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Other than the author having the ability to use large words I'm not sure what I was supposed to have come away with from this piece at all, it's just word salad
by noir_lord 7y ago
Other than the author having the ability to use large words I'm not sure what I was supposed to have come away with from this piece at all, it's just word salad.
- tr33house 7y agohey! I love some salads :)
- simond_d 7y ago100% this
- netsharc 7y agoI was interested until about half way, and then the author lost/bored me. Ah, the problems writing for the ADHD generation...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dhsysusbsjsi 7y agoOh my god I'm glad it's not just me. I gave up at: "...the distribution of wealth and popular acquiescence in the vicissitudes of the market—the hoi polloi might vote themselves welfare states or even socialism." Word salad is understatement of the day.
- scroot 7y agoWhat's unclear here?
- mjw1007 7y agoIt's not my favourite style of writing, but it's by no means word salad. That paragraph presents a single coherent line of thought. They could have chosen simpler individual words, but there's nothing difficult in the phrasing or structure.
- RHSeeger 7y ago> They could have chosen simpler individual words And they should have. I can put together a sentence using a lot of words most people won't know. It will be a valid sentence, and it will mean what I want it to mean, but a lot of people won't be able to understand what I intended it to mean.
- foldr 7y agoIt's so easy to look words up in a dictionary these days, but for some reason the tech community likes to take a perverse pride in reading at an 8th grade level. "How dare you use a word that happens not to be in my limited vocabulary?"
- Retric 7y agohoi polloi is a redundant phrase that’s intended to hide the simplicity of the idea. It’s simply lazy writing to mask lazy thinking.
- foldr 7y agoI don't think so. It's chosen because it reflects a particular attitude towards the working classes. (The hoi polloi don't call themselves the hoi polloi.) It's also not in any way an obscure phrase. In the UK at least it's in common usage.
- scroot 7y agoCorrect. To put it another way: he is choosing this word because he is arguing that those in power (neoliberals) view common people as unsophisticated rabble who cannot and should not be making important decisions. It is not the author's view, but one emblematic of the very target of his criticism.
- Retric 7y agoCoded language attempts to convey ideas through subtext. By doing so it’s reducing the carrying capacity of the information channel and lets authors pad words without adding meaning. That’s more or less the definition of lazy writing. Like a kid starting off with “It was a dark and stormy night...”
- foldr 7y agoIt would probably help if you read the whole sentence rather than just the second half of it!
- lazyjones 7y ago> Word salad is understatement of the day. It's apparently what every obsessive Marx reader ends up producing. Zizek for example. Perhaps it's a clever tactic to lure defenceless and impressionable minds, perhaps just a form of insanity.
- scroot 7y agoSeems pretty straightforward to me. He presents an intellectual history of neoliberalism (whose attributes he also describes), and charts out how its evolution has beared down on the present. This particular author also has a wider thesis that thinking about all of life and the laws of the universe in terms of market interactions has come to replace mystical and religious thinking.
- paulie_a 7y agoIt seems like the author just saw fight club and read the communist manifesto and decided to ramble with a dictionary on hand.
- payattentionhm 7y agoThis comment says more about your reading comprehension skills than anything else. Maybe try making a more substantive comment once you've had a proper crack at understanding the author's piece?
- dangus 7y agoI’m looking for your substantive comment on the article but I haven’t found it yet. Pot, kettle, etc. And I realize the irony in the fact that my pointing this out to you is the main subject of my not-substantive comment. However, I won’t resort to accusing you of being simple minded, as I wouldn’t call someone who couldn’t make it though an article like this simple minded either. The concepts and history presented are not terribly complicated, but the organization, length, and unnecessarily complex vocabulary make the article a difficult read.
- payattentionhm 7y agoI'm not sure why you're rushing to defend their comment, given they those chose to insult the author's work with derogatory term "word salad", a psychiatric term used to indicate the jumble of words present in some neurological and mental disorders. They were basically calling the author a retard, because they couldn't be bothered to take the time to understand the author's piece.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 7y agoThat's reductive and subjective. The grandparent comment said it was a word salad, you made the connotative connection to neurological disorder. My connotative connection was to failed delivery, like throwing a handful of birthday cake instead of serving it up on a plate. Your account is less than an hour old. Are you possibly the author on the piece? If so, I empathize. Direct critique in dense comment sections can feel brutal--but feedback can be worth the gauntlet.
- 7y ago
- hudibras 7y agoIf you don't understand what the speaker is trying to say, then there's no need for you waste our time with a comment letting us all know that.
- brownbat 7y agoFeels a bit like it came from a markov postmodernism generator: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ Postmodernist arguments and critiques are like the blue/gold dress. Some people see it as pure obscurantism, just all white noise. Other people see it as full of interesting ideas. I've never seen these two groups successfully hold a conversation about it without getting progressively angrier at each other, mostly devolving into insulting each others' intelligence (like many of the replies to your comment). Add a layer of politics on top of that, to really rile people up, and this whole thread is just a recipe for disaster.
- 2019-nCoV 7y agoFurther, as a reverse Turing test, an author should be declared unintelligent if their writing is indistinguishable from that of what is generated.
- blueline 7y agoits hilarious that comments to this effect have been posted multiple times, when the actual content of the article specifically quotes/supports ideas by people like Terry Eagleton, a marxist (/religious) thinker who specifically oppose postmodernism
- brownbat 7y agoSure, yeah. I actually studied in an advanced humanities program and have read most of the people he references. I worried a bit about the characterization. But since the labeling didn't really matter for my point I didn't sweat it too much. I was really into stuff like this for a few years. After a while, this argumentative style just stopped landing for me. To each his own though. I go back to the blue/gold dress. I can't explain my issues with it without just making people angry, advocates can't explain why it resonates without frustrating the other side. So... I just want to say sorry if you thought the link was some kind of offensive misdirected attack on something you like. If you like this stuff, go for it, knock yourself out.
- black_puppydog 7y agoWell, professor of humanities there. Accusing them of using large words or "having swallowed a dictionary" (like one of the siblings here) is getting dangerously close to an ad-hominem. He presents some content. Not in the easiest form, maybe, but you're insinuating there's nothing else in there, when really it's more of a refusal on your part to engage.
- throwlaplace 7y ago>Not in the easiest form, maybe, but you're insinuating there's nothing else in there, when really it's more of a refusal on your part to engage. people on hn do this constantly - as if precise language anywhere but in stem is a sign of an inferior argument. god forbid you have to do the background reading on something in order to truly understand.
- mam2 7y agoThe guy you are answering to was asking if there is more content than the title. but considering the comments it does not incite me to read the actual article