Comment by Swizec
12 days ago
> "I had a shower thought and I asked a chatbot to write five pages of text about it." I don't need prettier words, I need there to be fewer of them?
Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Decades of insights barely condensed into 200 pages? Great! Hours of thought expanded into 200 pages? Very bad.
Same length of text but lands very differently. Same is true for emails, tweets, videos, and even just talking. Say less! But not too little either.
> Always judge an author by the length of their text.
Flashbacks to a past employer where the CEO decided that brevity was a core company value and started rewarding people for short communications and scolding us for longer text.
Over the next year a few charlatans moved up the ranks by spitting out half-baked thoughts and e-mails all the time, which looked like clarity and brevity on the surface. People were afraid to speak out or discuss nuance because it was too many words, and you didn't want to use too many words.
There is such a thing as balance. For some reason it tends to be very easy to go overboard in either direction.
Also, any metric ceases to be a good metric the moment it becomes a goal.
I have observed both of the above statements in many different contexts, they seem to be (somewhat) universal rules for human society.
I've also observed the third direction, which is the message storm.
That's when someone breaks down their point into multiple separate messages, one sentence at a time, when a single coherent paragraph or two would have worked. Why send one message when you can send 7 in rapid succession?
It's arguably the most annoying method of communication because it spams your notifications and you have no idea when someone has finished dumping.
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Tangential but it kinda irks me when people just put their initials when signing off on an email. It seems like unnecessary brevity in a world where you can type your name once in your emails signature line and never worry about typing it again.
How about not writing the name at all? It's already in the email header.
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“Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick”
little offtopic, but speaking of, someone just made a coding agent plugin that makes it save tokens by speaking like caveman
So it’s really about the content; not the metrics.
My mother was British. She was also an awesome cook.
She used to say that the British dining table was the fanciest in the world, with fine china plates, silver silverware, lace tablecloths and matching napkins, etc., but terrible food.
French tables, on the other hand, were casual affairs, with newspaper on the table, and a candle jammed into a wine bottle, but excellent food.
As the saying goes: “If I had more time, I would’ve written a shorter letter”
So many books that could've been an article. I try to save myself time by checking Goodreads but it's not always clear as I'm more critical than the average person. Reading a preview in Google Books helps but you only get so many pages before you're cut off. Appreciate that lately new books are sometimes featured in pubs with an excerpt.
There’s an interesting thought!
For hundreds of years there have been incentives (money) to publish books, and yet in 2026 we still haven’t worked out how to monetarily incentivise authors of single articles without bundling them with articles or other authors you wouldn’t read (because you only care about a single article damnit
The worst is scifibooks that explore ideas but the authors afraid of literary critics jam in "real" characters with real "drama" to satisfy a crowd who does not get the purpose of the medium, even while they life inside one of those accelerando shortstories now.
Sure, but also: so many articles that could be books. I think all the articles should be books! I don't want to read all those books but hey go for it
What you say makes no sense by your own logic. 200 words can be wonderfully filled with wisdom or devoid of insight depending how much work and experience went into those words. So it is not appropriate to judge an author by the length of their text. You need length/wisdom but you can’t objectively or quickly determine the denominator.
So, not in fact the length of the text, which is constant at 200 pages.