It is fair to say that the irony was the reason I commented, rather than downvoting and moving on, but the point stands that summarizing a brief, non-technical

It is fair to say that the irony was the reason I commented, rather than downvoting and moving on, but the point stands that summarizing a brief, non-technical article distorts the author's views (as Spolsky said, you lose nuance when summarizing your own thoughts - how could it be otherwise when your thoughts are summarized by a stranger?) and leads to pointless, flame-bait-y semantic argments of the kind he complained about (cf: this post , and the 3 above it, and (god forbid) those below it). And by the by, any time you find yourself using words like "all", "always" or "never" in describing someone else's position is a good time to pause and reflect on whether you're honoring the Principle of Charity, as paraphrased in the HN comment guidelines thusly: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. The good faith interpretation of my post was that I was complaining about your summary, not about summaries generally and certainly not about summaries in wildly different contexts like journal abstracts. However, just to reiterate: please understand that I'm not attacking you, or saying that you mis-characterized anyone's position on purpose, or out of malice or incompetence. The whole point of the essay we're discussing is that conveying a complex and nuanced position through a short block of text is hard, and that when someone tries, a distorted view of the author's position is the expected outcome.