It's a minor annoyance but perhaps I am not the only one who feels this way.
I dislike it when we summarize our posts and articles with a "tl;dr". There's a perfectly good English word for it, namely "summary".
"tl;dr", besides being an ugly internetism, seems to me to convey a certain additional meaning, over the neutral "summary". If, as happens on the rest of the web, a commenter responds to a post with "tl;dr", it expresses an expectation to be entertained without exercising the reader's attention span or making him think. It's also an easy and insulting way to respond to someone you disagree with, avoiding having to process their argument and maybe change your mind.
If an author uses it in their own article, it seems to me to be pandering to the same expectation, apologising for actually having something to say that takes a few paragraphs to explore properly. Less Wrong, a community consisting largely of above average people in terms of intelligence and ability to follow detailed arguments, is the last place I'd like or expect to see that attitude validated. If your post has substance and says something I didn't know/think before, of course it will take work - apparently even in the thermodynamic sense - to process it...
It's particularly jarring to see a tl;dr appended to posts that took me only a few seconds to read in full anyway.
Upvoted for noticing your confusion. At least two possible reasons come to mind:
Explanation 1: Luke has made many solid contributions in the past, and such contributors' comments tend to receive more upvotes than others' do, just by a kind of halo effect: "Luke's other posts are good, so he's a good rationalist, so this comment of his must be good too." I don't know how true this is: I've heard the idea suggested by other people here, but I've also seen several examples of top contributors receiving well-deserved downvotes in some cases.
Explanation 2: Luke's comment is genuinely more deserving of upvotes, since rysade's comment uses phrases like "I think" and "subtly changing", which downplay commitment and measurability, respectively, while Luke's comment indicates an explicit change he has already made. Again, I can't really speak for the people who upvoted Luke's comment (not even being one of them myself), but it seems plausible that this is at least one force at work in the disparity.
I don't know how much of each of these two hypotheses is truly at work here, or if there's something else going on that I've missed. (It's easy to come up with what are in my opinion less likely scenarios: Luke has made several phantom accounts to upvote his own comments and/or downvote others' similar comments, or someone else holds a grudge against rysade, etc.)
It's a minor annoyance but perhaps I am not the only one who feels this way.
I dislike it when we summarize our posts and articles with a "tl;dr". There's a perfectly good English word for it, namely "summary".
"tl;dr", besides being an ugly internetism, seems to me to convey a certain additional meaning, over the neutral "summary". If, as happens on the rest of the web, a commenter responds to a post with "tl;dr", it expresses an expectation to be entertained without exercising the reader's attention span or making him think. It's also an easy and insulting way to respond to someone you disagree with, avoiding having to process their argument and maybe change your mind.
If an author uses it in their own article, it seems to me to be pandering to the same expectation, apologising for actually having something to say that takes a few paragraphs to explore properly. Less Wrong, a community consisting largely of above average people in terms of intelligence and ability to follow detailed arguments, is the last place I'd like or expect to see that attitude validated. If your post has substance and says something I didn't know/think before, of course it will take work - apparently even in the thermodynamic sense - to process it...
It's particularly jarring to see a tl;dr appended to posts that took me only a few seconds to read in full anyway.
Or maybe it's just me. I don't know.
/rant