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Comment by phreack | Hacker News Reader

I always insist that education is not storytelling and should not be structured as such. People want to save "twists" and "revelations" for maximum impact and it's harmful. It should actually be the other way around and be, keeping the theme, "spoilery" and repetitive. Like a good presentation you should start by saying what you'll say, say it, then conclude by saying what you said.

LLMs have made this problem extremely worse. Imagine how'd you'd explain what an MCP is in a couple words and technically, then try to look it up. There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point.

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I agree that education is not storytelling, but I think that storytelling can be a useful tool for education.

A lot of Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky posts don't get straight to the point and usually do not follow an intro -> body -> conclusion format. A lot of them start with a story that makes the direction of the post unclear[0] or include long digressions whose value isn't immediately obvious.[1]

For a while, I struggled with this contradiction because I think good writing should quickly demonstrate the value a reader can expect, but I think Graham and Spolsky are excellent writers that frequently take their time in getting to their point.

The easy answer is that Graham and Spolsky are famous, so they can do whatever they want, and people will still read. I've come to think it's actually that writers like Graham and Spolsky are so good that the quality of the writing itself is the thing of value that keeps you interested even if you don't know what point they're going to make.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1] https://paulgraham.com/worked.html

Over the years, readers learned what to expect from Joel and Paul, which gave them freedom to continue writing in their own style. I'm curious how the same writing would be received today in a very different environment - much more crowded and driven more by social media than the open web, not to mention the shift of attention towards video. I just don't think writers today have access to the attention that tech bloggers of an earlier era built up.

There is a balance. A short story can help understand. However you can go too far with stories. Joel strikes a good balance because it isn't long before you realize why the story is relevant and he cuts out a lot of details that are not relevant. He also is telling non-fiction stories, which adds additional credibility (unlike many blogs that are making up fiction stories)

With all due respect, PG and JS were titans of an era where attention spans were not short. I am not sure if that strategy would work in the LLM-era.

I think you are getting confused with the format for the reader. Someone looking for a light read would prefer a entertaining read with the twist of learning something, someone looking to learn something will be annoyed at your prose and narration style. What you write is aimed, whenever you like it or not, to a person in a particular state of mind. The motivated to learn will want you to not tell them about your grandma when they are reading the stupid recipe.

I think that's a factor as well. If the reader has a specific goal in mind, and your blog post presents itself as a way for the reader to satisfy their goal, then the reader will probably have less patience for stories.

But to take Spolsky's "Things You Should Never Do" as an example, obviously nobody's Googling, "things to never do," clicking Joel's article, and then getting annoyed at Joel for not telling them immediately. They're finding the post on HN, RSS readers, forums, etc., where they didn't have a specific goal in mind beyond learning/entertainment, so the author has more room to take their time.

I found Joel Spolsky's blog through tons of snarky StackOverflow non-answers. I can't be alone in that.

To a certain demographic coming of age in the 2000s, yes all of this writing was considered pretentious garbage getting in the way of sincere attempts at learning. They laughed at us from the high ground.

I didn't really enjoy Joel's writing until years later into my career.

I would argue that Joel and Paul's blogs are not education, they are opinion pieces. The fact that many of these opinions have become widely accepted over time doesn't change the format, which is that they are argumentative writing rather than purely informative (as you'd find in a textbook or scientific paper).

And this is exactly what the article fails to account for... they make several blanket assertions that may well make sense for certain types of posts but may not for others.

My 2c is that rule #0 of writing advice should be to take all writing advice with a grain of salt and an eye towards context and audience.

For older readers, see also "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley (originally published the ACM journal, later reprinted as books).

My undergraduate research advisor told me "Papers and presentations are not murder mysteries." I try to keep that in mind whenever I approach explanatory writing, because the purpose is to help the audience reach understanding of where you ended up, not to replicate the epiphany you had yourself.

Heh. Mine, before the diploma defense, literally told me "Assume that the panel knows everything about the math except for the stuff your did in your thesis, so tell them about that. Don't bother explaining what 'error correction codes' are, tell them about your specific construction and practical boundaries you've determined". Which, I guess, is precisely "the reader knows everything I know except this one thing" antipattern but then again, blogging is different from e.g. conference presentation, isn't it?

Yeah, deciding on your assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge is one of the toughest parts of presenting information well, I think. If you give too much info, you come across as boring or patronizing; if you don't give enough info, most (if not all) of your audience will rapidly lose interest. But it's all gotta be based on your exact audience in the moment, and that's really hard to take into account a lot of the time.

> Yeah, deciding on your assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge is one of the toughest parts of presenting information well, I think.

Right, all good (human) communication boils down to both the author and the reader having a theory-of-mind for one-another. The writer must anticipate what a reader will be thinking, and a reader must imagine [0] what the writer wanted to convey.

That's part of what makes the modern epidemic of LLM slop so frustrating: The correctly-formed words make us waste effort trying to reconstruct a mind that was never really there. Like some animals encountering an extremely realistic plastic fake that we cannot eat/mate-with.

Ooh yes, I like that way of framing the problem. I'll have to remember that!

When writing text, you have the advantage of being able to link to another text. In principle academic citations form a DAG that allows you to understand all prerequisite knowledge for any given paper. Your paper is expected to cite everything it depends on that isn't common knowledge but doesn't need to re-explain it.

Well, not necessarily a DAG — a colleague in my field managed to get two submissions accepted at the same conference that cited each other. I'm sure somebody's publications crawler was upset about this at some point...

I remember a smartass kid in year 12 that cited his own essay in the same essay and got points for it being cited properly, but points off for not being a primary source.

Papers are written to peers. It shouldn't be a "murder mystery" for them (that doesn't mean it shouldn't tell a story). You have to write to your audience. If a paper was written to a general audience, instead of peers, every paper would have to be a novel.

I'll admit that sometimes I'm frustrated with HN comments on arxiv articles. Despite being a nerdy forum most papers aren't written for this audience. Hell, I have a PhD and most papers aren't written for me. Nor should they. I'm perfectly okay if I don't understand a paper. Arguably the hardest thing about a PhD is learning to be comfortable with being dumb and willing to work on becoming less dumb (you're never not dumb, only less dumb)

That's true, but I think scientific writing often veers too hard towards impenetrability. At least in machine learning, many of the hallmark papers are remarkably clear and simple in a way that most papers I read day-to-day aren't. Even something as simple as the problem setting can be written insightfully in a strong piece of work.

  > At least in machine learning

You should read math papers lol.

Honestly, I feel the opposite. But maybe that's because my doctorate is in ML. But we might also have a different definition of what the hallmark papers are. Many of the well known papers are ones that model scaled an existing method (ViT and ddpm are good examples). Important papers, but in which sense? I do think we have space for all types of papers and written to different audiences, but I don't think we should punish papers just because they're written to their niche domain. In the past decade there's been a huge increase in citation farming and I don't think that helps. Math is probably too much on one extreme but I think ML is on the other. You have to write your papers so a first year PhD can understand, because they're the ones reviewing your work. I don't think that's a desirable outcome

I feel that this partly due to the fact the these famous/groundbreaking papers will usually be explained to you in many other places before you even read it. So you probably get good understanding of it even before reading the actual paper.

For example, the papers where Einstein presented special relativity suck really but most of people know about it with goor grasp before reading the actual papers (People of that era).

I have found the opposite to be true in conferences, but it might be different for maths than biology?

The worst presentations are always the one that assume that you know every experimental technique and every bit of knowledge. I always took the stance that the audience had at most a master's degree in the field and took care to explain everything, even briefly.

I was handed the paper: A rational design process, how and why to fake it [0]. It's still one of my favorit papers. Basically it tells you to, when writing documentation, go back and put in later findings in the place it would been, if the world had been completely rational. Just leave out all the weaving and late discovery, very few people cares. Retrofit documentation to pretend that everything and everyone was completely rational and had all the knowledge at the correct times. It can cut down documents by a lot.

0) https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE-Intro/fakei...

Sort of squash and rebase before a merge back to main?

My PhD advisor said something similar, but he also said papers tell a story. There are a lot of stories that aren't murder mysteries nor suspense novels. Your paper shouldn't be a novel and especially not a suspense one

If I am reading a cookbook, tutorial, or reference to teach myself quickly so that I can accomplish something specific, I completely agree with you. Blog posts can teach something, of course, but when I choose to read a blog, I am hoping to experience a bit of the writer's personality and to be entertained in the process. Storytelling accomplishes both nicely. Also, when I read a blog post, I am not in a rush and don't want to feel like I should be.

I think the appropriate level of "storytelling" depends on the type of blog post. A "bug hunt" type of post is often told as a detective story. A benchmark post has almost zero storytelling. Different purposes warrant different approaches.

Totally agree, everything is getting turned into a clickbait. The worst is YouTube videos on educational/technical topics. Instead of getting to the point and explaining the main topic of the video they goes into a rambling of history of how everything started and keep on dragging the video to 20 mins when in reality it should have been max. 5min.

Same goes for some blog posts as well, could have been less than 500 words and instead it’s turned into a novel

Following the sequence of a-ha moments in a field is often a useful way to make them happen in the student: at first people thought things stopped after you pushed on them, but then Newton and Galileo realised this was because of a thing called friction, and if there wasn't any friction things wouldn't stop, and this means if you shift your perspective you can change how fast things moved. Later on Maxwell found his equations implied a speed of electromagnetic waves, such as light, but couldn't figure out what perspective it was in. Michelson and Morley tested it and strangely found it was true in all perspectives at once, Einstein made mathematical sense out of that which causes weird effects like time dilation, and our GPS satellites prove time dilation is true.

twists and revelations are just unhelpful especially when someone is trying build a mental model, but I do think there's probably some overlap in pacing and I'll pieces together into a complicated model has some overlap with story telling, because there's definitely bad educational writing which is a slog to get through because they front load a lot of stuff without application.

I do find it kind of annoying when someone has a set of side characters they are trying convey the information through. Like it's cute the first few times you see it but after a while it's grating.

I do think some people for whatever reason also have no issue with the front loaded info dumps, maybe they are looking for a specific piece of information they want to pull not sure. I prefer something a bit structured while having the ability to zoom out and look for the piece later on.

Not everyone consumes information the same, so I don't know there's really a objective best way.

> LLMs have made this problem extremely worse. Imagine how'd you'd explain what an MCP is in a couple words and technically, then try to look it up. There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point

Also this, but I think this might be a result of models of poorly designed benchmarks and training that led to claude reading like an inner monologue and an exhaustive noncommittal statement being certain on very few things, leading a ton of unnecessary prefaces.

There's phone books worth of pages and text that never end up getting to the point.

I don't know if it's still there, but Grammarly used to have an AI feature that specifically made text longer. It was literally a button that says "Make longer."

  > education is not storytelling

I actually disagree. We're humans and we love stories. They keep is engaged and are a good way to compact information. But it also is highly dependent on how it is done. Truth be told, we're constantly telling stories and I think part of the problem is not being cognizant of this.

  > People want to save "twists" and "revelations" for maximum impact and it's harmful.

Maybe I'm misreading you. "Plot twists" would certainly be the wrong implementation. But when teaching one of my goals is to get students to be trying to ask a question that I'm about to answer. That's the story part. I'm leading them down the path and they should have suspicions about what lies around the next corner.

So basically a goal is that I'll stop for questions at some point and if I'm successful there'll be a student that asks a question we've been building up to and that I'm about to ask and/or answer. But there shouldn't be a "plot twist". I'm not trying to surprise students (usually :), but rather the story should make sense. As an educator[0] my goal is to get students to remember certain things and ask the right questions (a skill that's non-obvious yet people are overly confident about their level).

A good example of story driven writing is Cropper's The Quantum Physicists: And an Introduction to Their Physics. I really enjoyed this in my undergrad because it not only taught the physics but taught it in a historical manner. I said there's compression in story telling and this style of teaching did a great job at motivation of why these physicists were asking these questions. It gave context. I honestly think it had a big impact on me and helped push me into research (I do ML, not physics).

Certainly there's a time and place for being terse and hyper fixated on the information you're trying to teach but often we're trying to do a lot more than that.

FWIW, I think LLMs are terrible at this. They make everything seem "exciting". When everything is "load bearing" then nothing is. They're really bad at the context and understanding the bigger picture. They're especially terrible at responding to a question with something like "keep that question in mind, we'll come back to it in next week's lecture"

[0] I'm currently in industry

[1] https://archive.org/details/bwb_S0-BVP-068

> We're humans and we love stories.

Not when I'm busy and trying to clear my backlog of tech newsletters to find needles of wisdom in a haystack of meandering fluff. I'd rather have every article start with an executive summary. I'll save the stories for leisure.

I think you read my words but missed the meaning.

>saying what you'll say, say it, then conclude by saying what you said.

In other words, the clearest possible conveyance of information.

At some point the learners have to connect with "why" and do something with the information. Is it the teacher's problem if students have no connection with the information they are being fed? It seems you would say no, let the students deal with the trouble of caring about and connecting to the content. You may be right.

I think it's not a strict binary question. Clearly some stages of learning require lots of information (grammatical and mathematical rules, for example). But stories often provide the hook or opening where the information starts to matter to the learners, and that holds for how I want my LLM to feed me information. This does not mean I want flowery and gratuitously validating prose for every scenario. My account-level instructions for chatgpt say something like "talk like Data from Star Trek." I've rolled my eyes more than once at the AI slop analogies or the overdone AI ted talk approach to everything.

When I explain something I think it's always useful to exercise at least a modicum of empathy towards my audience - I have learned far too many times that, thorough as my givings forth have been, my listeners have not understood things I assumed they did. That's where story comes in, and the right story connects to things students care about.

The twists and turns delays, and forward-looking tantalizers used to be for maximum impact once upon a time, and are still for that reason (or else for shits and giggles) on ad-free sites.

Today, the circumlocution is to keep you on the page or video for as long as possible for maximum monetization.

> Like a good presentation you should start by saying what you'll say

This annoys me so much. Don't tell me what you're gonna say next, just fucking say it.

In journalism this is called “burying the lead.”

In journalism it’s more commonly called “burying the lede”.

That’s basically an internet hoax.

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