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Comment by forgotAgain | Hacker News Reader

As I reached about half way through the article I got bored and my mind starting having stray thoughts

- god this is long. Isn't it ironic that a superstar programmer would have been bored by now and stopped reading.

- momentarily after that, I guess I just admitted that I'm not s superstar programmer.

- momentarily after that, I wonder if there are writers who can transmit ten times as much information using one tenth of the words.

- just now, I imagine magazines don't want superstar writers. That would diminish the amount of ad space they could sell.

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You can achieve faster reading rates with this sort of stuff by only reading one sentence from the middle of each paragraph, or reading the second and last sentence in the rare case that the middle sentence wasn't enough. The content is of such low density that it takes little more than that to decode the meaning and intent of the article.

This is unfortunately true for most web articles and blog posts.

I tend to do this somewhat subconsciously when I start to realize the content is sparse.

I subscribe to the Economist and listen to it during my commute. Many of their articles are verbose, but it's still better, IMO, than many alternatives.

Yeah I barely made it through. I'm pretty sure this is a fluff marketing piece / near press release anyways.

You might be interested in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/...

I'm reading it right now and, if nothing else, can totally relate to "I can't concentrate on things very well anymore" feeling.

Oh, no... Not that thing again.I don't want to go too much off topic but to quote xkcd "More harm has come from people decrying societal decline, than societal decline ever has."

I like how Carr's own sentiment mirror the sentiment of people who thought books will stop people from remembering things. And he wants us to return to books?

Ugh, no. I suppose you've extrapolated quite a bit from the title. Carr thinks the benefits of the internet are massive, undeniable, and (probably) inevitable.

He's simply pointing out evidence that our tools change the way we think. He makes the same point about clocks, maps, books, etc.

The book has zilch to do with societal decline in the sense you mean it.

Hey, you're exactly right. Most articles have really terrible information density and this is one of them.

For example Paul Graham's essays are often very insightful, but they are frustratingly long. The core idea, which is the only reason why I am reading the essay, can be summarized into 1 - 3 sentences. The rest is just a boring extrapolation and repetition of that.

Paul Graham's essays are often very insightful, but they are frustratingly long.

First time PG has been denounced for verbosity?

I stopped reading newspapers years ago when I realized they used a full page article to verbosely repeat the article title. Sadly, 140 characters seems to be the correct length for headline news in a society with no attention span.

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