Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting

    I think this can be worse than ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge coupled with the confidence that comes from thinking you understand something you've never actually encountered. These people walk around armed with headlines masquerading as insights, ready to deploy half-digested talking points in conversations that require actual thought. They've become human echo chambers, amplifying signals they never bothered to decode.

Compare the journey of Newton inventing calculus to that of the modern day student learning it in a semester. The student is presumably experiencing "compression", but the alternative is they spend their whole life merely returning the point that humanity has already achieved.

If someone tells me they did a scientific study that proves that changing the color of my phone background will save some percentage of my battery life per day, should I spend the time to reproduce this experience without compression, or should I take this knowledge and use it to improve my life as I move forward?

Sometimes it is of course dangerous to act on the "compressed data", you need to unpack it to either understand it or evaluate its truthfulness, but just knowing that doesn't magically grant you the time to uncompress all the data you receive, you plainly couldn't function in modern society that way.

Instead we develop heuristics about which information we accept at the summary level and which we need to delve into more deeply. The alternative is never accomplishing anything because you're too busy re-doing all of human history.

> Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue.

Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.

I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.

The opposite is also true though. I'd argue it's even truer: we treat verbosity as depth, or at least as substance.

To an extent we're becoming wired to skim content because that content has been so deeply interleaved with items that aren't just extraneous, they're not even from the storyteller. I'd suggest this capability is even a kind of survival skill, akin to not only being able to spot motion in a dense jungle but to also instinctively focus on certain kinds of motion.

There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.

Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.

Writing a journal used to be more of a common thing that educated people did, but nowadays I guess social media is too big of a distraction…not the mention the question of whether anyone would read a journal as opposed to the simplified sloganeered book public figures typically put out today.

For some specific recommendations: I am about halfway through Harry Kessler’s 1890-1915 journals, and I just started George H. W. Bush’s journal on his time in China. Both are pretty insightful so far.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_von_Kessler

2. https://www.amazon.com/China-Diary-George-Bush-President/dp/...

I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.

Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.

HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.

This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.

Generating knowledge is an exercise in compression. It is helpful to deliver insights to readers. Consuming knowledge is important to keep your pulse in your field. Only consuming leads can create an illusion of understanding but no real usable knowledge that can provide value to the community.

The issue is that we live in an information glut and one can now live a life spending all their time consuming, but never creating for themselves.

I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.

I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.

I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.

‘No long sermons’: how influencer Catholic priests are spreading the word of God online

  Vatican invites 1,000 social media missionaries to digital jubilee conference

Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest.

A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.

I generally agree with the broad strokes of this post, but this description gives me pause. How do we know that listeners didn't grow impatient? Though I suppose it would take a good deal of compression to answer this :)

I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff.

I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well.

She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart.

I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.

I felt it put words to an experience I wrote about learning to "play" the piano: https://jondlm.github.io/website/blog/the_joy_of_discovery/

Cheers to all of you out there trying to slow down.

Honestly, I think a big part of the difference is simply how concepts are communicated. Richard Feynman really was that good at explaining physics concepts using every day examples.

It's also not always obvious when you need to stop and go into detail, and when a general grasp of a concept will be enough.

We started from there, with the economics of book selling dictating how long an idea was supposed to be, and we have moved smaller and smaller, as the economics have changed. Substack actually increased the expected length of writing. If people are paying for a newsletter, they want to feel like they got something. I haven't found any substacks that reliably contain more substance than shorter blog posts by the same author.

He puts forward the position that the medium controls how we interact with information. When the information is scarce (and as a consequence: dense) like books, you have to spend a lot more time interacting with said information to understand it. When it's overwhelmingly abundant and easily accessible (TV, internet) information is entirely discardable. We see the effects of this more intensely in the current internet age where traditional teaching methods (book learning) seems to be oft complained about because we raise a generation to expect education to be packaged in a similar format as what they see on the internet: as entertainment.

As one example, this implies that everything has a high signal-to-noise ratio and we are now bad at paying attention to the signal. But the base rate of SnR I think is much worse. I think there has to be value in being able to skip a lot of the noise with better and better technology.

On "um"s and "uh"s, I read a good article recently how humans are good at turn taking (while AIs struggle) and that ums/uhs/like help signal we are not done with our turn. There is no turn taking when watching a video so I personally value removing these and providing a higher SnR.

So I'm stuck feeling and agreeing with these articles, yet rationally also finding good counter points.

I don't think it's "%s culture" but just 'culture', a culture which has embraced social media apps prioritizing short forms of communication which lack the nuance as explained in the article. A culture that needs to go faster and faster either for dopamine[0] or profits. Number go up and number go up faster.

It's pretty hard to break this when many of our social signals for success and survival are now wired up like this.

It's also why you need to memorize a bunch of leetcode to get a job as a developer now. Who cares about the nuance that most jobs won't need it? Google is doing it, and so should we.

[0] replace with whatever neurological process that gives instant gratification

I would much rather search personal blogs of people to find really interesting and informative content but I just don’t have the will power and time to do it properly.

It is much easier to open hackernews, reddit, youtube or even worse, youtube shorts.

There is an obvious conflict of interest between social media and the consumer.

The platform sees the consumer as cattle, they just want the consumer to click/watch more ads, buy more stuff etc.

They measure success by engagement only.

For example if I want to learn some new thing, it would be nice to be able to tell youtube to occasionally recommend a certain kind of video relating to that thing. Instead of trying to “train the algorithm” by creating artificial engagement. This seems very backwards and practically not many people will have time for this kind of thing.

It could be better if every person had time and power to search the full web and find content that not only is reasonably fun to consume but also leaves a good taste after consuming.

here's a summary of this discussion about summarization: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/compression-culture-and-its-i...

This is how most people use LLMs. But I'll go one step further.

We've optimized these systems towards people believing they have learned, rather than measuring loss against actually delivering on that promise.

I think requires some differentiation between type of value.

Some you can certainly separate and condense while others need the lived experience.

Perhaps the split is knowledge vs wisdom…

Hot take alert: Humans are stupid. We've always been stupid. Our brains simply do not have the capacity - in either long term memory or in throughput - to deal with real life.

To deal with this we have always simplified as much as we can.

Sometimes that means putting things into boxes: "Good" or "Bad", "Left" or "Right", "Rich" or "Poor", "Healthy" or "Unhealthy". Reality is always very murky, but simple boxes like this help us to make decisions quickly.

If we did not do this, you could spend a century deciding what to have for breakfast! Thinking about all the aspects - the companies involved and the way they treat their employees, the effect of various industries on the environment and economy, the various nutrients and how they interact with the rest of your diet, the long-term cost, whether it is sufficient variety, how long it takes to eat and whether time is a factor, how hard it is to clean up after, etc, etc.

Just eating breakfast could turn into nearly endless debate and back and forth if you really explored it.

The reality is, humans are not equipped to deal with reality's level of nuance. So, we take mental shortcuts. We place things into boxes. We make assumptions. We build simple hierarchies so we only need to know about what's below and above. (Part of what governments and companies are structured the way they are)

This is not a modern phenomenon - it has always been true about us. However, now there is much more information blasted at us constantly. Our very limited mental resources are more taxed, so we need to start making more assumptions, taking more shortcuts, simplifying things down more.

A lot of people would point to our technology as evidence otherwise, but I think that's a bit false. We only make real technological progress by having large groups of people slam their head against one tiny aspect of a problem for nearly their entire lives. Sometimes we get lucky and get breakthroughs, but that's the exception and not the rule IMO. These days it can take a good third of our lifetimes just to get familiar with the problem we're trying to solve. It's just not sustainable. Our brains are too weak.

So, uh... caveat emptor.

In fact, I'd argue that the entire world is built on abstraction and summarization. It has been ever since humans started to specialize.

What good does it do a baker to understand the entire supply chain of wheat berries? To know the fertilization procedures? To know the kreb cycle? Certainly all of these specific details go into the process of making bread yet none of them are useful for a baker. It's why we could bake bread long before we knew exactly what made plants grow. It's why we've been able to do selective breeding long before we understood exactly what DNA was.

The power of specialization and "compression" is that rather that you the learner can choose what to spend your days learning. That has even caused a rise in symbiotic specializations. For example, a biologist can find a new bone and compare it's structure to the structure of other bones in similar species building out the family tree. A geologist can work with the biologist if they say "I want to look for bones roughly from roughly 600,000CE, where should I be looking?". They have a compressed understanding of what the geologist is capable of just like the geologies has a compressed understanding of what the biologist is doing.

What this article fails to understand is there is simply too much information for any one individual person to know. Compression is a natural outcome of that. The modern world works because we compress our understanding on topics that don't interest us while expanding and decompressing the topics that do.

And, if you want someone to decompress your specific article. To dive in and truly engage with it. Then it's your job to write a good summary that hooks people. You need to give people a reason to want to decompress. If that seems burdensome, maybe it's because you yourself have not taken the time to decompress knowledge of how to write good summaries. That is, you put low value on a summary.

"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"

I see people of all ages saying stuff like "I don't have the patience to watch a full movie uninterrupted". I think its the same thing.

PS. didn't have time to read the huge article, can you summarise?

It feels like there's an assumption that we've reached some kind of a complexity ceiling and compressing complexity below us will just make us dumb? What if we've black-boxed complexity below us so we can explore more complexity above us?

Maybe the argument is that the rate of compressing complexity below us is faster than expanding the complexity space above us? And the result is that it makes us run out of knowledge of digest and explore? Perhaps the answer to that is to make people more curious to go out and explore the complexity above us so we can generate that knowledge.

This isn't just needing to be better at "effective communication", which I accept is something I'm not great at. What has surprised me instead is the level at which I feel I have to aim has been consistently lowered.

There has always been a risk on the internet of getting dragged into an argument of semantics, but what feels new and fresh, is the risk of getting dragged into an argument with someone who couldn't comprehend the point at all.

I also despair at the crowd who desire to absorb all knowledge (often via summary), rather than enjoy the journey. The crowd who think a novel like "Consider Phlebas" is better handled by reading,

> A shape-shifting agent allied with the Idirans, is sent on a mission to retrieve a fugitive AI Mind that has gone missing on a forbidden, war-ravaged planet. His journey takes him through a series of perilous encounters—including space battles, cannibal cults, and a doomed mercenary crew—as he races against time and enemies to complete his objective in the midst of a vast interstellar war.

Than reading the novel itself. Content with their summary they move on to devour the next knowledge-goal.

I do kind of get it. I get that it's easier to get along in life having a wide basis of knowledge-hooks with a few niches of real interest. It's easier to feel smart if you feel you have context for conversations, rather than risk appearing "ignorant" by asking the conversation partner to themselves expand and inform you.

I also look at my own impatience. My own diminishing attention span, and my ever decreasing ability to juggle work without distraction and constant consumption of the HN news ticker.

I recently got a new laptop. Firefox informs me I've visited HN 7,765 times. That's not healthy. Many of those is simply opening and immediately closing it, or navigating to and from comments, but it's a very unhealthy habit, born of a desire to constantly consume information without actually putting in what would be hard work and effort of fully reading all the articles.

Including this one. I managed a few paragraphs and skimmed the rest.

https://lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/rushing-making-us-dumb...

There is a reason why scientific papers have abstracts at the beginning: because in order to have time to do deep thinking, scientists need to be able to triage the always-enormous pile of papers that have come across their desks and decide if they're worth reading.

I want this now for basically every link in HN. If I open an a link and after a paragraph I'm still asking WTF is this about?, then I ask Safari to summarize it for me and decide from that point whether I want to read the rest or not. Sorry, but HN's curation is not good enough to determine that for me, and almost every other automated or crowdsourced system is worse.

Of course, I would not have commented to the author that I wanted him to provide a tl;dr. I would have just moved on silently. This is probably good for him, because it provides a selection bias in his readers that they are (somehow) interested in what he has to say.

This is dumb. No matter how many thousands of pages you write you cannot convey the feeling of these without experiencing it. So might as well as summarize it.

tl;dr- Write better, stop abusing the privilege of our time.

It's always been like that and always will be.

The entire point of the article is that you're not a humanoid robot whose entire purpose is to process signals for some utilitarian purpose in the borg collective, it's that you're a human being who engages with culture to develop your own mind.

If you're being spoonfed information at the highest rate you can handle, when do you actively engage with what is happening in front of you? The reason why a priest in a mass is giving you ample silence and not the "tldr" version of the sermon is because that silence is productive, it's when you use the active part of your mind, rather than just absorbing information like a machine.

The fact that people can't even comprehend this any more and just want things to be fed to them, completely passive recipients, not engaged in any contemplation, which requires there to be "little signal" at times so there's space is what the author is getting at.

> We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless.

This is a reduction. Consider the opposite statement: We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can *never* be whittled down, that difficulty can *never be avoided*, that transformation *must be slow and painful*. Now you see the monster that is being fought when one is learning to summarize, learning to distill, learning to quicken the pace of understanding.

> It's the logical endpoint of an attention economy that treats human focus as a finite resource to be optimized and monetized.

Yet another cheap jab at social media.

> Podcasters are celebrated for "actionable insights" while wandering conversations that might actually lead somewhere unexpected are dismissed as waste.

Thank you for bringing up podcasts. Are they not a counter example to the point of this article? We've gone from quick-hit interviews on news programs and late night talk shows, to slow meditative discussions in the form of podcasts.

"Compression culture" is a deliberate pushback against the gatekeepers. They sit in their coffee shops discussing new ways to create barriers between the peasants and themselves. *Read more books on the subject.* | *Read longer books on the subject.* | *Get certified.* | *Reach tenure.* ... And on and on.

Many works of non-fiction are largely fluff. They take a simple concept and dress it up as elaborately as possible until the reader is completely intimidated and regretful. Sometimes this is done for word count, sometimes this is done because the author lacks the ability to be concise, and sometimes this is done deliberately, to make the author's small insights seem bigger and more important. Rarely is it justified. Compression culture to the rescue.

Compression culture is optimistic. It's inclusive. It's there to overcome problems we were told were impossible. If that's "the transformation without the time" then so be it.

The author argues that modern "compression culture" undermines deep, meaningful experiences by prioritizing efficiency and instant gratification. This culture treats depth as inefficiency, leading to a loss of valuable human experiences like confusion, difficulty, and transformation. The text highlights how historical practices, such as oral traditions and early universities, valued immersion and communal struggle for knowledge. The author criticizes the illusion of knowledge created by consuming compressed information, which leads to superficial understanding and a lack of true wisdom. The document emphasizes that meaningful growth, whether in skills, relationships, or personal development, requires patience, repetition, and engagement with complexity, which cannot be achieved through compression.

Time saved reading: 10min /s