"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." - Robert Heinlein
Out of curiosity, are you a reader? When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun? Does it feel like work to you? Is it a slow process?
I ask not to insult, but to understand. I can't help but wonder if a lot of this demand for terse language comes from a simple inability to read well? Reading is really not supposed to feel like work to the educated, and it does not to me. For me its just a state of consciousness, and doesnt require any more effort than being awake does.
I am genuinely surprised to hear otherwise educated people imply that simply reading something a coworker wrote significantly slows down their work.
Not the GP, but I'm an avid reader. One of the books I read (Strunk & White's Elements of Style) had this to say to aspiring writers: "Omit needles words."
I think the point is that some of the extra words OP is complaining about aren't needless. It's on the writer to know their audience, but it's also asking a lot to tune a message in a PR review to the one particular person who demands bluntness, especially if they don't know that person well. If the majority of people in the organization respond positively to a certain style (which may involve some amount of phatic speech), then the person who is "over-writing" here is probably making a good decision.
Once I build rapport with someone, I tend to be more blunt, but still balance that with the fact that other people may be reading the interaction, and I don't want to model a rude communication style.
An organization can choose to promote a very direct approach to feedback (Bridgewater is famous for this), but it requires top-down work to get everyone on the same page, not just expecting one developer to mind-read another.
Nobody is advocating for a rude communication style; the disagreement is over what constitutes rudeness.
Some people/cultures see being blunt or to the point as rude.
Others see beating around the bush, wasting time and hogging the listener's brain space with fill material that serves no purpose other than delaying the actual closure/completion of the thought (including insisting on various rituals, either verbal or, in some cases, physical, such as drinking a cup of tea (or coffee) and not broaching the actual subject until both parties have finished drinking), or perhaps (though I suspect this is less common as an actual motivation than generally supposed) taking pains to respect the imagined feeling of the listener, and possibly most importantly, to reaffirm the social hierarchy, as rude.
Very much so. I started reading adult novels at 7 years old, and by the time I was 12 or so, I could if I was hurrying read 5 or 6 novels a day. I read the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time in 5 days at that age. I've reread it again another 4 times or so.
My personal library is somewhere in the region of 5,000 to 7,500 of my favourite books. I estimate that I have read at least twice as many books as I own, and probably more: in the tens of thousands, I'd think.
I am also a professional writer and have been for 30 years. I've had 2 short books published, many hundreds of articles for about 15 different print magazines and professional paid articles on 3 commercial websites.
Currently, I am the Linux and FOSS reporter for the Register:
I knew little of the man. I had to read at least 30,000 words about him in a single morning in order to learn enough about the man to write his obituary. It was hard work.
> When was the last time you read a full length chapter book for fun?
I have about 25 on the go currently. Most recent start was Polostan by Neal Stephenson. I also have 1 print magazine subscription on top of that, but mostly, I read online now, several tens of thousands of words a day every day.
I think it is far to say I am a big and voracious reader.
Why? Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it? No. I can at a push read about 3000 words a minute but I normally cruise along at 1,500 or so. When I see "estimated reading times" on things online, I typically find they are approaching 10x longer than I take.
FWIW I can also read 5 or 6 other languages than English, but I am painfully slow in all of those. Currently I'm reading a copy of Charlie Hebdo I bought at FOSDEM and the new Astérix album. :-)
> Do you think I object to excessive verbiage because I struggle through it?
That was the heart of my question, yes. The only way I could fathom it was to think that maybe some people just found reading generally difficult. The hypothesis being that those few extra words hurt, because reading in general was high effort.
It seems I was very far off the mark, at least in your case. For what it's worth, I've enjoyed several of your recent pieces and found both the Mills and Hoare obituaries to be both informative and empathetic.
Now I wonder if it is sometimes the opposite problem: A skilled writer losing patience when someone less skilled is at the wheel. Others in his thread explored that theory, and it seems they may be onto something.
> Now I wonder if it is sometimes the opposite problem: A skilled writer losing patience when someone less skilled is at the wheel. Others in his thread explored that theory, and it seems they may be onto something.
Could be.
The KISS principle applies in communication as in the rest of life.
The original... takers of these films are dying off. It's well known that many episodes exist within private collections. The prevailing belief in the fandom is that they will be get released as the owners pass away. Indeed, that's likely where these two came from.
They animated a lot of the missing pieces of the missing episode Shada with excellent results. If AI could do something of similar quality that would be wonderful.
I have often thought that there should be a public ledger of some sort for people (powered by vouching), and then immediately forseen the negative externalities and abandoned that idea.
Reputation is as harmful as it is good. Anyone who survived being unpopular in high school, or seen the dummies that can be elected in democracies, should be able to explain how.
No, it is better to judge works by their merits than it is to judge people by their popularity. Though it is far more expensive.
A public ledger is antithetical to "high trust" anyway. A high trust society is one where you give hitchhikers rides without questioning too much about their motivations. If you have to do a criminal background check — which is just another form of consulting a public ledger of reputations — before letting him in your car, you are by definition not trusting him.
Popularity and reputation are not the exact same thing. Reputation is about trust and predictability, while popularity is about awareness of the person and/or their reputation.
But your points largely stands. However, reputation is one of many tools that can be used to assess the worthiness of giving some work attention, but should be given a relatively low weight compared to other tools. Giving reputation a low, but non-zero weight allows bad actors to be rightfully put in their place and allows someone the ability and chance to "clean up" their reputation with effort.
When I first considered this in the late 90's I was inspired by Google's Page Rank algorithm, and wanted something akin to that for humans in a social network.
My core idea (back in the early 00's when I cam up with it originally) was to identify a small cadre of trustworthy individuals in various sectors - lets say finance, computing, healthcare, etc (but more granular) and give them high trust (maybe a manual score of 10). Then let who they score, and who those people score "trickle down" as it does in Googles page rank. It was a variation on what Google later called trust rank, I suppose.
It would have either failed to launch completely or turned into a dystopian nightmare akin to China's Social Credit System. It may have even turned out worse than China's system because the goals of finance do not always align with the goals of humanity.
A more modern implementation could be built on the block chain and be made very profitable... while it crushes us all.
Cybernews posts screenshots[1] featuring usernames like idmKYCCN and idmKYCFR, and the ports were locked down after contacting ID Merit.
I think thay what's happened is that everyone is telling the literal truth and speaking very carefully to use that truth to obscure rather than inform. To hell with the victims. The way I intrerpet this is that their denials are both factually accurate AND misleading.
The partner who said there is "no indication that any customer data has been compromised" is telling the literal truth. They can't find any indicators because they stink at logging and the screenshots posted on CyberNews obscure the customer info intentionally. Instead Cyber News only shows the IDM usernames in plaintext. Which was the responsible thing to do They literally cant see any indications... of customer data... because they dont have logs.
It should also be noted that the Partners customer in this case is likely ID Merit... not the people whose information was stolen. So again, their statement was literally true even if they do find evidence of a billion records being leaked.
Nobody should ever trust anyone involved in this again if I'm correct in this interpretation of the available facts.
Brittleness is not a concern. "Disk rot" is. The dyes used to make writable DVD's were organic (AZO usually), and break down starting at around the 17 year mark (some earlier, if they were poorly made). They have some measure of redundancy built-in, so you may not notice right away. The discs begin to look a bit "cloudy" at first. Eventually they become unreadable.
Go with inorganic blu ray media if you want longevity. Most HTL blu rays made currently will last around 100 years if properly stored. If you need longer there are M-Disc's, but they are expensive and rumor has it that ALL verbatim 100Gb blu rays are essentially M-Discs with different labels these days.
For all practical purposes any Blu ray larger than 25Gb is probably inorganic HTL, but if you worry a lot you can buy more expensive "archival grade" discs from Japan as well that have been vettted and tested.
In what way does using this model reduce the authors credibility?
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