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I don't get it. I tried reading this New Yorker story when it came out and thought it was terrible and has little to do with Snowden. Now it's on the front page

I don't get it. I tried reading this New Yorker story when it came out and thought it was terrible and has little to do with Snowden. Now it's on the front page of HN? Did anyone understand the story itself?

fullshark 10y ago
I don't either. I think it's about obnoxious intellectuals but that might just be me projecting my own opinion of the characters.
- rovek 10y ago
  This was my conclusion.
  - zwieback 10y ago
    Okay, good to know I'm not the only one who thinks that. Normally the fiction is the first thing I read when I get the New Yorker but I did not enjoy this one.
rory096 10y ago
This was an impressive HN experiment, at the very least. 14 comments now and only one person even glanced at the article.
- kbenson 10y ago
  Depending on what you think upvoting the submission means, you might interpret it anywhere from deplorable to perfectly normal. I myself sometimes upvote for the submission (after at least minimally reviewing it), and sometimes for the discussion (sometimes before viewing the submission), and sometimes for the concept which I think deserves eyes and hopefully a discussion, even if the submission itself is anemic. Rather than treat submission score as some proxy for article quality or importance, I try to think of it as what I think it actually maps most closely to, which is interest, and in the most broad reading of the word and what it applies to. Edit: Although, it's possible you meant experiment in the entirely literal sense in that it exposes behavior, and there is no implied judgement.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    He said comments, not score.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      Sure, but I had to make some assumptions about what was being implied and what might actually be meant, because how do we actually know how many people read the article? I'll admit, I was using the comment as a springboard to bring up something I wanted to talk about. It wasn't really meant to come across as chiding, which I thought it unfortunately read as after I posted it, which is why I posted the edit, which I'm not sure really helps. It establishes it as me calling out the parent comment, but them tries to offer a way to soften it, and I'm not sure the net result was worth it.
  - threatofrain 10y ago
    Perhaps this is lazy, but I often read the Hacker News comments to decide if an article is worth reading. I'll upvote posts that I think promote my strategy of depending on Hacker News to filter for me. That posts like zwieback's post are easily found reaffirms my faith in this strategy. This is partly because I don't fully trust my ability to comprehensively generate or iterate through the most serious criticisms or strong points of a technical matter, but I trust that a sufficiently large Hacker News will capture all low hanging fruits. I want to know these low hanging fruits prior to even giving an article a chance. Another reason is because even when people have something interesting to share, they often pad it with unnecessary prose, maybe because that's the current blogging trend -- to make technical discussions seem more narrativey and personal.
- firebones 10y ago
  This thread illustrates the mechanics of the fake news phenomenon quite well. Post is literally fiction, and half the comments are responding to the story's title alone, as if it were headlining an opinion piece.
azernik 10y ago
It's a piece of fiction. Writers writing what they know, which means writing about writers thinking about writing. The content of the petition is irrelevant to the story; the actual content is all about a) the feelings the author has about Liz and her relationship with the petition-writers, and b) the credibility of artists trying to make their political action "artistic".
mundo 10y ago
I loved it. Not just the story, but it being here, with this title, and the ensuing confusion. I'm no expert, and trying to explain short fiction and poetry is probably a mug's game (one of the themes of this piece!) but here's my two cents worth: this story isn't about Snowden, the man; it's about Snowden, the cause, and the idea that causes can be political and wrenching and divisive in a way that is divorced from what they're ostensibly about. The protagonist spends the entire story wrestling with whether or not to sign the petition (how would it affect him professionally? what would his friends think of him signing it? is it okay to be associated with a popular cause if it means supporting someone he doesn't like?) without even a cursory thought about whether Snowden ought to be pardoned or not. That theme - people being more concerned with how their stance on a political issue reflects on them and how it makes them feel than with the content of the issue - seems very relevant right now, and as relevant here at HN as anywhere else. This thought gnaws at me every time there's a political controversy being discussed: that so many of the comments seem so obviously to be about the writer and how they see imagine themselves and how they want to be seen. Virtually every accusation (that someone or something is racist, or sexist, or blinded by political correctness, or what have you) comes with the unspoken, "...unlike me." A good example of this was the brouhaha over Curtis Yarvin being disinvited from Strange Loop a few years ago. If you missed that one, an obscure developer of an obscure open source project got blackballed from an obscure conference over his incredibly obscure political writings because someone you've never heard of said they were racist on twitter. And for a day or two, a lot of HN had an opinion on it! Not on what he wrote, mind you, which is dense and contradictory and not very interesting. Just the fact that it happened was, to many people, yet another piece of irrefutable proof that Silicon Valley is being ruined by either the right-wingers or the left-wingers. So, that's what I got out of this. The protagonist is faced with a very simple decision (sign a petition or don't), but he is so wrapped up in his own insecurities that, by a weird sort of alchemy, that boolean choice becomes a referendum on how he feels about aging and poetry and Bob Dylan and so forth. The story ends with his decision, but you can easily imagine him justifying that decision in an email or a forum with some made-up guff about Snowden and privacy that has nothing to do with his real reason for not signing. And in this light, how amusing that it should cause a few HN commenters to launch back in to the "Edward Snowden is a hero / Edward Snowden is a traitor" wars without actually clicking the link! It's a cliche that life imitates art, but that doesn't just happen by accident - life imitates art IFF the art has successfully managed to capture a real and relevant piece of life. I think this story did that, which is why I liked it.

fullshark 10y ago

I don't either. I think it's about obnoxious intellectuals but that might just be me projecting my own opinion of the characters.

rovek 10y ago
This was my conclusion.
- zwieback 10y ago
  Okay, good to know I'm not the only one who thinks that. Normally the fiction is the first thing I read when I get the New Yorker but I did not enjoy this one.

rory096 10y ago

This was an impressive HN experiment, at the very least. 14 comments now and only one person even glanced at the article.

kbenson 10y ago
Depending on what you think upvoting the submission means, you might interpret it anywhere from deplorable to perfectly normal. I myself sometimes upvote for the submission (after at least minimally reviewing it), and sometimes for the discussion (sometimes before viewing the submission), and sometimes for the concept which I think deserves eyes and hopefully a discussion, even if the submission itself is anemic. Rather than treat submission score as some proxy for article quality or importance, I try to think of it as what I think it actually maps most closely to, which is interest, and in the most broad reading of the word and what it applies to. Edit: Although, it's possible you meant experiment in the entirely literal sense in that it exposes behavior, and there is no implied judgement.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  He said comments, not score.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    Sure, but I had to make some assumptions about what was being implied and what might actually be meant, because how do we actually know how many people read the article? I'll admit, I was using the comment as a springboard to bring up something I wanted to talk about. It wasn't really meant to come across as chiding, which I thought it unfortunately read as after I posted it, which is why I posted the edit, which I'm not sure really helps. It establishes it as me calling out the parent comment, but them tries to offer a way to soften it, and I'm not sure the net result was worth it.
- threatofrain 10y ago
  Perhaps this is lazy, but I often read the Hacker News comments to decide if an article is worth reading. I'll upvote posts that I think promote my strategy of depending on Hacker News to filter for me. That posts like zwieback's post are easily found reaffirms my faith in this strategy. This is partly because I don't fully trust my ability to comprehensively generate or iterate through the most serious criticisms or strong points of a technical matter, but I trust that a sufficiently large Hacker News will capture all low hanging fruits. I want to know these low hanging fruits prior to even giving an article a chance. Another reason is because even when people have something interesting to share, they often pad it with unnecessary prose, maybe because that's the current blogging trend -- to make technical discussions seem more narrativey and personal.
firebones 10y ago
This thread illustrates the mechanics of the fake news phenomenon quite well. Post is literally fiction, and half the comments are responding to the story's title alone, as if it were headlining an opinion piece.

azernik 10y ago

It's a piece of fiction. Writers writing what they know, which means writing about writers thinking about writing. The content of the petition is irrelevant to the story; the actual content is all about a) the feelings the author has about Liz and her relationship with the petition-writers, and b) the credibility of artists trying to make their political action "artistic".

mundo 10y ago

I loved it. Not just the story, but it being here, with this title, and the ensuing confusion. I'm no expert, and trying to explain short fiction and poetry is probably a mug's game (one of the themes of this piece!) but here's my two cents worth: this story isn't about Snowden, the man; it's about Snowden, the cause, and the idea that causes can be political and wrenching and divisive in a way that is divorced from what they're ostensibly about. The protagonist spends the entire story wrestling with whether or not to sign the petition (how would it affect him professionally? what would his friends think of him signing it? is it okay to be associated with a popular cause if it means supporting someone he doesn't like?) without even a cursory thought about whether Snowden ought to be pardoned or not. That theme - people being more concerned with how their stance on a political issue reflects on them and how it makes them feel than with the content of the issue - seems very relevant right now, and as relevant here at HN as anywhere else. This thought gnaws at me every time there's a political controversy being discussed: that so many of the comments seem so obviously to be about the writer and how they see imagine themselves and how they want to be seen. Virtually every accusation (that someone or something is racist, or sexist, or blinded by political correctness, or what have you) comes with the unspoken, "...unlike me." A good example of this was the brouhaha over Curtis Yarvin being disinvited from Strange Loop a few years ago. If you missed that one, an obscure developer of an obscure open source project got blackballed from an obscure conference over his incredibly obscure political writings because someone you've never heard of said they were racist on twitter. And for a day or two, a lot of HN had an opinion on it! Not on what he wrote, mind you, which is dense and contradictory and not very interesting. Just the fact that it happened was, to many people, yet another piece of irrefutable proof that Silicon Valley is being ruined by either the right-wingers or the left-wingers. So, that's what I got out of this. The protagonist is faced with a very simple decision (sign a petition or don't), but he is so wrapped up in his own insecurities that, by a weird sort of alchemy, that boolean choice becomes a referendum on how he feels about aging and poetry and Bob Dylan and so forth. The story ends with his decision, but you can easily imagine him justifying that decision in an email or a forum with some made-up guff about Snowden and privacy that has nothing to do with his real reason for not signing. And in this light, how amusing that it should cause a few HN commenters to launch back in to the "Edward Snowden is a hero / Edward Snowden is a traitor" wars without actually clicking the link! It's a cliche that life imitates art, but that doesn't just happen by accident - life imitates art IFF the art has successfully managed to capture a real and relevant piece of life. I think this story did that, which is why I liked it.