<story><title>The Artificial Intelligentsia</title><url>https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-artificial-intelligentsia-timms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsacco</author><text>Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their burrows beneath the Hudson and East Rivers, caked in the mud of battle against glacial rock and riprap, many sandhogs succumbed to the bends. Passengers arriving at the modern Penn Station—the luminous Beaux-Arts hangar of old long since razed, its passenger halls squashed underground—might sympathize. Vincent Scully once compared the experience to scuttling into the city like a rat. Zoomorphized, we are joined to the earlier generations.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This goes on for about seven paragraphs before I have any idea what the article about. I understand “setting the scene” but I can’t tell whether or not to care about an article if it meanders about with this flowing exposition before indicating what its central thesis is.&lt;p&gt;It seems like a popular style in thinkpieces and some areas of journalism. The author makes a semi-relevant title, provacative subtitle, and five - ten paragraphs of “introduction” that throw you right into the thick of a story whose purpose doesn’t seem clear unless you know what the article is about. Rather than capturing my attention with engaging exposition, I find it takes me out of it. But it must work if it’s so uniquitous; presumably their analytics have confirmed this style is engaging.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>_nothing</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not the style-- it&amp;#x27;s just not good writing, but it&amp;#x27;s trying so hard to be. It&amp;#x27;s the kind of thing that would show up in a college writing workshop and hopefully get workshopped into something more intelligible. As they say, &amp;quot;Show, don&amp;#x27;t tell.&amp;quot; The passage describes a lot but not in a way that helps you actually visualize any of it, thus it&amp;#x27;s really hard to follow.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Artificial Intelligentsia</title><url>https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-artificial-intelligentsia-timms</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dsacco</author><text>Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoying:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; “SANDHOGS,” THEY CALLED THE LABORERS who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their burrows beneath the Hudson and East Rivers, caked in the mud of battle against glacial rock and riprap, many sandhogs succumbed to the bends. Passengers arriving at the modern Penn Station—the luminous Beaux-Arts hangar of old long since razed, its passenger halls squashed underground—might sympathize. Vincent Scully once compared the experience to scuttling into the city like a rat. Zoomorphized, we are joined to the earlier generations.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This goes on for about seven paragraphs before I have any idea what the article about. I understand “setting the scene” but I can’t tell whether or not to care about an article if it meanders about with this flowing exposition before indicating what its central thesis is.&lt;p&gt;It seems like a popular style in thinkpieces and some areas of journalism. The author makes a semi-relevant title, provacative subtitle, and five - ten paragraphs of “introduction” that throw you right into the thick of a story whose purpose doesn’t seem clear unless you know what the article is about. Rather than capturing my attention with engaging exposition, I find it takes me out of it. But it must work if it’s so uniquitous; presumably their analytics have confirmed this style is engaging.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>subcosmos</author><text>Just imagine ... that some day in the future journalism will be AI based, and will generate entire articles tailored to your viewing habits based on extensive psych profiling and AB testing to maximize clicks and screen time!&lt;p&gt;The content need not be true, but at least everyone will be happy with their preferred writing styles....&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;karpathy.github.io&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;rnn-effectiveness&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;karpathy.github.io&amp;#x2F;2015&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;21&amp;#x2F;rnn-effectiveness&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>