Am I the only one who found this essay to be meandering? It’s frustrating because I felt from the headline that it was going to make a valid point about the odd gloss of humor as a way of social/existential self-defense that is permeating our time. And I think that that’s what the author may actually be getting at. I found the quotes pulled into the comments here to be great re: quote tweets, but I felt like the essay itself was almost like a granite obelisk of one cultural reference after the other.
I actually thought it was very tightly structured: early in the essay (fourth paragraph) it sets out four character types ("the private detective, the comedian, the flâneur, and, most recently, the social media poster") and then proceeds to dwell on each of them in turn, in orderly sequence.
In more detail, here's a paragraph-by-paragraph "map" of the essay:
• [1–2] Three quotes that speak of cleverness negatively. So is there something wrong with being clever?
• [3-4] Connecting cleverness to being an "outsider". [IMO the main theme pervading the whole essay: alienation/dissociation.] The four character types [mentioned above].
• [5–9] The detective as outsider. [Raymond Chandler, Chinatown.]
• [10–13] The comedian as outsider. [Woody Allen, Seinfeld]
• [14–16] The flâneur (with link to detective).
• [17–19] Online cleverness (with links to the observations made about the earlier types).
• [20–22] Three paragraphs of conclusion: Kierkegaard and a way out.
In light of this, this essay is far more methodically structured than most I've read! From your comment it sounds like you're most interested in the "comedian" bits (paras 10–13 and 19), but the rest of the essay is quite connected too. And the journal is subtitled "Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture", so it makes sense that there are references to contemporary culture.
It is meandering, but that's a good thing so far as I am concerned. It's an essay in the old-fashioned exploratory Montaignian style where the journey matters as much as the destination, not the sterile persuasive plod of the modern style.
However, in Montaigne's essays he often doesn't have a clear thesis at the beginning of the essay. You are reading his (magisterial) thinking transcribed onto the page.
The OP gestures towards a thesis ('here's why society's championing of cleverness is bad') and then spends paragraphs meandering around it.
Are you referring to “Classic” style of prose as it is portrayed in the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”? If so, good point. But in my opinion, taking your observation into consideration, the piece now falls even flatter if I were to interpret it as an attempt at that style of writing.
If the author stuck to just dissecting only Twitter or Seinfeld or Kierkegaard or Einstein using some supporting of details derived from just one of of those references, or even tied in one extra reference for robustness, that’d be great in my opinion. But this essay reads like it was constructed from a bunch of transcluded notes from an Obsidian vault or a zettelkasten (where reference upon reference can be taking due to bi-directional links between notes).
I can go as far as to say that this is less classic prose, than it is prose in the manner of a Family Guy episode.
> Are you referring to “Classic” style of prose as it is portrayed in the book “Clear and Simple as the Truth”?
No, although that's an excellent book. I'm referring to the essay-writing tradition that started with Michel de Montaigne (who first used the word 'essay' in that sense). He was a skeptic and thought of essays as wandering and exploratory, not probative.
It was hard not to read it and think “this guy is analyzing cleverness? Like this?” It’s hard to read it and not feel the author themself wasn’t peacocking their cleverness. And I’m not entirely fond of the attempt at reinforcing a point this abstract trying to use quotes or excerpts from sources. It’s an idea; it doesn’t need evidence. It’s just meant to evoke thought. I’m ok with that and don’t need you to try to prove it by something Kierkegaard said.
I think the piece does resound a bit if you can clean off the gunky verbal tripe and look at what they’re trying to say. There’s a definite problem regarding people trying to be clever. I’m just not convinced that’s the source of the problem. Just a symptom.
> It’s an idea; it doesn’t need evidence. It’s just meant to evoke thought. I’m ok with that and don’t need you to try to prove it by something Kierkegaard said.
The point of citing Kierkegaard is to make use of the insights of others to try to explain something and to shed light on it. What the author is examining starts as a vague, confused, and murky impression that requires refinement, analysis, and effort to get to the essence of the thing. Clarity is not a given. Do you presume to know all there can be said about a thing? If not, then looking at what others have said is an opportunity to grow in wisdom and break out of the provincialism of one's own limited perspective, if only by the very act of wrestling with their material. I thank the wise who came before me for showing me the way and enriching my understanding of reality.
The creation of an idea is not something that requires prior art. The addition of prior art to an idea falsely equivocates it to evidence of the idea’s merit. However I believe an idea has merit when it has resonance, period.
Agreed. Curiously that meander makes the implicit point that the author never made explicitly, that cleverness is shallow. It's all about witty one-liners that lead no deeper than eliciting a smirk and a mote of respect for the joker's facility with an unobvious turn of phrase. Little surprise that Wilde wanted to be remembered for more than merely that, which alas, he isn’t.
I agree, the writing is entertaining, but it doesn't stick to any particular points. If it did, there would be more accountability for the author to say things that lead to useful conclusions, I think. At times I found myself wondering what the author was getting at, but then they would move on.
Is talking about "culture" a way of lumping fiction and reality together? Fictional always-right, wisecracking detectives aren't real, but there are real detectives, and presumably some clever ones whose actual cleverness is of real practical use. Fictional scientists who are more passionate than logical aren't real, but there are real scientists, whose cleverness is presumably valuable. Realistic work of professionals doesn't make for good reading. Fiction is entertainment in the first place.
I found the writing beautiful. Sometimes if writing "gets to the point" too directly, it can fail to make an interesting point at all. Weaving together lots of references and ideas provides a lot more nuance and richness IMO.
I don't intend this meanly, but do you read much non-technical nonfiction? New yorker articles, memoirs, things like that? This one is not particularly an outlier, but also not a ton of that stuff gets posted to HN.
Maybe I don't know. But we've self-selected into a forum where the main activity is the discussion of writing so I would expect us to be more practiced and open-minded about it than average.
This is quite an interesting phenomenon, though it's more unique. I find those kind (can't come up with a sensible qualifier... the best thing that comes to mind is "upper middle class normie journalism") of pieces incomprehensible on the higher strata of the parsing tree. I understand the words (which is not always the case with fiction, eg Blindsight - there are pages where I need to do multiple dictionary lookups, English is not my native tongue thou), the sentences more or less clearly denote facts or ideas, but... the more I read of them the less they make sense together.
Yet another funny thing occurred to me: I'm not sure I'm enjoying much non-technical non-fiction. Is Bret Devereaux[0] technical? Well, τέχνη, the root word hints at craft, art or skill. The articles focus on the "how to" (move armies, organize settlements or even write better fiction) merely using "how it was" as a teaching aid and inspiration. So the conclusion would follow that all kinds of guides are technical.
Then if a published piece of writing is neither technical (guide / manual) nor fiction (art) - what is it? Isn't it just... data?
Yeah I'm not necessarily trying to endorse that style of writing either, and I think "upper middle class normie journalism" is a pretty good name for it.
But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I also think that, like consuming only social media probably atrophies your attention span, reading only "direct" prose atrophies your ability to experience the ride of other styles and receive what they have to give.
And again I don't really intend this as a value judgement. Both styles have their place and there is no moral imperative to enjoy all approaches to writing. But having a limited palate accidentally, being blind to that, and thinking the fault is entirely in anything that lies outside of it is in a very literal sense pathetic. And here I often sense that it is perceived as virtuous distance from foolishness instead.
> But I do notice that HN tends to have a hard time with/disparage writing that doesn't state a clear thesis and move towards it directly. Writing that makes its point "between the lines" or through braiding apparently unrelated thoughts together and expecting the reader to finish the splice are not well received here.
I think that reaction's a combination of that sort of writing sometimes being amateurish wankery poorly-imitating better writers with better ideas, and an awful lot of tech- and science-nerd sorts having decided around 5th grade that they were already expert readers and literature and language classes were just a bunch of time-wasting made-up bullshit that couldn't possibly teach them to be better readers or writers. "It's this entire field that's wrong, not me!"
Poor literacy is almost as prevalent as poor math skills, folks are just less comfortable owning up to it. Plus a lot more people overestimate how good they are at it, I think, than do with math skills.
HN's content is entirely nonfiction, which demands a focused and discuplined style of writing: claim, defense, conclusion. Because its goal is to entertain, fiction frees the author to meander, muddle, or mislead — all of which impede making or defending a thesis.
If an article is nonfiction, then get to the point and stay there, dammit.
Yeah see this is the sort of very narrow-minded view of nonfiction I'm talking about. It's fine if that's the only thing you can bring yourself to value but it doesn't put the fault in the writing.
It reminded me of one of Paul Graham's essays. It is important to hone writing skills as a way of looking more deeply at issues and understanding them.
The unspoken archetype in his essay is the God-being, which he is playing by implication. He gets to watch even the watchers, observing truly from outside the space he's describing. It is still a game of cleverness - writing the article itself.
I did to. I actually find a lot of writing meandering these days (for instance, almost all of the stuff from SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen).
I think part of the issue is that these kinds of essays serve both as an argument and jumping off point for discussion, but also as a form of entertainment. If you enjoy the entertainment, you might enjoy the argument being padded and meandering. But if you're mostly interested in hearing the argument and responding, this type of writing can fell like it's intentionally wasting your time.
You do not have to respond to everything. Some writing is an opertunity for reflection. If you respond without some reflection, you become more of an NPC.
On a forum I could give things a couple of days and then write a response. Or I could start my own thread on the topic. But that's less of an option in places like HN. If I write a comment here two days from now, there's a good chance that zero people will see it. If I want to discuss the topic but not the essay, what are my options? I could start my own blog, write my thoughts on the matter, submit it to HN, hope that I'm one of the 1% of the submissions that make it past the screeners who hang out on "New," then hope I actually generate some discussion and don't immediately fall off the page.
I actually agree with you that more reflection in general is a good idea (though I don't necessarily agree that these kinds of essays engender that kind of reflection, but that's a separate topic). However, the online communities that exist now are designed to dissuade people from doing anything (reflection, research, editing, etc.) that take more time.
There is no reason to expect you will find the sort of dialogue you want unless you take some steps to initiate it yourself. The people who regularly appear on the front page of HN did not start off doing so.
This kind of writing has its own rewards. It is just as valuable to the writer as the reader. Paul Graham makes the point that developing writing skills also develops your ideas. If you cannot articulate your ideas well enough for others to understand it, it is likely the case your idea is still fully undeveloped.
I mean, certainly there are plenty of things people want to comment on without writing a blog post on it. This discussion, for example. We're discussing this with relatively quickly written comments, not as blog posts that we spend a great deal of time on, put away for a day, come back to edit, etc.
It's also the case that time is limited, and there are some topics we don't want to spend much time on. It's common to see people argue that if you don't spend as much time on the topic as them, then your opinions on it aren't as worthy, but I can't really agree with that. It's very often used as a way to defend poor beliefs against obvious criticisms. You see it a lot with conspiracy theories. "You can't dismiss this unless you've read all of the writings on it!" But only true believers are going to subject themselves to dozens of books on a crank theory.
I think the rise of meander is more likely a sign of inattention and the inability to focus. An essay is much more powerful and memorable if it can state a clear thesis and defend it memorably and undeniably.
In today's writing, perhaps because we demand so great a volume of it, purposeful prose financially rewards the author's extra effort less than ever before, and is less appreciated by readers because they're less willing to pause their pace of consumption to reflect on subtleties and unobvious insights. The online written word has evolved into a 24x7-driven ehpemeral commodity, where cleverness alone is the desiderata that makes or breaks the work and its auteur.
