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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

Summary:

- a diet consisting of white rice lacks in vitamin B1, which causes a debilitating disease called "beriberi"

- a naval officer named Kanehiro Takaki discovered this (indirectly) using epidemiology techniques, determining that those who ate more balanced diets did not catch the disease

- mixing barley in with rice basically eliminated the disease from the Japanese navy

- due to some combination of politics, and worry that the solution was "superstition" (ie, it was similar to a folk remedy, and was not laboratory-tested; many Japanese academics of the time did not trust epidemiological/statistical techniques) the Japanese army rejected the solution and continued to have serious beriberi outbreaks, up until 1905 when they finally decided to give it a chance

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One underlying reason for the split between the Imperial Japanese Army, and Navy was that the Army was generally made up of members of the Choshu clan who were rivals of the Satsuma clan that was mostly responsible for the Navy.

The two clans put their rivalries aside temporarily to overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate, but from the Meiji Era the rivalry was responsible for the lack of coordination between the Army, and Navy through the Second World War. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunbatsu#Hambatsu

the Japanese army rejected the solution

The article had a one sentence paragraph about this attitude:

   Stubborn and blind to the truth,
   the army was marching towards its
   biggest beriberi disaster ever.

I love those first words

   Stubborn and blind to the truth

Those words so perfectly describe so much of what's happening in the world today. Not 100+ years ago. Today. It reminds me of a quote attributed to Max Planck:

   Science advances one funeral at a time.

very similar story as the discovery and loss of the Scurvy prevention/cure: http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

All the way down this article I was expecting it to be about Scurvy as it hits many of the same issues. Only difference seems to be that Scurvy is vitamin C and Beriberi is vitamin B1. But same overall concept.

Greatly appreciate the summary. Thank you.

Thanks! TLDRs are looked down upon by some people. There are so many new articles you could read each day though that a short abstract you can read to decide if you want to continue in-depth is essential in my opinion.

Here's how I previously explained it: "HN has a strong bias toward allowing people to allocate their time based on their preferences. The tl;dr convention is tremendously useful because it allows people to make an informed decision as to whether or not to read the article, based on a summary which is (typically) more accurate than the headline."

It's clear HN appreciates this sort of thing -- the last time I had a comment as heavily upvoted, it was another summary. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8724105

Yeah, people equate TLDR with laziness but there's an infinity of new stuff to read so I want to be able to quickly evaluate if I want to read something before spending too much time on it.

I don't find articles that have a vague dramatic opening that gets you wondering where it's going works anymore.

Same here. If I see an in media res opening on a supposedly informative article, I skip down a few paragraphs. If I still can't see the meat of the matter, I skip it.

Inform me, don't try to "entice" me towards your embellishments. Ain't nobody got time for that.

I, or one, don't really equate TLDR with laziness. I equate with "get rid of all that unnecessary bloat and clickbait headlines".

The headline of this article, in my opinion, should have been "too monotonic diet", not "too much rice".

Summaries are great, and extremely useful. But, to me, “TL;DR” just inspires a feeling of contempt: “You think a 1700-word article is too long for you to read? What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you have the attention span of a goldfish? Have you ever seen a book?” (using, as my example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9359426.)

a 1700 word article isn't too long to read. But there are dozens of 1700 word articles (and longer) that make the HN frontpage every day, and most of us want to know which of those are worth reading for us -- whether the article has the kind of "meat" we're going for, whether it's mostly fluff, whether the technical details are relevant to our particular interests, etc.

One reason we see so many tl;dr comments even on a very technically inclined place like HN is that articles very often bury their content. We want a thesis out front; we don't want to be strung along for 1600 words and then find the interesting bit between 1601 and 1700.

So, I agree that summarization is very useful, precisely because it allows you to focus your attention on interesting things.

However, I also think that the phrase “too long; didn’t read” represents a dysfunctional attitude that turns this blessing that is the abundance of information into a curse: if you spend three hours reading 100-word abstracts (let’s say, 300 of them), at the end you will probably have learned almost nothing. If you instead spend three hours reading 1000-word articles (let’s say, 40 of them), you will probably have learned a small amount, which is an improvement. If, by contrast, you spend three hours reading 50 000 words (say, a few chapters of a Murakami book), or a quarter of Olin Shivers’s dissertation, you will probably acquire some new ideas that will stay with you for the rest of your life. There’s a point at which this becomes counterproductive; if you read a book in a day, it won’t stay with you as well as if you read it over the course of a week, and the week also gives you time to reflect on other connections.

My thesis: being able to focus your attention on interesting things is only valuable if you then do actually focus your attention on them. The attitude expressed in “tl;dr” is that focusing your attention is itself undesirable.

There are places where tl;dr implies a lack of focused attention. On HN, it often implies "I couldn't get the basic idea quickly enough to be sure this is worth focusing my attention on; can someone summarize for me so I can make a better-informed decision?"

What do you think of academic papers that all start with an abstract/tldr?

It's not about low attention spans, it's about there only being so many hours in a day. It's about helping people find what they want to read because there is just too much content being produced every day.

The first six words of the comment to which you are replying are, "Summaries are great, and extremely useful." That's what I think about the abstracts of academic papers. Academic paper summaries are not always exemplary, but they are usually very good. The only genre of writing I know that regularly has better summarization than the academic paper is the legal brief.

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