highlight the tldnr parts.

i could t help but think though, i thought the nightmare scenario for the LHC was to create a singularity and suck us all into a black hole ^_^

I've been on vacation for a while (can't escape HN) and this discussion strikes me as uptight, granular, and overall a waste of time. Read the article however you want and get on with life.

>Some of us enjoy reading and writing like this. [...] Background and personal touch are often entertaining.

Here's my guess on why the article's slow build up irrated many readers: It was the apocalyptic armageddon title and then the first sentence the reader sees is, "I finished high school in 1995."

If the title is bombastic or provocative, your readers are going to want the Inverted Pyramid[1].

Had the author titled it something more toned down like, "Coming to grips with LHC's lack of new particle discoveries" ... the immediate juxtaposition of "I finished high school in 1995" wouldn't have been such a letdown. The phrase "coming to grips" sets up the reader to sit back and relax for a "timeline".

Put another way, if the writer puts a promising title but buries the reader with personal details, it is often seen as a self-indulgent style of writing that does not respect the readers' time.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid

That's fine, but just sell what you're peddling and put your thesis at the top. A thesis including plenty of personal touch is just fine.

If you're going to have a title like 'LHC nightmare scenario" tell me precisely what it is -- briefly -- in the first paragraph and then introduce me to the fact that we're going to follow your maturing into a physicist and how that went along with the development and end with a good bang of expanding on that nightmare scenario.

Don't lure me in with a grabby title and then ignore it until the end. Make an interesting title, sell the title and the rest of the article in the first paragraph, and then get to the content.

I enjoy reading about the lives of scientists, just let me know that that's what I'll be reading.

It must be nice to be immortal. You're immortal right? The rest of us have limited time.

I am a slow reader and every paragraph which is not about "the thing" makes me question the value of what I'm reading.

Clicking on a title with this amount of drama and urgency, I expect to read something related to the title. So I see this as clickbait of sorts.

Makes me wonder if writing of this type comes from educational requirements having a word minimum, equating wordiness with value.

Similar to YouTube tutorials filling 5 minutes with fluff before the 30 seconds of what I was hoping to see.

I wish there was a "scroll to the topic related to the link you clicked" kind of thing.

It is an article on a personal blog. Really I find this post to be very cogent and well written, even extremely-so by personal blog post standards.

Edit: (tongue in cheek) maybe you can find something more in line with your expectations here: https://www.google.ca/search?tbm=isch&q=physics+comic+strips

Oh I actually hadn't noticed it's a personal blog, that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for responding.

Here's what I read on each paragraph:

1p: The mathematics that allow physicists to reconstruct the structure of matter is fascinating.

2p: The standard model, though ugly, is still undefeated (with examples).

3p: The LHC hasn't led to the discovery of new particles, and physicists are in denial (with examples and a link).

4p: There is a worrying trend about the failure to learn from failure.

5p: The trust in naturalness/beauty/simplicity to guide the search for a unified model is not working.

6p: Turns out "naturalness" is philosophical, not scientific.

7p: Physicists are opportunistic, so they'll try to justify a larger collider to try to discover new particles.

8p: The nightmare scenario: no new particles discovered with the LHC, so physicists have no guidance to continue.

9p: We've been doing it wrong with the use of naturalness as guidance. You can't trust the judgement of scientists when their future funding depends on continuing working in this direction.

So paragraphs 1 through 7 do offer a good background to support his thesis that "naturalness as guidance" is wrongheaded, which is the real point of the article. If you only read the last paragraphs his thesis sounds shaky and arbitrary.

What's worse is that a potentially interesting HN comment thread about physics was derailed by your nit picky comment about article structure.

Now the rest of the comments on this thread are mostly banal arguments about writing style instead of the LHC.

The 2nd and 3rd exposes what's the article about: that there are no new physics to discover from LHC. The 8th paragraph only confirms what the title means. Frequently, the paragraph beginnings are not meaningful. It is better to skim the end of the paragraphs too.

I don't mind this kind of writing for this length of article. I like it in fact. It took me much less to read it than to write this comment.

You could have cut out your first 9 paragraphs and got straight to the point.

Thanks. This http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hope-for-new-parti... is the real content here.

Edit: This quote from the scientific american article provides a counter-perspective

“We would have been very lucky if we found something, some new phenomenon or some new state of matter at this early stage,” says CMS physicist Tiziano Camporesi. “But we have to be patient.”

I have started reading articles like that, including this one. I think it's just because in this age there are a lot of articles that are stretched to be long enough to be an article and not just a tweet or what have you.

The frustration I think is because you have a very specific title, promising to have a very specific insight, and then it starts in 1980 and promises to bring you up to 2016....

I actually had the same reaction to that Bloom Filter article yesterday. But I ultimately skipped the first 3 and then got into it.

I am the first person to chafe at discursive writing about things I'm trying to learn or be informed, but to be fair this one isn't completely aggravating to me. Seems more like setting the stage than something like a Pioneer Woman Cooks recipe where an extended anecdote leads to a banal segue. "And that's when I noticed that both my niece and her puppy liked sweets, so I decided to go home that day and make these sugar cookies..."

>Ah, the article starts in the eighth paragraph. Summary: read paragraphs 8 and the last, 9.

Perhaps you mean "the subject of the title" begins in the eight paragraph.

The essence of an article or book or movie is not always at the title. Nor it's necessary for it to move to what the title says as fast as possible.

>The essence of an article or book or movie is not always at the title.

Also good to know: Headlines in newspapers are not written by the reporter, that is traditionally up to the copy-editor.

Titles of books are often not chosen by the author either.

A title or headline isn't a promise, it's a 'hook.' There is no reason to get mad once you understand that.

This is a totally idiotic summary of a well written article.

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