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I suppose that if you start with an obvious fact without any disclaimer of that then it gives the impression that everything else will be obvious too, and so th
by quietbritishjim 6y ago
I suppose that if you start with an obvious fact without any disclaimer of that then it gives the impression that everything else will be obvious too, and so the article isn't worth reading. They could perhaps have phrased it a bit differently e.g. "you're no doubt aware that ...". Personally, I wasn't offended.
It reminds of something a little different but on a similar theme: the advice to never say "clearly, ..." in lectures, because it serves no purpose except to intimidate people that don't already know what follows. Actually, it does serve a purpose: so that people who do find it trivially obvious aren't thrown off wondering if there's something deeper there than they had realised.
- SilasX 6y agoThis. Those phrases are useful for distinguishing between “I’m giving new information” vs “I’m starting from what I expect to be common knowledge”. And yes, it’s possible to abuse such phrases but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their place.
- latexr 6y agoThe comment wasn’t on those types of phrases, but on that phrase in particular. There are better (more positive, don’t lose significance) ways to convey that information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23897649
- rimliu 6y agoHonestly, your comments so far were the most negative thing I saw in all this.
- latexr 6y agoThe intro provides no information now, and the the more time passes the more irrelevant it will be. A variant of “it’s all over the news that Twitter got hacked” would do the same job without commenting on the reader. The author didn’t even need to rephrase the sentence. Cutting everything up to the first comma would be an instant improvement with zero effort, conveying the same information just as clearly and in less words: > You probably know that Twitter got “hacked”.