Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

> When an article starts like this, I instantly close it

Why? You don't believe in car crashes or what?

I think they probably mean “article that’s meant to share research but mostly shares anecdotes”. It’s a common framing for this kind of thing though, so they probably have to close a lot of articles after the first sentence.

A friend of mine told me a few days ago that he thinks LLMs are already smarter than most humans. I agreed with him instantly.

Someone who wants to tell you something true doesn't lead their communication with emotional distraction. Kinda like how someone who is asking a real question doesn't disguise the question as an insult.

It's not emotional distraction, it establishes the reason the subject was getting blood tests, which is revealed later in the same sentence. If this is your level of reading stamina you must find yourself very poorly informed. Even a tweet would be too long for you.

You will not build reading stamina or make yourself well informed with sappy stories. Learn some basic statistics and try reading research papers directly. "I have read more words" is a measure of only that, and nothing else. Maybe also a measure of the ability to not be able to separate wheat from chaff.

tldr

it's just fucking annoying, really. just a really irritating, baity way to write

>Someone who wants to tell you something true doesn't lead their communication with emotional distraction.

This seems needlessly cynical. Someone can have multiple objectives in writing, to tell you facts and also to capture your attention or to convey an emotion and motivate you to action. Very little writing is done with a single purpose in mind. We don’t expect academics drafting research papers to eschew concerns about the impact the writing will have on their career for example.

Starting a story with an anecdote that humanizes the information is simply acknowledging the reality that people want more than just facts. If the latter was all they wanted, most of us would only read encyclopedias and textbooks.

In this case it really was just pointless distracting filler. The article would have been better without it. I reach for different books when I want drama or entertainment than when I want data and research. This article promises one thing and then clumsily shoves something else in randomly throughout. It really is obnoxious.

It's extremely lazy "writing".

Seems absolutely unnecessary, forced, immeasurably trite, off-puttingly boring, overused, so brazenly cliché that there has to be some kind of counter-intuitive selection going on, like with the email scammers that target those who are not immediately noticing the fraudulent intent.

... or simply our arrogance is showing, after all average minds discuss people, right?

How many major national magazines have published your superior articles?

How many major national magazines publish good articles? The inverted pyramid is from newspapers and bears resemblance to scientific publishing while magazines bear more resemblance to the human interest crap between events when presenting the Olympics. Perfectly fine I suppose but then it's nice if they don't get confused about appropriate subjects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com