Comment on Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure | Proton
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks agoIt’s the equivalent of when I got assigned papers with minimum word counts as a kid. Despite the fact that the prompt doesn’t warrant 5000 words and it would take massive deviation off of the prompt to get anywhere close to it, people have this weird impression that more words shows more “care” than just communicating clearly. I struggled a lot with a lot of assignments (to the point of not turning some in) because all the filler they’d need to reach the page counts hurt my soul lol.
(I do tend to prefer 500+ page books, but it’s because the authors I engage with the most use that space to build out better plots or develop better characters or whatever. It’s not padded out.)
Also, teachers are typically smart enough to probably themselves understand the word-count problem. Which is why I was able to make deals with many of my teachers to change the assignments given such that writing something good was actually possible.
Hence why it’s not the same. The people you are talking about aren’t worth the effort of dealing with. A writing teacher that gives you high marks for saying nothing with a lot of words, is not a good writing teacher.
I never once had a language teacher that had even the tiniest shred of competence. It’s not the norm.
Was for me. I’ve had teachers assistants that were intelligent and pedagogically literate. Benefits of going to school in the nordics, I guess.
But my point stands. That makes those people unworthy of the effort. You might play to those things to get ahead, but it still doesn’t mean it’s good communication.
I don’t play those games.
But most people do, because there’s a lot of it required to succeed in a lot of industries. (Even if most recognized that it’s nonsense, which they don’t), everyone can’t just apply for the one percent of bosses who don’t do bullshit games.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
Is it?
I once told a teacher I’d write ten times the number of required words as long as I could pick a subject that actually warranted it. And I followed through.
The rare times I got prompts that were actually good, I would run out of paper on which to express everything I wanted expressed. (Yes, I’ve done writing assignments writing by hand.)
Outside academia no-one is enforcing a word-count. Unless you’re dealing with people that don’t actually read what you write and instead just look at net weight of the word-salad you threw at them, the content of the text is what matters.
Who takes offence at only a single paragraph, if it addresses their every concern and insecurity, and they are left feeling seen as they reach the final word?
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
It’s the same philosophy, yeah. That more words means more substance and more “respect” or whatever to the message.
It’s not rational at all, but people genuinely don’t think that way. (Unless it’s a forum/social media, then 3 paragraphs is a wall of text that needs to have a 5 word TLDR, because none of it is rational).
The exaggerated version of a simple message once you have a working relationship is silly, but there are way too many times you don’t get to a working relationship at all without a wall of bullshit.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 4 weeks ago
Ok, but do the people you’re referring to actually appreciate prose, or just skim-read through everything?
Because I’d wager it’s the latter, and that point you don’t even need to try to write something good. It’s fine to send them three paragraphs where the second and third ones just paraphrase the first.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Paraphrasing the first multiple times is still a big, distracting extra cognitive load, and it needs to hold up if they actually do pay attention to it. One time they notice the obvious bullshit can end a relationship. I won’t use an LLM for anything like this because it’s stupid, but that’s why people are doing it.