| ▲ | wcfrobert an hour ago |
| > "Requirements documents that were once a page are now twelve. Status updates that were once three sentences are now bulleted summaries of bulleted summaries. Retrospective notes, post-incident reports, design memos, kickoff decks: every artifact that can be elongated is, by people who do not read what they produce, for readers who do not read what they receive." Great article. The "elongation" of workplace artifacts resonated with me on such deep level. Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays. Professional formatting, length, and clear prose are no longer indicators of care and work quality (they never were, but in the past, if someone drafts up a twelve page spec, at least you know they care enough to spend a lot of time on it). So now the "productivity-gain bottleneck" is people who still care enough to review manually. |
|
| ▲ | physicsguy 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| In my experience I'm pasting a lot more into AI to get the high level summary though. |
|
| ▲ | Swizec an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Reminded me of when I had to be extra wordy to meet the 1000 minimum word limit for my high school essays. Minimum word lengths are the greatest dis-service high school and college have ever done to future communication skills. It takes years for people to unlearn this in the workplace. Max word counts only please. Especially now with AI making it so easy to produce fluff with no signal. |
| |
| ▲ | awakeasleep an hour ago | parent [-] | | Minimum word lengths were really a terrible idea and I wonder what arguments were used to get all the teachers to buy into that system. | | |
| ▲ | voxl 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Have a second of critical thinking on this topic will make it abundantly obvious why this line of questioning is anti-education and anti-intellectual. You write in school to practice. No just composition, but grammar, spelling, individual sentences. Practice requires volume. Subject yourself to a classroom of kids that you must teach to write, and throw out minimums. Will some students do fine? Sure, of course, and what of the others that turn in one sentence? That never grow? That have to go into the math class and hear their idiot parents say "why are you learning that we have calculators" | | | |
| ▲ | yed 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Considering that many high school kids won’t want to put in any effort at all, how else do you convey the amount of detail and effort you expect for a given writing assignment? It’s an imperfect proxy but I can’t think of a better one. | | |
| ▲ | notahacker 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah. 1000 words is not a long essay that requires padding, and any competent teacher marks an essay with 1000 words achieved mainly by repetition and bad sentence construction much lower than one discussing the subject matter in a suitable level of detail, and probably lower than a better- written essay which gets marks deducted for only having 985 words. Since "write an essay" can be anything from three paragraphs to a 50 page paper and the teacher probably doesn't think either is the appropriate response to the task, some sort of numerical guide is a good starting point, even if a fairly wide range is a better guide than just a minimum... (plus actually there are real world work tasks involving composing text that fits within a certain word range, and since being concise and focused isn't AI text generation's strong suit, I'm not sure those work tasks will disappear...) | |
| ▲ | j_w 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, this is seemingly the only effective proxy for "write with some amount of depth." If the word count gets BS'd then it will be obvious when reading the output. | | |
| ▲ | Swizec 13 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Yeah, this is seemingly the only effective proxy for "write with some amount of depth." If the word count gets BS'd then it will be obvious when reading the output. My high school professors had a really good solution to this: Minimum word lengths but you have to write the essay in class by hand. You have 2 periods. Some of us still write a lot but having limited time and space (4 pages) really put a hard limit without saying so. In higher classes they started saying “I’m gonna stop reading after 3 pages so make sure you get to the point” |
| |
| ▲ | tayo42 10 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | When the teacher goes to grade it? If you turn in one sentence with or without a minimum your getting an F... |
| |
| ▲ | iterateoften 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s easier to judge an objective output like number of words than subjective like quality. Same as lines of code, etc. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | jdauriemma 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Whenever I see a document with horizontal rules between headers and the blues and purples that Claude Cowork adds to .docx files, I sigh. |
| |
| ▲ | dude250711 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Whenever I see AI-generated content put forward for my attention, I extract myself from the situation with the minimum possible time expenditure from my side. It's some sort of a leverage: "I spend 5 minutes prompting, so that you could spend 30 minutes reviewing". Not gonna happen LLM buddies. | | |
|
