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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2551 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 31, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Every book and every long article should start with a bullet point preface of significant conclusions and noteworthy evidence / argumentation that led to the conclusions. That way we can quickly parse whether it is worth it to invest our time on it (or whether: we have gone through the information before; there is nothing noteworthy to glean from it). Even scientific articles should do this immediately on the first page, not just somewhere in their discussion / conclusion.

I do this on my weekly Wednesday posts too so that people can skip stuff that they find boring to begin with.

I read a book once where the start of each chapter listed the contents of every paragraph. It was fantastic.

Is this not the purpose of an abstract?

Most publications outside of research don't include an abstract.

EDIT: The Washington Post is using AI to summarize articles. No doubt The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other media organizations will implement. Bloomberg uses AI to write boilerplate financial stories, but the organization hasn't said, from what I've seen, about using AI to summarize an article and place the findings at the top.

Scientific papers already do this; the abstract is almost always first and it does exactly what you want.

Yes, some ideas do need to be slow-rolled (or the audience has to be primed), but that’s also so exceptional a case that it might as well not exist and even that doesn’t need to blow the twist if you do it correctly.

Most scientific and academic papers I read don’t do this though. The abstract only says their conclusion for a few criteria, sometimes only in general terms. The discussion or results section you’ll often find more complete conclusions and a lot of sentences that contain words like “surprisingly”, “unexpectedly”, “interestingly”, “one noteworthy finding”. That’s a lot of information that should be front and center rather than buried in the discussion section.

Sometimes you need to slow roll people into your shocking conclusion not to turn them away immeadiately. Often books need to really stretch out the distance to their conclusion to get people to actually read them. But in general I agree. I find it especially annoying when books and long articles don't actually even clearly state their conclusions anywhere, let alone in the preface!

Can’t you just do this with an LLM?

It's possible, but you have to be cautious of the LLMs accuracy.

True! Probably can now.

Would a sufficiently detailed table of contents satisfy you? Assuming reasonably descriptive chapter and section headings of course.

Especially if there is also a table of figures and list of tables, it seems pretty straight forward to flip through and see how familiar/tractable the content will be.

I do think there is a place for bullets sometimes, but bullets can also be symptomatic of a sort of powerpoint syndrome.

Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas.

If you could get the full argument a book makes from reading a bulleted list is there really a point in the book?

Or along the same lines there is the classic:

... bullet outlines can make us stupid

Ultimately arguing that poor use of bulleted lists contributed to the loss of shuttle Columbia.

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