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Comment by lultimouomo | Hacker News Reader

> Funny, how suddenly a tight, 1-2 sentence response on point is a sign of skill.

Wasn't it always?

I agree, anecdotally I've always noticed a huge amount of my peers lacked professional communication skills even pre-LLMs.

A lot of people get this idea that "more verbosity = better" instead of optimizing for conciseness and information-density. I largely blame minimum word-count essays from school assignments.

Would you like me to edit this mess for you? You’re way too verbose..

Verbosity can be fine, but you'd want a simple enough text, with the verbosity separated. I still write emails with footnotes, and thanks to UTF-8 I now have all the numbers available.

Amusingly enough the advent of HTML-emails didn't produce any better formatted mails, despite the extra formatting options, than what you can do with a plain text email supported by a proper text editor.

Verbosity is, among other things, a cover-your-ass move. Stating something simply requires cutting details that might matter sometimes. If your counterparty or experience has made this painful, you'll likely write more.

"As brevity is the soul of wit, I shall be brief. [then bloviates on and on.]" ~Polonius

I’d have written a shorter comment, but I didn’t have the time.

That's the essence of it, I suppose. Cheap walls of text.

Edit: although another quote comes to mind- "Quantity has a quality of its own."

Was also a power signal, often demonstrated by execs who send three or four word replies to everything, often also in lower case with no punctuation.

sama tweets like this all the time, totally performative

Depends. A lot of the 1-2 sentence rapid responders from my past jobs weren’t really understanding the problem. They were virtue signaling that they were confident, fast to respond, and understood immediately (without elaborating)

It’s easy to send a pithy response that suggests experience and understanding without having either. Think of a middle manager spouting pithy buzzword laden cliches confidently in response to every request, then transferring the real problem to the grumbling employees who have to solve the actual hard parts of the problem which lie in the nuance.

This is a core problem of short-form social media (including HN): it’s easy to signal understanding or expertise without having to demonstrate it.

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