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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

The mathematician Gauss said, "You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length."

This is what almost everyone on the internet gets wrong these days, especially writers on medium and other blogging platforms, but also writers on the BBC and the Guardian. Their articles are too long and padded.

I guess I can't fully blame them. Google prioritizes lengthy texts as a signal of being authoritative and comprehensive. Most texts these days are twice as long as they need to be.

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This is the problem I have with long form articles. They are promoted as a counter reaction to short shallow articles without substance. Though most of these long form articles are just as shallow. Starting a articles on physics by the description on how a professor wiped his horn rimmed glasses that shimmered in the morning light only to have them steam up again by his first sip of chocolade brown coffee.

> We met in a north London café lined with books, where he calmly unpacked his concerns about the quantum gravity status quo ...

That is fine and quite humane. But sometimes one has to scroll to find the real start of the article.

Nice example. At that point there's a subtle shift in emphasis from quantum gravity as the subject of the article to "my experience talking with a leading quantum gravity researcher" as the subject of an article. What the article is selling is the experience, rather than the knowledge. Which is fine in and of itself, except when that becomes an overly popular pivot and one feels inundated in indirection.

Do you want an experience, or do you want information? The right writing style is very much dependent on the answer to that question.

False dichotomy. Tight writing produces both. For example, there's a quote about Simenon to the effect of "nobody else can in so few words recreate the entire atmosphere of a time and place (france in the ~30s)".

New-Yorker-style long-form articles are a different reading experience compared to an article intended to deliver factoids. These articles are not meant to just deliver news. They are meant to be immersive and also educational. They end up being long-winded because they paint a more comprehensive picture of a particular topic's history, outlook, and also the proponents and detractors involved. The descriptions of the people are intended to give you sense of their mentality and what drives them to champion or fight the article's topic.

Quality can also vary wildly of course. Tight writing also applies to long-form. You do not want to end up meandering.

At their best, they are art. They’re more than a transfer of raw information. They are an extreme compression format.

Sometimes they fall far short of that goal

I think I agree with you

Agree. It is also the mindset.

If I am reading Gauss, my mind wants to process facts immediately.

If I am reading the New Yorker, my mind would like to wander a bit.

It all depends on what you are reading.

A new yorker style article explaining for loops in a programming language. Yeah nobody wants that.

Coming soon to McSweeney's : Gore Vidal's unpublished memoirs of iterative exhaustion during that summer on Fire Island.

Modern books are too long, too. Let's take something like "Atomic Habits", which was god knows how often recommended in various places.. it can be summarised on a few pages max. (Gauss would probably only need 1/3rd of a page..) I think it's psychology and psychology only why those books are too long: 1. more paper seems like it's worth more, so they can charge the $20 or whatever .. 2. reading 4 pages seems trivial, reading 400 is an accomplishment. Having accomplished something (even if its B.S.) increases likelihood that we recommend it, because we want to brag

A few pages? You barely need a single sentence. "Build lasting habits by recognizing how triggers lead to action."

Yeah, one of the problems with being too abstract is that it's open to many interpretations, most of them incorrect. Also, a few pages or paragraphs won't stick; I need examples. I'm not a computer; installing new ideas in my brain isn't like installing apps. My brain prefers storytelling to better grasp ideas and make them its own.

Agreed, but many self-help books either waste their time by making dubious claims from half-sourced research, using useless anecdotes, or repeating the problem in different ways. The best ones actually tell stories of different ways of using its method to solve a variety of problems.

Absolutely, that contextualization can be so useful even if some deem it fluffy. Also no one is obligated to read every single word of a book, if you don't want the anecdotes and case studies, you can skip them! They are helpful for the rest of us.

Ok, but a few sentences explaining what each of those terms mean would be ideal.

This is why there is a paid app that gives you summaries of books everyone is talking about so that you don't have to read them but also won't be left out. For most popular books these days, totally sufficient.

Modern "books". A lot of the problem is that these books, like atomic habits, aren't actually vehicles for information transfer. They're growth hacking blog spam. See also: Deep Work, The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck (one of the cringiest things I've read), etc... With this style of book, it's almost always evident by mid-way through chapter 01 that there's no actual book-length warranting content present. They all share that same padded undergrad college paper style of saying nothing about anything by massively over quoting and citing things that don't need quoted or cited.

Deep Work was such an egregious example of betraying its own principles by cluttering up a thesis for the sake of the NYT bestselling list and in doing so wasting its readers’ time.

Yeah almost every nonfiction book is like this which makes me hate reading them (plus half the stuff in psychology/behavioral economics books is unreplicated fabulation).

Small subthread derailment - nonfiction books which are worth the full length. I'll start:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb; Gödel, Escher, Bach; The Ancestor's Tale; Bad Pharma

There's a similar quote: "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.", often attributed to Mark Twain.

Indeed. I think that most excellent writers have realized the advantage of writing concisely. I just like Gauss's version the best because he is one of my favourite mathematicians.

And often attributed to Pascal.

Not just Google is to blame. In college it wasn't unusual to have minimum length requirements for written work.

I once got into an argument with the teacher for a psychology elective. I asked her to indicate which oft the expected aspects I did not address, but she said she didn't even read it because "it was too short so it couldn't possibly cover everything". I padded it with a bunch of meaningless fluff, resubmitted it and it was accepted.

Really? I've only ever encountered requirements of a _maximum_ length...

I see that you are from Israel, perhaps there is a different practice as compared to my experience in the United States.

All through middleschool, highschool, and college every writing assignment has had a minimum word or page count.

Sometimes we had maximum requirements, but oftentimes just a minimum.

I was nearly a straight-A student on writing assignments in college. I'd often write well below the minimum requirements by filling out my outline, then I'd add fluff around it to reach the minimum words without actually adding any meaningful content, still scored fine.

Truly a profound waste of time.

> I padded it with a bunch of meaningless fluff, resubmitted it and it was accepted.

Similar story here. In college I got extremely good at adding fluff to reach minimum word counts, I performed well on almost all writing assignments doing this. I would write an outline, fill it out with useful information, and then turn a couple sentences of actual content into multiple paragraphs each.

I had an advanced math exam (in physics) and I was at my second page for exercise 1 when the prof wandered around the class. He stopped at me, read a bit, sighted and then said loudly "ladies and gentlemen, I just would like to point out that if your handwriting is not too big, the solution to exercise 1 could fit on one line, max two. Thank you."

What a way to fuck up my day :)

On the flip side, a friend’s thesis was under the university’s mandated minimum word count. She struggled with it for a while but decided to not pad it with fluff and instead deliver what she thought was good, ignoring that requirement. The panel at the defence praised her thesis for being short and concise, in direct contrast to her colleagues’ meandering.

I don’t think they realised that by lowering (or removing) a single integer on the guidelines, they would improve the lives of students, the faculty, and everyone who will ever read those papers.

“I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” — Blaise Pascal

Apparently also said by Locke, Franklin, and a bevy of other famous figures too. Good advice, even if the source is unclear.

Source is quite clear, Blaise Pascal, Lettres Provinciales (1657) (repeating after https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/)

That’s also true of many management books, where what could have been communicated in 10 to 50 pages has been diluted in 200 pages. I kind of understand why authors and editors were doing that when all books were printed: a 200 pages book looks more “serious”. But in the era of ebooks, it shouldn’t matter anymore.

I feel like there has to be a way to optimize for economy the same way you can similarly write a program/code snippet that accomplishes a specific output in as few lines and operations as possible but I just can't seem to make it happen for the most part. Always the obsession to endlessly qualify, pontificate, and inabillity to settle on one simple idea with 100% conviction its necessary and sufficient and that I am "okay" for it.

My strategy as a professional writer is to take my near-final version and then simply have a goal of reducing it to at least 75% of the original. There are always superfluous words in a text which has not yet gone through a good reduction.

Articles are also commonly paid for by the word, and so for anyone paid to write articles it rarely pays to spend more time per word unless doing so gets them a reputation boost sufficient to significantly boost their rate per word.