Comment by Arainach
2 months ago
By leaving out the following paragraph you're doing an injustice, framing a humorous anecdote as an attack:
>Then I remembered that I'd heard it before. A homeless guy had been saying this exact same thing down by the beach, although I had to admit the message benefited from the wireless microphone, the giant festival stage, and the thousands of screaming fans.
It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker.
The author of this article is a solid storyteller who brings in a number of human elements that make it compelling. Meandering storytelling is intentional - this isn't an article for a scientific journal.
> It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker.
It’s not a poignant observation. This is the issue I had with the entire article; it was an uninsightful, unoriginal tweet that the author dragged out into more than two dozen paragraphs.
> The author of this article is a solid storyteller
I disagree. He’s using formulaic creative writing methods and came across as pretentious.
> Meandering storytelling is intentional
The meandering added nothing to the story. You summarized the entire post in less than a paragraph.
Writing isn't always about terse summaries of information. If you want that, have an LLM summarize it.
Good writing expresses concepts and ideas in engaging ways. You could write a few paragraphs summarizing theology, philosophy, and family dynamics that could be read in 10 minutes, but that doesn't come close to matching or replacing Dostoyevsky.
Doing everything as efficiently as possible misses the point. It's similar to how handwritten notes are slower but are retained more because of the process and taking the time to make them and read them.
> You could write a few paragraphs summarizing theology, philosophy, and family dynamics that could be read in 10 minutes, but that doesn't come close to matching or replacing Dostoyevsky.
The author of the post is not Dostoyevsky. My objection is not to meandering, it’s to the meandering done by those who have nothing worthwhile to say.