[WikiEN-l] About tl;dr

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

Original subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] declining numbers of EN wiki admins 
- The theory that making it easier to get rid of admins is a solution 
to the decline in their active numbers

At 03:46 PM 6/2/2010, quiddity wrote:

>Abd, please take the time to make your thoughts more readily parsable.
>Don't force your readers to work so hard in order to find your point.
>[[tl;dr]] is generally an odious dismissal, but it really does apply here.

Thanks, quiddity.

Some find my boiled-down "thoughts" even more difficult to read. If 
the uncondensed material, which contains the redundancy that 
sometimes allows the unclear to become clear, is hard to "parse," 
it's quite likely that one or more of a number of different conditions obtain.

1. There are held assumptions interfering.

2. It takes time to approach some of the concepts. I've seen it take 
a year of exposure before the meanings start to appear to even a very 
bright reader.

3. The reader is impatient or needs an overview in which to place 
each statement, instead of simply reading without demanding immediate 
understanding. (That can describe me, sometimes, by the way. And one 
of the easiest fixes to my TL comments is to make them a little 
longer by prefixing them with a summary. I always create a summary on 
request, and others have done this for me. Actually boiling it down 
without making it unintelligible is very time-consuming, typically 
I'm already spending too much time writing!)

4. It's not polemic, but some readers want to know what the "point" 
is. I.e, what conclusion is being pushed? Trying to figure this out 
can be frustrating because I'm not generally pushing a point but 
simply considering an issue. Or, another way to put this, it is a 
literal point of view, that is, a view from my position, that is 
being expressed, not pushed.

5. The reader has a strong position which appears to be contradicted by me.

6. The reader doesn't have time and/or adequate interest. This is the 
real tl;dr, and it's fully legitimate.

There are different learning styles, and only some people are capable 
of learning from someone like me. That is not blameworthy, and is 
only a problem when these people try to prevent *others* from 
learning from me, for there are many who can and do.

Now, as to the question I posed: What do you get when you can see 
things from two different points of view at the same time?

Some thing that this is weak, that it produces vacillation, lack of 
clarity, etc.

But what you actually and literally get is depth perception.