A lot of Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky posts don't get straight to the point and usually do not follow an intro -> body -> conclusion format. A lot of them start with a story that makes the direction of the post unclear[0] or include long digressions whose value isn't immediately obvious.[1]
For a while, I struggled with this contradiction because I think good writing should quickly demonstrate the value a reader can expect, but I think Graham and Spolsky are excellent writers that frequently take their time in getting to their point.
The easy answer is that Graham and Spolsky are famous, so they can do whatever they want, and people will still read. I've come to think it's actually that writers like Graham and Spolsky are so good that the quality of the writing itself is the thing of value that keeps you interested even if you don't know what point they're going to make.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
But to take Spolsky's "Things You Should Never Do" as an example, obviously nobody's Googling, "things to never do," clicking Joel's article, and then getting annoyed at Joel for not telling them immediately. They're finding the post on HN, RSS readers, forums, etc., where they didn't have a specific goal in mind beyond learning/entertainment, so the author has more room to take their time.
Right, all good (human) communication boils down to both the author and the reader having a theory-of-mind for one-another. The writer must anticipate what a reader will be thinking, and a reader must imagine [0] what the writer wanted to convey.
That's part of what makes the modern epidemic of LLM slop so frustrating: The correctly-formed words make us waste effort trying to reconstruct a mind that was never really there. Like some animals encountering an extremely realistic plastic fake that we cannot eat/mate-with.
0) https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE-Intro/fakei...
I don't know if it's still there, but Grammarly used to have an AI feature that specifically made text longer. It was literally a button that says "Make longer."
> education is not storytelling
> People want to save "twists" and "revelations" for maximum impact and it's harmful.
So basically a goal is that I'll stop for questions at some point and if I'm successful there'll be a student that asks a question we've been building up to and that I'm about to ask and/or answer. But there shouldn't be a "plot twist". I'm not trying to surprise students (usually :), but rather the story should make sense. As an educator[0] my goal is to get students to remember certain things and ask the right questions (a skill that's non-obvious yet people are overly confident about their level).
A good example of story driven writing is Cropper's The Quantum Physicists: And an Introduction to Their Physics. I really enjoyed this in my undergrad because it not only taught the physics but taught it in a historical manner. I said there's compression in story telling and this style of teaching did a great job at motivation of why these physicists were asking these questions. It gave context. I honestly think it had a big impact on me and helped push me into research (I do ML, not physics).
Certainly there's a time and place for being terse and hyper fixated on the information you're trying to teach but often we're trying to do a lot more than that.
FWIW, I think LLMs are terrible at this. They make everything seem "exciting". When everything is "load bearing" then nothing is. They're really bad at the context and understanding the bigger picture. They're especially terrible at responding to a question with something like "keep that question in mind, we'll come back to it in next week's lecture"
[0] I'm currently in industry