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Comment by jimmyvalmer | Hacker News Reader

Summary (from 4277 words): From a study of 18 players, testosterone levels fell from 88th percentile among males their age to 32nd percentile by midseason. Their grueling travel schedule, and not the exertion of on-court play, was to blame as non-player personnel also experienced similar declines. Studies show five hours of sleep per night over the course of a week lowers testosterone levels by an equivalent of 11 years of aging.

Verbosity is an existential threat.

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"Verbosity" also encourages empathy. The piece does a good job relaying the lengths several players go through to achieve the sleep they want. It also gives a good overview of what their travel schedule actually is. Let's not pretend that a three sentence summary contains the same amount of information as a long-form article.

(And to counter the inevitable follow-up: yes, I know many people think there is too much human-interest, irrelevant personal information in such reporting. But there's still lots more relevant information.)

Verbosity risks people never reading it at all.

Their loss.

If you awaken to the collapse of duality into unity, you see that its your loss too, its everyone's loss.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we need to oversimplify and dumb down content, that has massively polluted the information ecology. I am just pointing out that most people wont take the time to read anything longer than a couple paragraphs in this particular context.

I think we're basically in agreement that it's a great shame when important information is not reaching the audience it deserves because of how it's presented. It's a neat parallel to the other thread in this topic about how the overall product might be improved by reducing the number of games played in a season.

It seems wild to me when people basically shoot themselves in the foot by going "tl;dr", but also if you're the author, it's up to you to present your message in a easily comprehensible form - nobody owes you their time and attention, it has to be earned.

(FWIW, this site doesn't allow downvoting direct replies to one's posts, so it wasn't me who downvoted (nor flagged) your sibling comment.)

Summaries are fine. Just let's not pretend there's no loss of information.

Yes I actually agree with verbosity, 10 second soundbytes have massively polluted the information ecology. I was just arguing against myself :|

This summary omits context for what the “grueling travel schedule” is, similar results for REM sleep and cognitive function, player reactions and countermeasures, and interpretations by sleep science experts (Czeisler and Walker).

I’m not sure how a few sentences about testosterone is an adequate recap.

> Verbosity is an existential threat.

Any thoughts on some sort of sliding-scale interface for text density/verbosity like in this concept design? Would that help or hurt the situation?

http://futureofinformation.com/

(See “Abstraction slider”, about halfway down)

The complaint here is just that these articles are written with an anecdotal lead style, rather than inverted pyramid style.

The solution is writers changing their writing style, and probably not a browser/tool that can display 4 different versions of a text.

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