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The author is obviously self-aware and this is precisely what makes it frustrating. Nearly every point is obfuscated through ornamentation, or broken up into pa
by skrjabin 11y ago
The author is obviously self-aware and this is precisely what makes it frustrating. Nearly every point is obfuscated through ornamentation, or broken up into parenthetical statements like a jigsaw puzzle. The entire article could be summarized in a concise paragraph with minimal loss of meaning. It's just pretension.
- jdmichal 11y agoI find this comment jarring, because I had little-to-no issues reading the article. So I encourage you to instead read her language as a performance, and figure out what group she's performing in.
- kough 11y agoThis writing style is itself a performance of Rationalist culture. Read anything by The Last Psychiatrist or Scott Alexander or Eliezer Yudkowsky for comparison.
- mdpopescu 11y agoI actually double-checked to make sure I wasn't on Yudkowsky's site.
- jholman 11y agoYou think The Last Psychiatrist is performing Rationalist culture? I hadn't noticed such a relationship, and at a moment's consideration I still don't notice it, and if you really do think that, I'd appreciate any evidence you can point me to.
- kough 11y agoI do think so; hard to prove if reading the content isn't argument enough. One fact is that TLP is the third link on the left-hand blog roll on SSC's website, so there's at least a one-way relationship. Anecdotally I remember reading something by Scott Alexander that mentioned that TLP was part of the LW community at one point, but I can't back this up with links.
- sn9 11y agoI actually first read this through a link on one of Scott's articles a few months ago.
- nkurz 11y agoIt's just pretension. No. Or maybe yes, but not in the condescending way you imply. The article is about "class", and stylistically, it's speaking to a particular class. If you are in that target class (or familiar with it), it reads very well. If you are not, well, that's the self-referential topic of the article.
- erroneousfunk 11y agoThere are a lot of important details and discussions here that would be lost in a single paragraph. For instance: - Many people think that things that indicate social status cost money (who thinks this, why do they think this, when it is and is not the case) - How education and occupation do, and do not, influence social class. - How our culture defines class in ways that we may not realize even exist. We're so immersed in culture, it's difficult to realize alternatives. - She explores inter-class relations, and how the perception of class differs around the world. I mean, those are just a few things I ran through and picked up near the beginning. I found the article extremely easy to read, and appreciated some of the subtle details in the writing that drove the point home. Is any type of long form writing on a subject pretension, or what would you prefer?