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Comment by wcfrobert | Hacker News Reader

What that comment is describing is already here. A colleague sent an email that was obviously AI-generated (bloated, repetitive, low signal-to-noise ratio). I guess he's quite new to the team and it's a sign of formality, but I really don't mind if you send me just the bullet-point notes... Why are we going through this encoding-decoding process? I think succinctness and low-noise writing will be treasured in the age of AI.

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> Why are we going through this encoding-decoding process? I think succinctness and low-noise writing will be treasured in the age of AI.

I hope so, because I hope this will lead to making it OK to skip the manual encoding process. After all, AI isn't doing anything new here - it's automating the customary need for communication to be in wordy prose paying right respects to right people. Maybe people will finally see that this - not AI, but the wordy prose part - is the bullshit that helps neither the sender nor the recipient, and it'll finally become culturally acceptable to send information-dense bullet point lists in e-mails instead.

perhaps, but humans are human, and building relationships require a culturally appropriate carrier wave - especially in global work

But if the message will be "decoded" by an AI, that "carrier wave" isn't from the original message anyway.

I don't see this happening. People learn wordy prose in education: an assignment requires certain amount of words, but the student is either unwilling or unable to come up with information-packed content and resort to padding with fluff. Some become copywriters, some middle managers, some HR. Eliminating fluffery makes these positions, built around wrangling as much written word as possible, suddenly obsolete and consequently people, because writing well masked fluff is their main marketable skill. There's very strong feedback loop working against information dense written word.

Information-dense written words are beneficial in the corporate setting too. We just call them "executive summaries".

It's never been my read on people that wordy prose like this is done as a formality.

If a lawyer or am academic wrote it, it most often comes off as overly complex wording to prove a point of intellect or superiority.

For basically anyone else, when I see prose like that it most often reads like (a) they either don't understand the topic well or (b) they don't need to write it at all other than to stay busy and/or appear more valuable in a role.

A well-written, well-formatted email does convey some level of professionalism right? Even if it is a little wordy. Maybe this is no longer true with AI.

I went to a career fair recently and a new grad sent me an email afterwards. His three-paragraph email can basically be reduced to "I want to work for this company. I am qualified. Please hire me". But I don't know how I would feel about that if someone actually sent me an email like this.

That's totally fair, there's a balance. Maybe a better argument I could make is that I find people often lean too far to the end of being verbose without any real reason to it. You may not want to be blunt or rude either, the balance is in the middle.

For the career fair grad you mentioned, a couple paragraphs would have been my expectation - three paragraphs isn't off base. If I were them I'd want to say I want to work for you, but I'd also want to at least mention why I want to work there and why you'd want me there. To me that extra context is a better email than just saying "hire me" in one or two sentences.

Writing is an art, and some enjoy producing or consuming verbose prose. I hope AI doesn't change this.

Personally, I don't appreciate verbosity while reading blog or news articles.

However, I don't think its bullshit. If a author is sharing, they likely are doing so in a manner that they find enjoyable.

The way I see it, you don't need to read communications like this if you don't enjoy it. Much of what gets said repeats what has been said elsewhere.

- Correct re. writing as art - but context here is stuff like work e-mails.

- Such e-mails are in many ways similar to a comment thread like this -> my reply is a valid example of my point.

- I wrote the comment the way I actually think about this topic. Would it be better if expanded to full-blown prose?

- Alas, this doesn't fly at work (and rarely on Internet).

Bullet point lists aren't always the most optimal. Anything longer than 6 bullet points actually reads worse.

If you look at that tech emails twitter account that shows emails from discovery in various legal things, this is basically what you see, just sentences of context with very little niceties.

https://x.com/TechEmails

I had a professor in graduate school who gave me permission to turn in my detailed outlines for my essays rather than filling in all the rest of the words. I think we both liked that better too, and that was 15 years ago.

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