Dan Luu

Yeah I haven't edited the post yet :-). I've noticed from talking with folks that pretty much no one reads appendices, so maybe I should label them as something else? Not sure what I should call it.

I've tried mentioning that I'm doing a simplified analysis in other posts. It's possible that this forestalls some nitpicking, but people often will attack the exact thing I mentioned. I get so much static on https://danluu.com/new-cpu-features/ … from people who haven't read my 2nd sentence

I really don't like putting disclaimers up front since I don't think of those as "content" and it pushes content further down, and it also doesn't seem to work? The most frequent comment on that CPU post is "this guy doesn't know anything about CPUs, X was around before the 80s"

Hmm. For me, I think pushing the content down by 1 sentence is a small price to pay for making that content much easier to parse. I read the entire baseball example with "so when is he going to talk about variance/hitter skill?" in the back of my head

Also, what happens if you try to optimize for "people I know are good readers understanding" instead of "minimize Internet static"? I'd worry that the latter is too noisy (hah) for most improvements to be noticeable

I think that this may result in fewer of what you call good readers because of the way so much traffic is driven through news aggregators & social media. I think (?) a lot of people decide what to read based on reading the comments and/or the title and

from having spent too much time commenting, I've noticed that a seeming refutation will get upvoted about the same regardless of whether or not it's right, and if someone replies with a seeming counter-refutation, the upvote rate will slow down, again regardless of correcntess

People don't seem to actually care about the information in the comment and judge things by how right-sounding the comment is. I think (?) an incorrect refutation that sits at the top of a comment section will cause people to not read the article.