[efitz]

Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts.

I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images projected for a fraction of a second one after the other.

But no one has the patience for my storytelling style. Congratulations if you got this far, most people gave up if they didn’t grok my point in the first two sentences.

Yes slideware is ugly and low information and boring and insulting to the audience, but some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.

[mkleczek]

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

[funcDropShadow]

> In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated ...

Wow, do you really equate long prose with "generated content"? Long prose is novels, deep non-fiction books, long letters, and much more. You can like them or not. In comparison "generated content" is sugar-coated garbage, like way too many social media posts. There was never any point in reading such "generated content".

[mkleczek]

I wasn't clear enough and I agree: art cannot be replaced by LLM (although this is heavy disputed by AI believers). Consuming art also precludes reading summaries generated by LLMs.

My comment was about "utility" texts (this is a context of this discussion, I suppose) - my prediction is that we are going to write shorter and more condensed texts to avoid overhead of LLMs use in generating and summarising text.

[ssivark]

But why should there be two polar opposites: utility & art? Even when reading comments on HN I appreciate a a well written narrative with clarity and cohesion, instead of an assorted stack of bullet points.

The idea is that good writing actually makes you think clearer (both writer & reader); it’s not just a nice to have.

[mkleczek]

If that was the case people wouldn't use LLMs to generate long text only to use the same LLMs to generate short summaries of it.

What I am saying is not that good writing is useless - rather that good writing is _hard_ and people are lazy. There is way more bad writing than good in the world. Bad writing will be replaced by LLMs which does not make sense because it is still bad - and useless.

Good writing is going to stay but since it is hard it is (still) going to be rare.

In the end my hope is that bad (and useless) writing is going to be replaced by short, dense and useful format.

Of course - this begs the question: what constitutes good writing? Pretty good estimation is that a good writing is the one that is - generally speaking - as information dense as possible (ie. there is nothing you can take away from it without loosing some important information). And we are back to square one - it does not make sense to write anything longer than necessary :)

[OldGuyInTheClub]

cf. Doonesbury on Californian/Mellow-Speak:

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16

[vibrio]

Thank you. It’s been a while since I read some Doonesbury. Now, I might go on a bender.

[copperx]

What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?

[nativeit]

> What has a higher information density than text?

Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video

Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.

[Angostura]

Now draw a picture that conveys everything just said in 24 words.

[TeamDman]

It took much more than 24 words to achieve the final result, and also had to use emojis to convey what I wanted lol

Even still I couldn't quite get the result I wanted

Image link

https://chatgpt.com/share/67769bef-537c-800f-90ac-35a44747f0...

[ahartmetz]

Many things can only be said in text, though. Video can work as a replacement for the so inclined because they can have narration.

[MonkeyClub]

To add to that, text has more of "authorial intent" (debates on the demise of which notwithstanding) than other media.

Consider the visual rebus, for example, which is open to interpretation and depends on commonality of context in both producer and consumer, contrasted to a rigorous argument, which depends onoy on commonality of (technical) jargon.

Video ends up conveying information thanks to narration, while the visuals assuage boredom. Like an Adam Curtis documentary: it's essentially an essay read out, with clips and music overlaid to keep the audience from realising they're told, rather than shown, the argument.

Having the talking points as aides memoire on screen is nice in that it charts the course of the argument, but the map is not the territory, and we end up with significant information loss and knowledge gap.

I think that moving from the message in itself to its summation (i.e. from text to bullets) creates a knowledge divide between the producer (who knows more) to the consumer (who has access to less and can only divine the rest).

It's pretty bourgie IMO.

[mkleczek]

I meant evolution of writing.

[CRConrad]

Upvote for the Affleck quote. Damn, that guy is (providing he came up with it himself) not so stupid after all.

[jasdi]

Its not that they want to be spoon fed, that is the ever decreasing bandwidth available as info and complexity in environment keeps exploding.

As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.

[ssivark]

Could it be that such increasing specialization (sales, accounting, coder, glue…) is driven in part by decreasing attention spans and ability to focus? Maybe nobody is able to exert significant deliberate cognitive processing on anything beyond a narrow slice that they are already comfortable with.

[jasdi]

It's natural. Rate of change is increasing in all fields. So when teams can't keep up, another team is setup to handle whatever is new and then automatically you get divergence in expertise, between the two groups over time. If you specialize in selling on amazon you learn totally different things, than selling in a store. If you specialize in mobile app development, a gap grows with teams who work on web or desktop. Info Asymmetry and Knowledge Gaps between specialists keeps growing with time. So the glue people naturally emerge.

[wcfrobert]

The number of books, blogs, papers, textbooks, monograph, tutorials, reports, comments that are worthwhile reading will only ever increase though. Today is as information-lite as we're going to get. I feel like it's only natural to try and condense all this data (usually in a lossy way).

I hate PowerPoint but bullet points could be quite information dense. They lose effectiveness past 6 bullets due to readability reasons, but I still prefer them over fluffy low signal prose. I think at the end of the day, it all depends on the writer. I got to the end of your comment just fine. But I cannot and will not get to the end of a corporate jargon filled report or ppt.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

> some people, particularly in higher levels of management, just want to be spoon fed bullet lists and then feel like they’re making informed decisions.

That caste likes to say, "I have people that do that for me."

[herghost]

> I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity.

I've never been able to articulate why I couldn't stand Wired so succinctly! Thankyou

[Angostura]

I can actualy cope quite well with the slides that have 5 words on. But typically in the organisations that I have worked for, people will cram 200 words on a slide and then droningly reads them out.

No matter how often I explain that 'people can either listen to what you are saying, or read the slide - pick one' - it doesn't really sink in

[plagiarist]

A recent colleague often gave my team feedback like that. But we listened to him and all our presentations were much better afterwards. I hope I've internalized that idea somewhat.