Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 months ago
> the information density is too low
You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a traditional, long-form article that presents a rewarding read.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experim...
Marshmallow test assumes the payoff exists and is worth it. Does it? Is it? IDK and I don't want to waste time finding out. I'm far more interested in information-dense sources that let me find out if I want to know what it's offering. That's why journal articles have abstracts.
> Does it? Is it? IDK and I don't want to waste time finding out
This is what goes through the toddlers’ heads too! Gauging credibility is inextricably entangled with patience and Kahmeman’s System 2 thinking [1][2].
If this were a random article, sure, you shouldn’t trust. But it’s not. It’s on HN’s front page.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3730121/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
Given how many non-marshmallow articles are out there on the internet, and your apparent risk-reward ratio, I wonder if you're the one failing the test. And you haven't really justified your original claim that GP failed the marshmallow test.
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Toddlers are told they will get two marshmallows if they wait.
This is like “you can have a headache now and, if you wait, might get something later, perhaps a punch in the face, perhaps a slice of pie, perhaps nothing.”
The Internet is full of non-marshmallows though, I'm not gonna wait around forever for a haribo
I agree with OP that this presentation is very irritating.
This article is ADHD-walled. The long load time, the weird slide show. Then the first page has a jittery animation that makes it impossible for me to actually focus on reading the article.
It's less of a marshmallow thing (though I often fail that test) and more of an overwhelming impression that the article does not want me to read it.
Halfway down the downward scroll is subverted into a left -> right scroll.
No - just, no.
> This article is ADHD-walled
I mean yes, folks with untreated ADHD would fail a marshmallow test. Marshmallow test failure doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It simply signifies impatience and trust issues.
The kid can see the marshmallow. I can’t see the payoff from this article.
The kid knows what the payoff is.
The payoff here is unknown.
I really hate how articles are starting with full page slides and animations now. This is the third article that I've seen this week following the format. I suppose since two of those three were on the HN front page it's a format that works, but I guess I'm not the target audience.
This one is different from most. The visual design is consistent, engaging, and well done. The pictures are relevant and interesting and complement the text.
I agree that most articles that start with slides are just dross, this one is an exception.
The article fails the marshmallow test - it needs to convince people that there is a traditional, long-form article that will be a rewarding read from the start.
Only then is the test relevant to humans. Otherwise, all that's really being tested is the reader's trust in the publisher.
>You failed the marshmallow test [1]. There is a traditional, long-form article that presents a rewarding read.
I didn't downvote but reading an unknown article with unknown or non-existent payoff is not the same premise as The Marshmallow Test because the Stanford experiment explicitly specifies the "reward" upfront: ">, a child was offered a choice between one small but immediate reward, or two small rewards if they waited for a period of time."
In contrast, reading unfamiliar articles to _maybe_ get a "reward" is a Bayesian Probability. As the one reads each sentence that's not engaging, the expectation that there might be a "reward" at the end is tainted by the fact that most long articles in the past that reader forced themselves to finish didn't present a worthwhile reward at the end.
Now, if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end of the long article before the reader started it, then the test of that patience would be closer to The Marshmallow test.
It’s not a random article. It’s been upvoted to the HN front page.
> if JumpCrisscross explicitly told the reader that there would be a guaranteed mind-blowing insight payoff at the end
I literally said it’s “a rewarding read.”
> It’s not a random article. It’s been upvoted to the HN front page.
Time is precious, and I choose not to waste mine on the unnecessarily slow consumption of annoyingly-formatted articles.
I came across this hypothesis recently:
"A lot of the magic of ChatGPT is nothing to do with AI, it’s just nice to consume high-quality internet content without ads or whacky custom formatting."[0]
[0] https://x.com/maiab/status/1723784023619895489
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EDIT reply to your EDIT:
>I literally said it’s “a rewarding read.”
At the risk of stating the obvious, you wrote that reply to gp ctenb's comment _after_ he already gave up on the article and not _before_. You'd have to tell him before he considered reading the article for it to be more analogous to The Marshmallow Test. In other words, he can't "fail" your Marshmallow Test if you never set up the proper conditions for the test.
>It’s not a random article. It’s been upvoted to the HN front page.
Yes, being on the front page is one potential signal of quality but HN audience is diverse in reading preferences.
Because you happen to like this article and the front page upvotes confirms your bias, I just want to go meta and point out how some others on HN would dislike this type of "long-form human interest" article. My previous comments about that
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26698153
This thread's article is not a fast-moving explanation about undersea cable logistics (e.g. Wendover Productions style). Instead, it frames the narrative around people such as Mitsuyoshi Hirai with long biographical sentences such as this:
>, Hirai’s mind leapt to what would come next: a tsunami. Hirai feared these waves more than most people. He had grown up hearing the story of how one afternoon in 1923, his aunt felt the ground shake, swept up her two-year-old brother, and sprinted uphill to the cemetery, narrowly escaping floods and fires that killed over 100,000 people. That child became Hirai’s father, so he owed his existence to his aunt’s quick thinking.
[...] Hirai’s career path is characteristic in its circuitousness. Growing up in the 1960s in the industrial city of Yokosuka, just down the Miura Peninsula from the Ocean Link’s port in Yokohama, he worked at his parents’ fish market from the age of 12. A teenage love of American rock ‘n’ roll led to a desire to learn English, which led him to take a job at 18 as a switchboard operator at the telecom company KDDI as a means to practice. When he was 26, he transferred to a cable landing station in Okinawa because working on the beach would let him perfect his windsurfing. This was his introduction to cable maintenance and also where he met his wife. Six years later, his English proficiency got him called back to KDDI headquarters to help design Ocean Link for KCS, a KDDI subsidiary.
A lot of readers prefer not to slog through text like that if they're really just interested in the undersea cables. It's not just the dynamic sliding photos that would dissuade potential readers to finish the article but the style of writing itself.
EDIT reply to >Lots of people don’t like dense books either.
Well, this subthread you replied to was literally complaining, ">, since the information density is too low"
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>It’s not a random article. It’s been upvoted to the HN front page.
Lol, So? HN front page has plenty of garbage.
That's not failing the marshmallow test, because the reward is obvious at the start of the test.
Is the reward obvious for reading any random article? No, but it may be there. But I sincerely doubt that you, or anyone, devotes themselves to consuming 100% of the content they come across on the internet, in hopes for a payoff(which may never come) in the end.
Rather the article failed him.
I closed the page at "from banks to government to TikTok", of all the glorious applications of a world wide network, the most glaring is teenagers making dance videos.