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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Kind of. The guy in this ad is portrayed as a slacker who didn't read the report everyone was expected to read. He presumably received the report well in advance of the meeting, he just didn't bother to look at it.

This is very different from someone who was given a report he/she could not possibly have read in time!

This guy is the person who uses Sparknotes instead of doing his homework. I'm all for efficiency, but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary.

Of course, maybe in this brave new world we're living in, the report's author did just write a summary, then used AI to turn it into a multi-page document, which readers used AI to turn back into a summary.

Is this what we want?

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> if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report, they'd just have written the summary

That is not my experience with corporate writing in the slightest.

Yes, but... that's bad corporate writing, right? I suppose you could argue that's the reality for many, but it's not what we should aspire to! The solution isn't to add AI summarizers, it's to stop writing BS!

Easier said than done, I get it. But I'm scared of AI normalizing this. What happens when no one, even the good writers, can write for actual people any more, because everything is uniformly thrown into an AI?

It's already normalised. If companies were capable of rewarding insight rather than volume they'd be doing it already. If anything, normalising the use of AI to reduce a report to its valuable insights should reduce the incentive to pad out reports.

Or AI tools will be used to pad out the reports making the author look prolific while knowing everyone will summarize the report to important parts.

> Or AI tools will be used to pad out the reports making the author look prolific

But everyone will know everyone can do this. So it will stop impressing anyone, maybe.

> but if a summary could fully capture the report, the author wouldn't have written the report

I'm curious if you work in a corporate environment. Middle management gets swamped with stuff like this because the person who wrote the reports thinks the longer the better to show off how good they are at their job.

Amazon fought this trend with their commonly referred 1-pager and >=6-pagers.

I don't have hard rules like Amazon, but one of my common pushbacks on my team is make documents shorter.

> He presumably received the report well in advance of the meeting...

Where'd you get that from? That everyone else had read it / lied about reading it?

Yeah, the alternative is that everyone else lied and the boss has impossible expectations of his team. That's absolutely possible but not my default assumption.

Realistic alternative: life happens. By my experience, most of other people in that room probably only skimmed the prospectus, but even if they all read it carefully, maybe this one guy had a really busy couple days. Deadlines at work, kids getting sick, etc. With a dozen people in a room, sheer probability demands that every now and then, someone will be unprepared through no fault of their own. In this ad, it happens to be that guy.

In other words: beware of fundamental attribution error.

Sure, fine, but then the guy could have said "I'm sorry, my kids have been sick all week and I've been working on Project X, I haven't had time to read the Prospectus yet."

Instead, he lied. And while I don't think that's some unforgivable crime—there are absolutely circumstances that could justify it—I don't think that's what the ad is portraying. You have to go out and come up with additional external factors which the ad does not provide evidence for.

The guy was clearly zoned out and caught off guard. And yeah, maybe that's because he was taking care of a crying newborn all night and is sleep deprived, but that's not the simplest explanation or the one Apple intended for us to think about.

I think you'd have to go outside what's on the screen to draw any conclusions about how much time everyone else spent reading the prospectus.

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