11 ms·
Ironically I think Ms. Schwartz could stand to improve her writing, and be more productive with her audience's time. I gave up 7 long paragraphs in, after reali
by viridian 8y ago
Ironically I think Ms. Schwartz could stand to improve her writing, and be more productive with her audience's time. I gave up 7 long paragraphs in, after realizing that:
a) no real counterclaim had been made yet, and
b) I was only 1/4 of the way through this article
Her concluding paragraph is that you should do non-productive tasks sometimes, disconnect, and enjoy yourself. The great irony in this is that I recall being given the same advice in the last couple of self help books I read, Deep Work and The Shallows.
This article seems to be a mountain of words to broad brush a genre, but then I could be wrong, as I only read a quarter of it.
- willbw 8y agoI see this sort of comment on every New Yorker article posted here. The style of the magazine is not efficient, short articles. Some people do enjoy longer form, descriptive writing, even if it could be summarised in a shorter article.
- viridian 8y agoSure, and that's reasonable. I'm a fan of slatestarcodex.com, which posts a lot of long form content as well, the problem for me here was that the author didn't even outline the direction of the counterpoint in seven paragraphs.
- viridian 8y agoI also just wanted to let everyone know, that back when this article first came out, another HN user summed up my thoughts better than I could myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16135800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16135800
- ep103 8y agoI also like longform.org
- TeMPOraL 8y agoYou can't really compare SlateStarCodex with New Yorker. The way Scott Alexander writes is information-dense and doesn't go off completely pointless tangents. It's long because he has a lot to say, not because it's an art style.
- dokem 8y agoHow could an article like this be anything but a long winded ramble?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pervycreeper 8y agoThe title instantly identifies it as belonging to the genre of vacuous contrarian hot-takes. Without having read it in its entirety either, I would guess that if does make a good point, it relies on confusing the dangers of bad info, excessive application, or selective focus on areas for improvement, for detriments of the enterprise of self-improvement itself.
- piyushahuja 8y agoIf you think this is bad writing (because it doesn't make a productive use of audience time), the article has a piece of advice for you, "Put away your self-help guides, and read a novel instead." Like a novel, the reading of an article is meant to be an experience. It follows the "show, don't tell" dictum pretty well. The critique of perfectionism hits at you viscerally, instead of being an academic argument. That good writing necessarily requires a more productive use of audience's time (or follows some economics of the form of insights communicated/time spent), is the optimizing/perfectionist thinking that Ms. Schwartz has taken aim at in her content. So the form follows content in a way. The writer feels that in today's self-improvement culture, we do not appreciate something for its own sake. For example, when we read, we think of "what is it saying? Why does it not say it quickly?", rather than imagining possibilities, chewing on the words of a sentence, or relish the turn of phrases, or appreciating the metaphors employed to communicate a feeling. You do seem to be right in suspecting that you are wrong about the article. Her concluding paragraph, for example, states that the one should be able to enjoy experiences for their sake alone, rather than the sake of self-improvement. "Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value." This is contrary to the assumptions shared by the two self-help books you allude to: The Shallows and Deep Work. These argue for disconneting FOR the sake of having some value in the dimension of self improvement: for being able to improve the quality of your work (Deep Work), or increasing reading comprehension, e.g. (The Shallows).
- scarejunba 8y agoThis is just another comment in the fetishization of everything long. There's nothing particularly grand about anything being long. Timecube is longer. I have 50 years at best left to live. This isn't competing with self help. This is competing with the best books of all time so it had better be good.
- kharak 8y agoStrongly agree. Most articles I come across could be summarized in bullet-point style. How many articles are there that couldn't be compressed in 5-10 bullet-points, each containing a short sentence?
- _cs2017_ 8y agoI always read the top HN comment or two, then read the article for 10 seconds or so, and then usually switch back to reading HN comments. I find HN comments to be more informative and interesting. There are some rare exceptions when I actually finish the article, but it's rare.