Hi Aaron, thank you for the suggestion. I agree that posting a more extensive summary would help readers decide if they should read the whole thing, and I will strongly consider doing so in case I ever plan to post similar things. For this specific post, I probably won’t add a summary because my guess is that in this specific case the size of the beneficial effect doesn’t justify the cost. (I do think extremely few people would use their time optimally by reading the post, mostly because it has no action-guiding conclusions and a low density of generally applicable insights.) I’m somewhat concerned that more people read this post than would be optimal just because there’s some psychological pull toward reading whatever you clicked on, and that I could reduce the amount of time spent suboptimally by having a shorter summary here, with accessing the full text requiring an additional click. However, my hunch is that this harmful effect is sufficiently small. (Also, the cost to me would be unusually high because I have a large ugh field around this project and would really like to avoid spending any more time on it.) But do let me know if you think replacing this text with a summary is clearly warranted, and thank you again for the suggestion!
For this specific post, I probably won’t add a summary because my guess is that in this specific case the size of the beneficial effect doesn’t justify the cost.
I still think you should write it. This looks like an important bit of information, but not worth the read, and I estimate a summary would increase the amount of readers fivefold.
Hi Aaron, thank you for the suggestion. I agree that posting a more extensive summary would help readers decide if they should read the whole thing, and I will strongly consider doing so in case I ever plan to post similar things. For this specific post, I probably won’t add a summary because my guess is that in this specific case the size of the beneficial effect doesn’t justify the cost. (I do think extremely few people would use their time optimally by reading the post, mostly because it has no action-guiding conclusions and a low density of generally applicable insights.) I’m somewhat concerned that more people read this post than would be optimal just because there’s some psychological pull toward reading whatever you clicked on, and that I could reduce the amount of time spent suboptimally by having a shorter summary here, with accessing the full text requiring an additional click. However, my hunch is that this harmful effect is sufficiently small. (Also, the cost to me would be unusually high because I have a large ugh field around this project and would really like to avoid spending any more time on it.) But do let me know if you think replacing this text with a summary is clearly warranted, and thank you again for the suggestion!
I still think you should write it. This looks like an important bit of information, but not worth the read, and I estimate a summary would increase the amount of readers fivefold.