[copsarebastards]

So basically you want to know whether you're interested in something without actually bothering to understand it?

I'm increasingly frustrated with this mindset. Yes, you don't have the time to read everything. The answer to this, in my estimation, is gear your reading toward information sources with higher density of quality. If, instead, you only read things with titles that summarize the content for you, you're limiting yourself to ideas which can be summarized in a 5- to 20-word blurb. These ideas and simple, and consequently, frequently wrong. Reality is often complicated and it's not possible to dumb it down into a "1 weird metaphysical argument that will make your brain grow 10 inches"-style clickbait headline.

I do think it's a courtesy to the reader to provide keywords in a title that make it easy to reference and that create an effective vocabulary for talking about the topic (which this title does). I don't think that authors have any responsibility to dumb down their titles into summaries for those who can't be arsed to hear them out.

As an aside: generally stuff published on Stanford's website is written by top professionals in various fields, which makes it a high-density source of good information.

[jasode]

>So basically you want to know whether you're interested in something without actually bothering to understand it? [...] I don't think that authors have any responsibility to dumb down their titles into summaries for those who can't be arsed to hear them out.

I may have misunderstood voidz's question but I don't think he's asking for a dumbed-down tldr or something to be spoonfed to him.

The keyword I read in his question was "context". In other words, was there another event or news article that prompted the OP to submit "Hole Argument" and for multiple people to vote on it enough to have it show up on the HN front page?

For example, on the front page there's a post "Python is the new BASIC"... it's an old 2008 article... why is it there?!? I think many of us can guess that its submission was possibly triggered by the other article "Guido on Python" from EuroCon 2015". Reverse engineering the context is a little easier in that case.

The "Hole Argument" is interesting, but there are thousands of interesting physics articles... so maybe there's another trigger that prompted its submission. E.g. a recent discovery at Hadron Collider, or one of the authors recently passed away, etc.

Of course, the article's submission may be purely random in which case there is no context. The submitter (infinity) can clarify that for the voidz.

[copsarebastards]

> I may have misunderstood voidz's question but I don't think he's asking for a dumbed-down tldr or something to be spoonfed to him.

Okay, I'll just quote voidz's response to the same post you're responding to:

> Most of all, I wanted to kick off the discussion by asking if we should guess what information the link would give us. From the title alone, I have no idea. It's a play on words ("the hole / whole argument"), but beyond that, i had no clue.

Can you think of a way to get "what information the link would give us" without it being a dumbed-down tldr?

[voidz]

I couldn't have said it better myself. Thanks for taking the effort to explain so eloquently what I meant, when I asked my question. I'm not a native English speaker, but you still got it right. ^ht

[voidz]

You are projecting. I said nothing about having time or not, nor did I share any mindset, nor did I say whether I was bothered. Most of all, I wanted to kick off the discussion by asking if we should guess what information the link would give us. From the title alone, I have no idea. It's a play on words ("the hole / whole argument"), but beyond that, i had no clue.

But, after reading (trying to, rather), I felt that the subject deserved some explaining for people who are unfamiliar with the topic as well. Hence my request for context.

I have never asked for anyone to dumb down anything, that's your frame of mind, please don't put that on me. In general, it seems you just tend to get frustrated by your own frustration. That might be a vicious circle, but I'm no part of it. Should I dumb this down for you? Or do you catch my drift.

[n0us]

Actually some of it on SEP is written by undergrads which is kind of awesome in my opinion but it is certainly vetted before being posted.