>Citation needed. Like, really. I'm of two minds about this. This is an excellent piece of writing and is extremely persuasive and accomplishes all of it's int

>Citation needed. Like, really. I'm of two minds about this. This is an excellent piece of writing and is extremely persuasive and accomplishes all of it's intended goals. This is very effective writing and may change someone's opinion from emotional calls. It's very human, easy to understand and people flock to it. However; we have seen the constant and repeated abuse of using this style of writing. Advertisements are the most prominent and politics the most dystopian. It's also very easy to convince people that certain things are facts when that may be disputed or outright wrong. So there's a weird question to come out of this: how accurate and cited do we really need our emotional appeals to be? Given the effectiveness of the writing, citations seem completely unnecessary. Given the context (letter to child; although I'm fairly certain it was orignially intended for a broader audience this is what they claim) you would assume it has no need to be entirely factual, but that context is changed now that it's become a public letter. A public piece of writing should ethically cite or have some backing for any statistics they claim (in my opinion). Although overall hacker news' culture would probably say that if you make a decision, it should probably be based on real data. Personally, I think it's a piece of writing meant for a wide audience which in my opinion means they should cite any claims they make in this case. It's easy to mistake it for something else entirely because of how it's written, which is why it appears to get a pass.