

The Hole Argument - infinity
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-holearg/

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voidz
I never know: should we just click this link and "wait for it," or, will OP
give us a bit of insight into the content's context?

~~~
copsarebastards
So basically you want to know whether you're interested in something without
actually bothering to understand it?

I'm increasingly frustrated with this mindset. Yes, you don't have the time to
read everything. The answer to this, in my estimation, is gear your reading
toward information sources with higher density of quality. If, instead, you
only read things with titles that summarize the content for you, you're
limiting yourself to ideas which can be summarized in a 5- to 20-word blurb.
These ideas and simple, and consequently, _frequently wrong_. Reality is often
complicated and it's not possible to dumb it down into a "1 weird metaphysical
argument that will make your brain grow 10 inches"-style clickbait headline.

I do think it's a courtesy to the reader to provide keywords in a title that
make it easy to reference and that create an effective vocabulary for talking
about the topic (which this title does). I _don 't_ think that authors have
any responsibility to dumb down their titles into summaries for those who
can't be arsed to hear them out.

As an aside: generally stuff published on Stanford's website is written by top
professionals in various fields, which makes it a high-density source of good
information.

~~~
jasode
_> So basically you want to know whether you're interested in something
without actually bothering to understand it? [...] I don't think that authors
have any responsibility to dumb down their titles into summaries for those who
can't be arsed to hear them out._

I may have misunderstood voidz's question but I don't think he's asking for a
dumbed-down tldr or something to be spoonfed to him.

The keyword I read in his question was " _context_ ". In other words, was
there another event or news article that prompted the OP to submit "Hole
Argument" _and_ for multiple people to vote on it enough to have it show up on
the HN front page?

For example, on the front page there's a post "Python is the new BASIC"...
it's an old 2008 article... why is it there?!? I think many of us can guess
that its submission was possibly triggered by the other article "Guido on
Python" from EuroCon 2015". Reverse engineering the context is a little easier
in that case.

The "Hole Argument" is interesting, but there are thousands of interesting
physics articles... so maybe there's another trigger that prompted its
submission. E.g. a recent discovery at Hadron Collider, or one of the authors
recently passed away, etc.

Of course, the article's submission may be purely random in which case there
is no context. The submitter (infinity) can clarify that for the voidz.

~~~
copsarebastards
> I may have misunderstood voidz's question but I don't think he's asking for
> a dumbed-down tldr or something to be spoonfed to him.

Okay, I'll just quote voidz's response to the same post you're responding to:

> Most of all, I wanted to kick off the discussion by asking if we should
> guess what information the link would give us. From the title alone, I have
> no idea. It's a play on words ("the hole / whole argument"), but beyond
> that, i had no clue.

Can you think of a way to get "what information the link would give us"
without it being a dumbed-down tldr?

