Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spudlyo | Hacker News Reader

I struggled greatly with this article. There was something halting about it. Something precious. I felt that the author desperately wanted to elevate the mundane into the realm of the sublime.

I found myself annoyed.

I thought to myself "Are paragraphs a renewable resource? Is it wrong to waste them?"

It doesn't matter.

In neuroscience, there is a thing called the "default mode network" which is best known for being active when a person is not focused on anything in particular. The mind is awake, but at rest, like when you're daydreaming, bored, and have no goal oriented tasks. All sorts of neat stuff happens in this network, things like "shower thoughts", self reflection, autobiographical memories, thoughts about future goals and events, trying to figure out the people in your life -- their desires, intentions, emotions and thoughts. In boring situations like when I'm on the bus, or waiting in line for something, I'll spin it as an opportunity to spend time with the ole' default mode network. It's a good time observe people around you, as they're often completely engrossed in their devices. Occasionally I'll seek out other folks who are also chilling in the default mode network, and we'll sometimes share a knowing look.

I appreciated the author’s writing format.

For example, I read your first four sentences/paragraphs. When I got to your last paragraph, it was so long that I started skimming halfway and then just gave up.

I think a mix and match of small paragraphs and single line sentences for emphasis is a pretty good writing format for holding my attention, but I can see how others might be annoyed by it.

Yeah, I should have split the final paragraph into two, but I kept it long thinking it would be a funny contrast; it wasn't. In retrospect, it probably would have been better not to have made fun of the poster's style at all. I also find it annoying when commenters complain about trivial stylistic issues in folks' writing rather than engaging with the substance.

eh, i'd rather have fun with rhetoric and do some light poking (even if it doesn't land sometimes) than nothing at all!

I've seen some other commentary on the short/one-line paragraphs trend, and linking it to LLMs. I think it is just kind of a thing of the times—attention spans and all that.

I think it is more suited to the ways people consume text these days, kind of like how digital platforms moved to sans-serif fonts. Long dense paragraphs are fine in books and newspapers but hard to read and don't flow right on web browsers.

Books have also always had sections of short paragraphs for dialogue or pacing effect. I find myself breaking my own writing into more succinct paragraphs/thoughts that start to feel like jumbled run-on sentences without line breaks.

That neuroscience bit sounds like complete bullshit, but your annoyance is justified and I think shared by others in this thread.

There are many walks of life and some people are wired in ways that annoy us when they present themselves, or talk about themselves as this individual has. It is not only to elevate the mundane to the realm of the sublime, rather it’s to beat a profound lesson of life into us by proxy of whoever the characters are. Notice the shift from the friends, to I, to “you”. Notice the use of “you” in the blog post. You are being lectured. You need to be taught things that this individual just discovered, because you are clueless and they are wise. That is why you feel annoyed.

Whenever you hear someone using the royal “we” to lecture you, you’re always welcome to ask “who is we?”, because it’s appropriate to understand who is actually being discussed. This individual thinks that we are clueless and they are carrying the stone tablets to teach us. They have a long way to go.

> That neuroscience bit sounds like complete bullshit

If only there was a way to learn more about things you don’t know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network

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