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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Abstracts should be either Actually Short™, or broken into paragraphs, published by Raemon on March 24, 2023 on LessWrong.
It looks to me like academia figured out (correctly) that it's useful for papers to have an abstract that makes it easy to tell-at-a-glance what a paper is about. They also figured out that abstract should be about a paragraph. Then people goodharted on "what paragraph means", trying to cram too much information in one block of text. Papers typically have ginormous abstracts that should actually broken into multiple paragraphs.
I think LessWrong posts should probably have more abstracts, but I want them to be nice easy-to-read abstracts, not worst-of-all-worlds-goodharted-paragraph abstracts. Either admit that you've written multiple paragraphs and break it up accordingly, or actually streamline it into one real paragraph.
Sorry to pick on the authors of this particular post, but my motivating example today was bumping into the abstract for the Natural Abstractions: Key claims, Theorems, and Critiques. It's a good post, it's opening summary happened to be written in an academic-ish style that exemplified the problem. It opens with:
TL;DR: John Wentworth’s Natural Abstraction agenda aims to understand and recover “natural” abstractions in realistic environments. This post summarizes and reviews the key claims of said agenda, its relationship to prior work, as well as its results to date. Our hope is to make it easier for newcomers to get up to speed on natural abstractions, as well as to spur a discussion about future research priorities. We start by summarizing basic intuitions behind the agenda, before relating it to prior work from a variety of fields. We then list key claims behind John Wentworth’s Natural Abstractions agenda, including the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis and his specific formulation of natural abstractions, which we dub redundant information abstractions. We also construct novel rigorous statements of and mathematical proofs for some of the key results in the redundant information abstraction line of work, and explain how those results fit into the agenda.
Finally, we conclude by critiquing the agenda and progress to date. We note serious gaps in the theoretical framework, challenge its relevance to alignment, and critique John's current research methodology.
There are 179 words. They blur together, I have a very hard time parsing it. If this were anything other than an abstract I expect you'd naturally write it in about 3 paragraphs:
TL;DR: John Wentworth’s Natural Abstraction agenda aims to understand and recover “natural” abstractions in realistic environments. This post summarizes and reviews the key claims of said agenda, its relationship to prior work, as well as its results to date. Our hope is to make it easier for newcomers to get up to speed on natural abstractions, as well as to spur a discussion about future research priorities.
We start by summarizing basic intuitions behind the agenda, before relating it to prior work from a variety of fields. We then list key claims behind John Wentworth’s Natural Abstractions agenda, including the Natural Abstraction Hypothesis and his specific formulation of natural abstractions, which we dub redundant information abstractions. We also construct novel rigorous statements of and mathematical proofs for some of the key results in the redundant information abstraction line of work, and explain how those results fit into the agenda.
Finally, we conclude by critiquing the agenda and progress to date. We note serious gaps in the theoretical framework, challenge its relevance to alignment, and critique John's current research methodology.
If I try to streamline this without losing info, it's still hard to get it into something less than 3 paragraphs (113 words)
We review John Wentwor...