Which Came First? Cliffs Notes or Info Short Cuts
May 8, 2024
This essay is the work of a dinobaby. Unlike some folks, no smart software improved my native ineptness.
The first online index I learned about was the Stanford Research Institute’s Online System. I think I was a sophomore in college working on a project for Dr. William Gillis. He wanted me to figure out how to index poems for a grant he had. The SRI system opened my eyes to what online indexes could do.
Later I learned that SRI was taking ideas from people like Valerius Maximus (30 CE) and letting a big, expensive, mostly hot group of machines do what a scribe would do in a room filled with rolled up papyri. My hunch is that other workers in similar “documents” figures out that some type of labeling and grouping system made sense. Sure, anyone could grab a roll, untie the string keeping it together, and check out its contents. “Hey,” someone said, “Put a label on it and make a list of the labels. Alphabetize the list while you are at it.”
An old-fashioned teacher struggles to get students to produce acceptable work. She cannot write TL;DR. The parents will find their scrolling adepts above such criticism. Thanks, MSFT Copilot. How’s the security work coming?
I thought about the common sense approach to keeping track of and finding information when I read “The Defensive Arrogance of TL;DR.” The essay or probably more accurately the polemic calls attention to the précis, abstract, or summary often included with a long online essay. The inclusion of what is now dubbed TL;DR is presented as meaning, “I did not read this long document. I think it is about this subject.”
On one hand, I agree with this statement:
We’re at a rolling boil, and there’s a lot of pressure to turn our work and the work we consume to steam. The steam analogy is worthwhile: a thirsty person can’t subsist on steam. And while there’s a lot of it, you’re unlikely to collect enough as a creator to produce much value.
The idea is that content is often hot air. The essay includes a chart called “The Rise of Dopamine Culture, created by Ted Gioia. Notice that the world of Valerius Maximus is not in the chart. The graphic begins with “slow traditional culture” and zips forward to the razz-ma-tazz datasphere in which we try to survive.
I would suggest that the march from bits of grass, animal skins, clay tablets, and pieces of tree bark to such examples of “slow traditional culture” like film and TV, albums, and newspapers ignores the following:
- Indexing and summarizing remained unchanged for centuries until the SRI demonstration
- In the last 61 years, manual access to content has been pushed aside by machine-centric methods
- Human inputs are less useful
As a result, the TL;DR tells us a number of important things:
- The person using the tag and the “bullets” referenced in the essay reveal that the perceived quality of the document is low or poor. I think of this TL;DR as a reverse Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. We have a user assigned “Seal of Disapproval.” That’s useful.
- The tag makes it possible to either NOT out the content with a TL;DR tag or group documents by the author so tagged for review. It is possible an error has been made or the document is an aberration which provides useful information about the author.
- The person using the tag TL;DR creates a set of content which can be either processed by smart software or a human to learn about the tagger. An index term is a useful data point when creating a profile.
I think the speed with which electronic content has ripped through culture has caused a number of jarring effects. I won’t go into them in this brief post. Part of the “information problem” is that the old-fashioned processes of finding, reading, and writing about something took a long time. Now Amazon presents machine-generated books whipped up in a day or two, maybe less.
TL;DR may have more utility in today’s digital environment.
Stephen E Arnold, May 8, 2024
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