People love tips. A list of tips is the easiest way to make the front page of Digg, attract dozens of back links, and acquire hordes of RSS subscribers. The tips don’t even need to be new or insightful, they just need to make sense and cover an interesting topic. Who doesn’t enjoy useful information in an easily digestible format?

The problem with tips is that they’re too delicious. People become obsessed with prepackaged information nuggets and stop thinking for themselves. When an article focuses on theory, no matter how brilliant it is, people complain that the information isn’t “useful”. The definition of “useful” has become so narrow that it only includes information that applies directly to a concrete problem. This reluctance to master and apply conceptual knowledge is a symptom of intellectual laziness.