I've read your comments three times, and the original article twice. I'm still very confused about what your point is. Before I read your comments, which call

I've read your comments three times, and the original article twice. I'm still very confused about what your point is. Before I read your comments, which call direct attention to the author's style, my impression of it was that the author was writing in a deliberately informal, encouraging and sympathetic tone. The material is somewhat difficult, he admits, but not as difficult as it is made out to be, and the reader will be rewarded with the understanding of an elegant concept if they just push on for a bit. Having read and done a bit of mathematics myself, I recognize this tone as the one I try to adopt when I explain concepts to others, or write notes for my own understanding. (Which is half of the reason Kun writes these things himself, I assume. Kudos to him for it.) It is far from condescension-- if anything, it is _commiseration_. Your concerns, so far as one can find them stated explicitly, are nits about style. These would be minor even if they were accurate, but they are not. For example, "half in jest" is twice as popular as "half-joking", according to google. "We", as other commenters have noted, would have been perfectly fine even if it weren't alraedy completely standard usage in mathematics. Which it is. I am reminded of a line from the "Note on Notation" in Hodges' _Model Theory_: > 'I' means I, 'we' means we. For all the objections about uncommon vocabulary, I can't help but observe that the only usage that seems to have confused readers in this thread (myself included) was "tofferies". But I learned a new word today, so thank you for that. But I still don't understand how "jest" is "symptomatic of a particular discourse that makes assertions regarding social order and fundamental power relationships between humans". In fact, the phrase: > symptomatic of a particular discourse that makes assertions regarding social order and fundamental power relationships between humans strikes me as _rather a lot more_ "symptomatic of a particular discourse that makes assertions regarding social order and fundamental power relationships between humans". In particular, the discourse of critical theory, which has become so cloistered and self-referential that you can pick it out a mile away. I would be grateful if you would spell out exactly what those assertions are, so long as you are charging the author with making them. I catch another whiff of that with phrases like "he is bluntly interpolating an elite". Either you mean "interpolating" in the sense of approximating a function between two known values, in which case I have no idea what you're talking about. Or you mean "interpellating", in the Althusserian sense, which is the only interpretation that the context seems to support. But in that case, look what you're doing: you're walking into a forum on hacking with highly, _highly_ abstruse jargon that even the average English-speaking philosopher does not understand. I would say that you are hoist by your own petard here, but perhaps that phrase would strike you as oppressive. Finally, I don't understand what you intend by "an anxious situation". Do you simply mean that math produces anxiety? There's no shame in admitting that, but you might at least acknowledge that it's precisely that anxiety which Kun attempts to combat in his tutorial. I don't see how you can miss that Kun is, in fact, making an extremely generous effort to encourage the reader. PS: Those "little tests of the intellect" are what we in math call "exercises", which are how one actually grasps the material. You cannot learn math by passive absorbtion-- you have to sharpen your pencil and puzzle it out for yourself. Not because "we did it so you have to, too", but because we sincerely know of no other way to put mathematical understanding in another human being's head. Well-selected exercises are actually a strong signal to the reader that the author really cares about the reader's comprehension. I don't know of a charitable way of putting this, but for one criticizing the OP's engagement with the conventions of mathematical writing, you seem rather innocent of them yourself.