Reflection Is Cooked

I wanted to understand this, but was impatient enough to skip.

It was during the second paragraph or so:

> <Mara> Cultural note: the Gaokao is one of the toughest college entrance exams in the world. Think of it as the SAT but the police fly helicopters over the testing centres in order to prevent cheating. Kids in China start preparing for it as early as kindergarten. Your Gaokao score is the only thing that matters in your college application. A friend reports "your life is basically over if you don't do well in it". It's no wonder that it's used as a test for large language model performance.

I first didn't notice because the exam subject was interesting, but do I need to click links and read other texts to care about ficticuous characters?

Combined with the angle brackets it made me skip the rest, but that doesn't mean I want to flame this post in any way.

It's just the moment where my "general interest" attention span says no.

Without recommendation, I tend to skip texts that require me to "know" non-factual stuff unrelated to the main plot.

Same as with books, movies or other blog posts.