Comment by bel8
5 days ago
It takes skill and effort to condense knowledge.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal in “Lettres Provinciales,” 1657.
5 days ago
It takes skill and effort to condense knowledge.
"I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal in “Lettres Provinciales,” 1657.
I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
To me it's clearly the opposite. They could condense but did not have the time to do so. And I struggle to understand how the opposite conclusion could be reached when the explanation is right there, leaving little margin to extrapolation.
> I don't think historical "sorry for the wall of text"s by famous intellectuals is the dunk on walls of text that people seem to think it is.
It is a bit overused phrase, but I find it to be absolutely correct -- to make something concise without losing meaning and not being overly dry is both a skill and also lots of effort. I don't think it is impossible, it is just that often it is not worth it.
>I see this quote being thrown around a lot as if it supports the article's point, but this quote is just some of the most famously smart, skilled, and effortful people ever admitting even they cannot condense their knowledge that much.
But that’s explicitly not what the quote says - it’s not that they can’t, it’s that it takes work.
I don't understand how you're parsing that quote as "cannot".
That sounds like a different way of saying that wall of texts with low signal are produced by low skill and low effort users...
Which, TBH, matches the clear majority of AI boosters.
so that's why Claude is so verbose