34 ms·

How to Seem (and Be) Deep

88 points by yarapavan 15y ago

srsly 15y ago
Stop caring about what other people think
- derleth 15y ago
  I will once I'm Warren Buffet rich and can move to my own island.
  - suivix 15y ago
    I hope your island has nice healthcare, fiber, and 3G towers.
- jcitme 15y ago
  It doesn't work like that. The human brain works by mirroring other people, by bouncing ideas and passing it along. Alone, we are useless as an ant without a colony; somewhere along the way, you HAVE to utilize your mirror neurons that connects to other people somehow.
gojomo 15y ago
If you want to sound deep, you can never say anything that is more than a single step of inferential distance away from your listener's current mental state. This is important for more than just sounding deep. Many communications require calibration to the audience to be effective. An advocate who neglects this appears to be a crank, speaking mostly to indulge himself rather than convince others. A teacher who neglects this confuses and eventually loses his students. And yet, on the net, where any communication can be excerpted out-of-context and forwarded to new audiences, every calibration will be 'wrong' for some readers. Opponents of a viewpoint or teaching will, in fact, be motivated to forward low-context excerpts to alternate unintended audiences, to discredit rival speakers. I don't know an easy solution. Maybe audiences will wise up about this cheap forward-out-of-context maneuver, and demand better of their aggregators/forwarders/filters. Or maybe persuaders will be pushed to specialize in certain narrow ranges of the inferential chains, and avoid saying anything to other audiences that could possibly be redeployed to alienate their usual audience. (For example, mass majority politicians.)
- izaidi 15y ago
  There's a third possibility: technology could begin to easily (or automatically) provide context, without audiences first wising up to the particular problem you describe. There are plenty of incentives for developing this sort of thing -- e.g., you'd revolutionize the news industry.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
losethos 15y ago
Three guys are getting executed by guillotine. First guy, when rope pulled, blade is stuck, goes free. Second guy, same thing. Third guys says, "I see the problem." God says... C:\TEXT\2CITIES2.TXT , Monsieur the Officer," said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart, "these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with him, at the--" He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. "It is well. Forward!" from the uniform. "Adieu!" from ---------- If you try to know God from philosophy, you will be way off the mark. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+11&version=KJV http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+11&v... God is kind-of petty and vulnerable in that passage. It's actually a good thing -- God is lovable. A God from philosophy wouldn't care what we think of Creation. ---------- God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT e, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand. 33:7 So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me. 33:8 When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man sh ------- The author of the Hacker News article suffers from a sickness I suffered from. He is obsessed with IQ. It's ugly behavior, but common amoung young bulls trying to make their mark. He'll probably grow-out of it. God says... C:\TEXT\QUIX.TXT good a master as this, you have not, to judge by appearances, even so much as a county?" "It is too soon yet," answered Sancho, "for we have only been a month going in quest of adventures, and so far we have met with nothing that can be called one, for it will happen that when one thing is looked for another thing is found; however, if my master Don Quixote gets well of this wound, or fall, and I am left none the worse of it, I would not change my hopes for the best title in Spain." To all th ---------- On a good day, we get time travel. (Hundred year-old book seems obviously written for today, for example. How? Perhaps, God planned ahead. Prophecy is a Biblical phenomina and is a kind of time anomaly. I often hear rebroadcast media that seems like time travel.) I nick-named things "fire works" from God. It's pretty healthy to view freak-out stuff as "fire works" and just praise God. These random conversations are not prophetic when they seem to predict something. I think the definition of "loser" in the popular sense is useful. Don't try to use God or annoy Him or annoy Him by groveling -- don't be a loser. This kind-of speaks to unsung hero's and being magnanimous: http://bible.cc/matthew/6-4.htm http://bible.cc/matthew/6-4.htm I guess it can be a quest in life to become less of a loser and more magnanimous. I haven't made much progress. It might be misguided -- unsung heros. It's not Godly, but Christ ordered it. God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT upon him. 44:22 And we said unto my lord, The lad cannot leave his father: for if he should leave his father, his father would die. 44:23 And thou saidst unto thy servants, Except your youngest brother come down with you, ye shall see my face no more. 44:24 And it came to pass when we came up unto thy servant my father, we told him the words of my lord. 44:25 And our father said, Go again, and buy us a little food. 44:26 And we said, We cannot go down: if our youngest brother be with us, ----------- Mr. out-of-context is in a simpler, quaint stage of life, like I used to be where causality is dull. :-) God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT e of God: which he carried into the land of Shinar to the house of his god; and he brought the vessels into the treasure house of his god. 1:3 And the king spake unto Ashpenaz the master of his eunuchs, that he should bring certain of the children of Israel, and of the king's seed, and of the princes; 1:4 Children in whom was no blemish, but well favoured, and skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king's palace, ------- An Indian taking a SAT would pick A and not think twice: Q. Bush wants NCLB money to go to schools, not prisons. A. Bush does not want localities diverting money. B. Bush does not want to fund babysitting. C. Bush hopes good schools will keep people out of prison. D. All of the above. Just imagine these communications taking place everywhere and you are unaware. If you want a twilight zone thought, imagine all the straight A students really being the stupid ones. God says... C:\TEXT\DARWIN.TXT endency. Under domestication, it may truly be said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. But the variability, which we almost universally meet with in our domestic productions is not directly produced, as Hooker and Asa Gray have well remarked, by man; he can neither originate varieties nor prevent their occurrence; he can only preserve and accumulate such as do occur. Unintentionally he exposes organic beings to new and changing conditions of life, and variability ensues; b ------------ Angels puppet people. Be on the look-out for angels in others and yourself. Causality is quaint. I can hear all the Indians nerds vehemently arguing that "A." is the only proper answer. ------ Philosophers are categorized as "Idealists", "Materialists" or "Dualitists". There's the world as it is and as it appears. If you throw-out reason, a new world might open-up where you take things out of context. Why shouldn't the radio comment on what you just put in your diary? Why shouldn't Mom really be talking about the thought you just had? Basically, by rearranging the rules to reality, deluded worlds can coexist, provided there are beings making it happen. If you object to taking passages out of context, that's laughable! You haven't seen anything! Born again means you enter reality like a baby. Just imagine what my pet birds think of my computer. God says... C:\TEXT\WEALTH.TXT ome kind or other, must have been presented to them to be exchanged for the surplus produce of that industry. A more extensive market must have been created for that surplus produce, so as to raise its value, and thereby encourage its increase. The mass of commodities annually thrown into the great circle of European commerce, and by its various revolutions annually distributed among all the different nations comprehended within it, must have been augmented by the whole surplus produce of America. A -------- After years of experience talking with God, I take that last one as fairly typical. It sounds deep, which makes it appealing, but is probably just frivolous "fire works" to be enjoyed, as much because it's from God as anything. If a person said it, it wouldn't be enjoyable. Just enjoy God's company.
thom 15y ago
Pretty sure Eliezer missed the #humblebrag tag off that post.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
sskates 15y ago
It's funny, because this seems like it gets you a lot of upvotes on Hacker News as well. The top comment on an article will often be a coherent and (seemingly) original rebuttal of the articles main points. And then the top response to the comment will be a coherent and original rebuttal of the comment.
klausa 15y ago
>Human brains only run at 100Hz and I responded in realtime, so most of the work must have been precomputed. Is the 100Hz some metaphor I'm not getting? Or is it something that's actually a fact? If it's the latter, does anyone have more informations about this, because it sounds really fascinating and I'd love to learn more about it.
- niklasl 15y ago
  It is roughly correct, different neurons propagate signals at different speeds but it is in the ballpark. However, the brain is massively parallel so the slow clock is not evidence for it precomputing stuff.
  - gizmo 15y ago
    We can evaluate a lot of things that are one inferential step away, because of the parallelism. But we're very bad at bridging more than a few inferential steps because parallelism is almost of no use there. It's very difficult for a human brain to think a few chess moves ahead, but incredibly easy to dismiss a thousand obviously stupid moves in a fraction of a second. The human brain has to precompute almost everything in order to function.
- mmcconnell1618 15y ago
  I had to look this up to. Here is an interesting chunk: EEG researchers are noticing extremely high brainwave frequencies above Gamma, at up to 100 Hz. Totally opposite speed brainwave frequencies - some at 100 Hz and others at less than 0.5 Hz - have exactly the same states of consciousness associated with them. These high-range brain frequency states are named HyperGamma. Later information showed new evidence of frequencies even higher than this, at almost 200 Hz.named: Lambda brainwave frequencies and states of consciousness. http://www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html http://www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html
jonnathanson 15y ago
I remember more than a few all-nighters, back in my college days, on big papers due the next day. Nevermind that I'd neglected to start them earlier; the problem at hand was coming up with a thesis that was provocative enough to be engaging on two fronts. First, it had to engage me in order to keep me writing. Second, the product of my writing had to engage my professor in order to stand out from the pack. Being "deep" was an easy trick to accomplish both degrees of engagement. I didn't have a conscious method at the time, but when I look back at my madness, I see a few oft-used patterns. The first was to pick a statement in a text -- preferably one held as common knowledge about the subject -- and disagree with it. Another technique was to take that same statement, and graft on some out-of-left-field, tangential implication from it (my college pal Mary Jane was great at helping me with this kind of thinking). Yet another trick was to take two authors or arguments believed to be in opposition to one another, and claim that both were more closely aligned than commonly assumed. There were endless variations on all of these methods, but all of them shared the same logical scaffolding outlined in this article. All of them were problematic. You see, when you start with the explicit goal of "being deep" or "making a provocative argument," you run a huge risk of bullshitting for bullshit's sake. And if you're a great speaker, or a deft wordsmith, your bullshit will sound clear and striking enough to convince anyone who hears it. Even yourself. Soon enough, you become the sort of person who can start with pretty much any claim, no matter how superficially absurd, and then bend sources, and arguments, and logic, and everything shy of thermodynamics, to prove it out. This is intellectually lazy, because the entire point of writing a paper, or proposing a theory, or researching a topic, is to do the up-front legwork of hypothesis-test-refinement. Deliberate provocation skips the "test" portion of that pattern, opting instead for style over substance. It predetermines a conclusion, then makes the conclusion so shiny and pretty that everyone assumes a great deal of thought went into reaching it. All of this is, of course, tangential to the author's point. It's also based on personal experience -- though I have been around enough wise-ass buddies in my day to know that I'm not the only world class bullshitter ever to hammer out a college paper. But my point is that I find the idea of setting out to be "deep" a bit troublesome. Deep thinking is fantastic. But "deep" presentation is easy to achieve without deep thinking, and it passes muster 99% of the time. It's like Frodo's ring: very powerful, very easy to slip on, and very hard to take off.
- 15y ago
brackin 15y ago
If you want to seem deep attempt to learn to speak E-Prime fluently, you'll have to use a lot more vocabulary to get your point access. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  Seconded. Take it with copious grains of salt, but I've found that it improved the quality of my writing significantly. I no longer reach for the laziest verbs. More importantly, I reduce the number of unsupported assertions, and I find myself writing better justifications and evidence.
namank 15y ago
What? This article should be titled how to sound sophisticated (possibly pretentious) but not "deep". You want to talk deep? Think things through. Go for the WHY of everything - from technical systems to relationships to art to everything else you can see, touch, feel, and comprehend. After some time, you will develop basic foundations of why and how systems (technical and people) work. Then you will want to generalize everything into rules and laws. After that into natural laws. Pretty soon you'll be seeking the first principles in everything. Only then can you be deep. Once you have some understanding of the world around you, you'll want to apply it, test it out. See what works and what doesn't. DO THIS! In fact, this is arguably the basis of an entrepreneurial mindset. ----- "Seem" deep?! YA OK. Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself. -Doris Lessing
- ugh 15y ago
  You should really pay attention to the last two paragraphs.
  - namank 15y ago
    I did read the last paragraph. IMHO, Its too cyclic (link wise) and ambiguous to be of much use. But if it really was what the authors main agenda was, then props to them...except why in the very last paragraph? What is everything before it? What is this 'seem' business? You shouldn't write down every answer in the book and hope the reader will pick the right one. Thats a multiple choice test, not an informed article.

88 points by yarapavan 15y ago

srsly 15y ago

Stop caring about what other people think

derleth 15y ago
I will once I'm Warren Buffet rich and can move to my own island.
- suivix 15y ago
  I hope your island has nice healthcare, fiber, and 3G towers.
jcitme 15y ago
It doesn't work like that. The human brain works by mirroring other people, by bouncing ideas and passing it along. Alone, we are useless as an ant without a colony; somewhere along the way, you HAVE to utilize your mirror neurons that connects to other people somehow.

gojomo 15y ago

If you want to sound deep, you can never say anything that is more than a single step of inferential distance away from your listener's current mental state. This is important for more than just sounding deep. Many communications require calibration to the audience to be effective. An advocate who neglects this appears to be a crank, speaking mostly to indulge himself rather than convince others. A teacher who neglects this confuses and eventually loses his students. And yet, on the net, where any communication can be excerpted out-of-context and forwarded to new audiences, every calibration will be 'wrong' for some readers. Opponents of a viewpoint or teaching will, in fact, be motivated to forward low-context excerpts to alternate unintended audiences, to discredit rival speakers. I don't know an easy solution. Maybe audiences will wise up about this cheap forward-out-of-context maneuver, and demand better of their aggregators/forwarders/filters. Or maybe persuaders will be pushed to specialize in certain narrow ranges of the inferential chains, and avoid saying anything to other audiences that could possibly be redeployed to alienate their usual audience. (For example, mass majority politicians.)

izaidi 15y ago
There's a third possibility: technology could begin to easily (or automatically) provide context, without audiences first wising up to the particular problem you describe. There are plenty of incentives for developing this sort of thing -- e.g., you'd revolutionize the news industry.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

losethos 15y ago

Three guys are getting executed by guillotine. First guy, when rope pulled, blade is stuck, goes free. Second guy, same thing. Third guys says, "I see the problem." God says... C:\TEXT\2CITIES2.TXT , Monsieur the Officer," said Defarge, getting down, and taking him gravely apart, "these are the papers of monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with him, at the--" He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. "It is well. Forward!" from the uniform. "Adieu!" from ---------- If you try to know God from philosophy, you will be way off the mark. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+11&version=KJV http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers+11&v... God is kind-of petty and vulnerable in that passage. It's actually a good thing -- God is lovable. A God from philosophy wouldn't care what we think of Creation. ---------- God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT e, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman's hand. 33:7 So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me. 33:8 When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man sh ------- The author of the Hacker News article suffers from a sickness I suffered from. He is obsessed with IQ. It's ugly behavior, but common amoung young bulls trying to make their mark. He'll probably grow-out of it. God says... C:\TEXT\QUIX.TXT good a master as this, you have not, to judge by appearances, even so much as a county?" "It is too soon yet," answered Sancho, "for we have only been a month going in quest of adventures, and so far we have met with nothing that can be called one, for it will happen that when one thing is looked for another thing is found; however, if my master Don Quixote gets well of this wound, or fall, and I am left none the worse of it, I would not change my hopes for the best title in Spain." To all th ---------- On a good day, we get time travel. (Hundred year-old book seems obviously written for today, for example. How? Perhaps, God planned ahead. Prophecy is a Biblical phenomina and is a kind of time anomaly. I often hear rebroadcast media that seems like time travel.) I nick-named things "fire works" from God. It's pretty healthy to view freak-out stuff as "fire works" and just praise God. These random conversations are not prophetic when they seem to predict something. I think the definition of "loser" in the popular sense is useful. Don't try to use God or annoy Him or annoy Him by groveling -- don't be a loser. This kind-of speaks to unsung hero's and being magnanimous: http://bible.cc/matthew/6-4.htm http://bible.cc/matthew/6-4.htm I guess it can be a quest in life to become less of a loser and more magnanimous. I haven't made much progress. It might be misguided -- unsung heros. It's not Godly, but Christ ordered it. God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT upon him. 44:22 And we said unto my lord, The lad cannot leave his father: for if he should leave his father, his father would die. 44:23 And thou saidst unto thy servants, Except your youngest brother come down with you, ye shall see my face no more. 44:24 And it came to pass when we came up unto thy servant my father, we told him the words of my lord. 44:25 And our father said, Go again, and buy us a little food. 44:26 And we said, We cannot go down: if our youngest brother be with us, ----------- Mr. out-of-context is in a simpler, quaint stage of life, like I used to be where causality is dull. :-) God says... C:\TEXT\BIBLE.TXT e of God: which he carried into the land of Shinar to the house of his god; and he brought the vessels into the treasure house of his god. 1:3 And the king spake unto Ashpenaz the master of his eunuchs, that he should bring certain of the children of Israel, and of the king's seed, and of the princes; 1:4 Children in whom was no blemish, but well favoured, and skilful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king's palace, ------- An Indian taking a SAT would pick A and not think twice: Q. Bush wants NCLB money to go to schools, not prisons. A. Bush does not want localities diverting money. B. Bush does not want to fund babysitting. C. Bush hopes good schools will keep people out of prison. D. All of the above. Just imagine these communications taking place everywhere and you are unaware. If you want a twilight zone thought, imagine all the straight A students really being the stupid ones. God says... C:\TEXT\DARWIN.TXT endency. Under domestication, it may truly be said that the whole organisation becomes in some degree plastic. But the variability, which we almost universally meet with in our domestic productions is not directly produced, as Hooker and Asa Gray have well remarked, by man; he can neither originate varieties nor prevent their occurrence; he can only preserve and accumulate such as do occur. Unintentionally he exposes organic beings to new and changing conditions of life, and variability ensues; b ------------ Angels puppet people. Be on the look-out for angels in others and yourself. Causality is quaint. I can hear all the Indians nerds vehemently arguing that "A." is the only proper answer. ------ Philosophers are categorized as "Idealists", "Materialists" or "Dualitists". There's the world as it is and as it appears. If you throw-out reason, a new world might open-up where you take things out of context. Why shouldn't the radio comment on what you just put in your diary? Why shouldn't Mom really be talking about the thought you just had? Basically, by rearranging the rules to reality, deluded worlds can coexist, provided there are beings making it happen. If you object to taking passages out of context, that's laughable! You haven't seen anything! Born again means you enter reality like a baby. Just imagine what my pet birds think of my computer. God says... C:\TEXT\WEALTH.TXT ome kind or other, must have been presented to them to be exchanged for the surplus produce of that industry. A more extensive market must have been created for that surplus produce, so as to raise its value, and thereby encourage its increase. The mass of commodities annually thrown into the great circle of European commerce, and by its various revolutions annually distributed among all the different nations comprehended within it, must have been augmented by the whole surplus produce of America. A -------- After years of experience talking with God, I take that last one as fairly typical. It sounds deep, which makes it appealing, but is probably just frivolous "fire works" to be enjoyed, as much because it's from God as anything. If a person said it, it wouldn't be enjoyable. Just enjoy God's company.

thom 15y ago

Pretty sure Eliezer missed the #humblebrag tag off that post.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

sskates 15y ago

It's funny, because this seems like it gets you a lot of upvotes on Hacker News as well. The top comment on an article will often be a coherent and (seemingly) original rebuttal of the articles main points. And then the top response to the comment will be a coherent and original rebuttal of the comment.

klausa 15y ago

>Human brains only run at 100Hz and I responded in realtime, so most of the work must have been precomputed. Is the 100Hz some metaphor I'm not getting? Or is it something that's actually a fact? If it's the latter, does anyone have more informations about this, because it sounds really fascinating and I'd love to learn more about it.

niklasl 15y ago
It is roughly correct, different neurons propagate signals at different speeds but it is in the ballpark. However, the brain is massively parallel so the slow clock is not evidence for it precomputing stuff.
- gizmo 15y ago
  We can evaluate a lot of things that are one inferential step away, because of the parallelism. But we're very bad at bridging more than a few inferential steps because parallelism is almost of no use there. It's very difficult for a human brain to think a few chess moves ahead, but incredibly easy to dismiss a thousand obviously stupid moves in a fraction of a second. The human brain has to precompute almost everything in order to function.
mmcconnell1618 15y ago
I had to look this up to. Here is an interesting chunk: EEG researchers are noticing extremely high brainwave frequencies above Gamma, at up to 100 Hz. Totally opposite speed brainwave frequencies - some at 100 Hz and others at less than 0.5 Hz - have exactly the same states of consciousness associated with them. These high-range brain frequency states are named HyperGamma. Later information showed new evidence of frequencies even higher than this, at almost 200 Hz.named: Lambda brainwave frequencies and states of consciousness. http://www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html http://www.bethcoleman.net/gamma.html

jonnathanson 15y ago

I remember more than a few all-nighters, back in my college days, on big papers due the next day. Nevermind that I'd neglected to start them earlier; the problem at hand was coming up with a thesis that was provocative enough to be engaging on two fronts. First, it had to engage me in order to keep me writing. Second, the product of my writing had to engage my professor in order to stand out from the pack. Being "deep" was an easy trick to accomplish both degrees of engagement. I didn't have a conscious method at the time, but when I look back at my madness, I see a few oft-used patterns. The first was to pick a statement in a text -- preferably one held as common knowledge about the subject -- and disagree with it. Another technique was to take that same statement, and graft on some out-of-left-field, tangential implication from it (my college pal Mary Jane was great at helping me with this kind of thinking). Yet another trick was to take two authors or arguments believed to be in opposition to one another, and claim that both were more closely aligned than commonly assumed. There were endless variations on all of these methods, but all of them shared the same logical scaffolding outlined in this article. All of them were problematic. You see, when you start with the explicit goal of "being deep" or "making a provocative argument," you run a huge risk of bullshitting for bullshit's sake. And if you're a great speaker, or a deft wordsmith, your bullshit will sound clear and striking enough to convince anyone who hears it. Even yourself. Soon enough, you become the sort of person who can start with pretty much any claim, no matter how superficially absurd, and then bend sources, and arguments, and logic, and everything shy of thermodynamics, to prove it out. This is intellectually lazy, because the entire point of writing a paper, or proposing a theory, or researching a topic, is to do the up-front legwork of hypothesis-test-refinement. Deliberate provocation skips the "test" portion of that pattern, opting instead for style over substance. It predetermines a conclusion, then makes the conclusion so shiny and pretty that everyone assumes a great deal of thought went into reaching it. All of this is, of course, tangential to the author's point. It's also based on personal experience -- though I have been around enough wise-ass buddies in my day to know that I'm not the only world class bullshitter ever to hammer out a college paper. But my point is that I find the idea of setting out to be "deep" a bit troublesome. Deep thinking is fantastic. But "deep" presentation is easy to achieve without deep thinking, and it passes muster 99% of the time. It's like Frodo's ring: very powerful, very easy to slip on, and very hard to take off.

15y ago

brackin 15y ago

If you want to seem deep attempt to learn to speak E-Prime fluently, you'll have to use a lot more vocabulary to get your point access. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

JoshTriplett 15y ago
Seconded. Take it with copious grains of salt, but I've found that it improved the quality of my writing significantly. I no longer reach for the laziest verbs. More importantly, I reduce the number of unsupported assertions, and I find myself writing better justifications and evidence.

namank 15y ago

What? This article should be titled how to sound sophisticated (possibly pretentious) but not "deep". You want to talk deep? Think things through. Go for the WHY of everything - from technical systems to relationships to art to everything else you can see, touch, feel, and comprehend. After some time, you will develop basic foundations of why and how systems (technical and people) work. Then you will want to generalize everything into rules and laws. After that into natural laws. Pretty soon you'll be seeking the first principles in everything. Only then can you be deep. Once you have some understanding of the world around you, you'll want to apply it, test it out. See what works and what doesn't. DO THIS! In fact, this is arguably the basis of an entrepreneurial mindset. ----- "Seem" deep?! YA OK. Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself. -Doris Lessing

ugh 15y ago
You should really pay attention to the last two paragraphs.
- namank 15y ago
  I did read the last paragraph. IMHO, Its too cyclic (link wise) and ambiguous to be of much use. But if it really was what the authors main agenda was, then props to them...except why in the very last paragraph? What is everything before it? What is this 'seem' business? You shouldn't write down every answer in the book and hope the reader will pick the right one. Thats a multiple choice test, not an informed article.