phone booth, side comment: ridiculing your APL (ave. post length) has nothing to do with wanting things framed so that i can understand them (wanting people to be nice to me, according to you). i mock you because you apparently don't see the value of brevity. consider it an attempt at constructive criticism. i'm sure you make some very good points in your novels, and i'm also sure you could make the same points in posts short enough for people to want to read.

the above is actually an improvement

Then it will be less comprehensible, not more.

I do but brevity is relative. You have 5000+ posts here, for instance.

a very small % of my posts are in SE. not sure what your point is, though. when people are communicating through conversation, 5 sentences at a time, back and forth > 5 pages at a time.

people who write 5 pages at once tend to be lecturing more than conversing - that is, they think they have something that others should learn. but the problem is that, whether they do or not, others don't know they do. i just have no reason to believe reading a 5 page post from a semi-random on the internet is worth the effort.

i think you are mistaken on this one. i can almost guarantee you that others will understand more of what you say once you get good at condensing it.

Phone Booth, you are writing on an internet message board, not a Phd dissertation. If you can't get your point across in one, maybe two paragraphs, you're just rambling.

I thought so.


Few in the real world think 5 sentences back and forth is an ideal way to utilize a written communication medium to explain difficult concepts. I don't write that much more than in a conversation block than you do, except when I'm going out of my way to explain things in detail to accomodate some of you. In this thread, for instance, what appears to be verbosity is simply my truncation of multiple posts into one. For instance, note how easily this post could've been two posts.


Funny, you asked me to explain something last time you accused me of this. Should I have given one tenth of the explanation, see if you get it and move to the next tenth? And have a long back and forth? I unintentionally did that in one thread in Economics and everyone who jumped into the thread late was confused, because they don't know which posts they needed to read. Unless you're keeping up with the thread in real time, having what is effectively a single explanation span multiple posts is even more confusing.


Nothing compels you to read anything. On the contrary, I don't desire more readership than I have now. Maybe you want to be read, but don't project your desire on others. Do you write the author of every book that you didn't read to inform her why? And lecture on what she should do so that you would read it?


See bolded above. The opposite is true - if I were to insert more analogies, more examples, story arcs, emotional anchors, etc, each point I make would be much more understandable. But as I said before, even I'm not quite that unwise to allocate my time in that manner. People would understand more of what I say, if I made fewer, less complex points, but that would defeat my main motive here - communicating to myself in a structured manner things that I don't completely understand on an instinctive level.


All your posts here combined fit in one or two paragraphs? And a typical PhD dissertation - I understand how badly written that is, btw - is far more concise than a typical 2p2 post or any conversation of the sort willie25 was talking about. Raw length is a bad measure of brevity and don't mistake your short attention span for etiquette on appropriate length on an internet message board. It's incredibly easy to ignore or skip posts that are too long to read. I don't post here to exchange clever one-liners with you guys.

in spite of it, not because of it. and i was eventually convinced and conceded that you were mostly right. but i bet i could explain your point to someone else (and get him to understand it) in about 10% of the words it took you to get it across to me.

that makes sense. it's probably the motive that most of us have (that and learning). but when you're giving the appearance of actual communication with others (e.g. addressing people by name and responding to quotes), i think it makes sense to follow through and actually communicate as close to optimally as you can. whatever though, to each his own.

the problem is you don't know what other people are misunderstanding (what you're failing at communicating) until you hear their responses. so it's much more economical to briefly write out your point, listen to the mistaken response, and attempt to correct the responder than it is to just throw out 20,000 words right off the bat and hope some of them stick.

any cliffs on why this thread is still going?

Phone Booth keeps typing multi-thousand word posts. The people that actually read them have realized that despite his large vocabulary and incredible stamina, he's wrong about pretty much everything.

Could we actually get a show of hands of people who read them?

I doubt it. There was a lot of back and forth of the exact nature you're advocating earlier in that thread, which you ignored because it's hard to understand that when you jump into a thread. And I gave you the dumbed-down, assume-almost-nothing version, because a shorter, simpler, more intuitive explanation was already offered earlier in the thread and people didn't understand it (though some were emotionally invested against understanding it). And I wasn't just talking to you.

I'm saying that it takes more words, not fewer words to optimally communicate all my points.


But I'm not talking to just one of you here. I've gotten a lot of random private messages from people who don't post in the same threads as I do and I've even met people in real life who claim to be lurkers here, so communicating purely based on feedback is uneconomical even if I could address everyone's feedback. Once you write something on the internet, it doesn't disappear, so treating it as though it's a bar conversation doesn't maximize its communication efficiency. When possible, I try to write in a way that makes sense even if the reader's not involved in the conversation. Sometimes, there's more than just here and now.


This isn't quite fair - all 0 people that have read my long posts do agree 100% with me. As for my large vocabulary and incredible stamina, I think you're slightly misquoting your mom.

He understands chartreuse to be green, and will call people idiots for calling it chartreuse, because they don't call it green. Then when he is obviously proven wrong beyond doubt, he claims the goalposts got moved or something stupid that effectively ends his role in the conversation.

lol that was an awesome description of Thremp by P.B.

I like it. 4th down exists for a reason, it shouldn't be an auto-punt everytime for a bevy of head coaches scared about job security. The man has guts, he tried to end the game right there without putting the ball in Manning's hands. Any non-stellar punt followed by a halfway decent return, and Manning is at the 35 or 40 with a full 2 minutes left. Not exactly difficult to imagine him marching on the New England D after he's already put 28 on the board.

Obviously different circumstances. The Pats can afford to lose a regular season game given their division, and it's unlikely they were catching Indy for the 1 seed anyway. Better spot to gamble, you don't go home if you are wrong.

i like PB's posts.

wat

PB- okay, you've explained your reasons well enough and your APL is certainly your business more than mine anyway, so i will hush about it for the moment.

I've read PB's posts. I hope that he keeps scribbling in the margins of the document of conversation - I find his commentary perceptive and absorbing. I have little to add, just: let the haters hate.

PB is awesome. He types too much. But this is also what makes him awesome.

lol Phone Booth and NZ.

I think Phone Booth is sad cause I didn't wanna argue about his ******ed baseball stuff where he essentially creates a weird and esoteric scenario and then rambles circular definitions.

Standard.

ROFL

PB's description of Thremp is awesome, the rest not so much.

PB,
Comparing APL in this thread to total post count doesn't make sense. Your dissertations in this thread are all part of the same discussion the body of one's posts are discussing thousands of other topics.

It seems like PB's word bombs are a defense mechanism to prevent people from actually reading his posts unless they agree with them.