> [Opening Paragraph of Article:] One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: [...]
Am I in the minority, when seeing this writing style (for articles covering this kind of content) becomes an instant turn-off?
When an article covers a technical subject or company, I don’t really care whether a founder had an awkward nervous walking gate, or that the conference hall was “perched” on the edge of the SF bay.
In fact, I’d prefer not to focus on such superficial things about people (or places), at least until I exhaust learning about the facts with substance!
So when I read about something like AI (or an AI company), I tend to want to see fact-oriented, event-oriented, concise writing up front (even if it doesn’t have the scope to dive into technical details), so as to grab my attention and reassure me that reading these 10-20 pages of prose will be worth the reading time (in a world of overwhelming information overload).
When I read science fiction (and I do love this too!), I enjoy the paragraphs setting the scene, verbally illustrating mental images, etc. So, it’s not that I don’t enjoy the writing style in general; just that I don’t understand why it’s applied here.
I am still reading this article and I still have no clue if it’s going to contain any useful information content other than textual descriptions of the Deep Mind founders’ superficial walking gate style and speech mannerisms, and perched-ness of various building locations.