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“Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful
- jessaustin 11y agoFor example, a piece titled "'Considered Harmful' Essays Considered Harmful" would very likely be a case of using the "considered harmful" format to draw attention for its own sake. We will ignore such essays in this commentary. Now I'm just confused.
- kbenson 11y agoThe expert troll doesn't need to push his work upon this targets, they push it upon themselves and others for him.
- chris_wot 11y agoHe ignored his own essay, so even the actual substance of the essay could be considered an existential threat to the essay. I have to wonder though if he ignored his own argument whilst in the process of writing his article, because if he truly did so then it probably should have been a dissertation on modalities which I'm sure we all could have readily ignored without doing ourselves much harm. Thus defeating the point of the article, leading to a resurgence of interest in Structuration. Or to put it more simply: this essay is a plot by the intelligentsia to make us reason like a madman.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoI literally can't read another word of this essay because of the logical burden.
- eclipxe 11y agoIt's called humor
- jessaustin 11y agowhooosh...
- joshrotenberg 11y agoI consider your confusion harmful.
- AdieuToLogic 11y agoConsidering your consideration of GP's confusion harming the considerateness of your considered position has led me to considerately classify this confusion to be considered harmful as well. Ouch. Brain freeze!
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoIndeed. I'm over these as well as any of the, "Why I quit X technology" or similarly titled essays. Oh and the "Open letter to Big Corp". You're not that important. I don't really care why you quit using X. I don't need validation from some blog about what technology to use or not use. I can evaluate X technology on my own, thank you.
- pidg 11y agoLet me reach out to you about why I left Gmail for FastMail. It's because if you're not paying for the product... you ARE the product. Yeah.
- SixSigma 11y agoFastMail doesn't do free accounts for new signups any more, just 60 day trials. :)
- serge2k 11y agothe points is referring to why gmail is free. I considering switching back anyway. Fastmail search is just awful.
- JustSomeNobody 11y agoNo I'm not. My user data is a form of currency that I spend in the manner of my choosing. If I choose to spend it at google, it may cost more than, say, fastmail, but it's still my choice.
- k__ 11y agoThe information from those articles isn't the problem. Just the writing style. They often want to tell you "We're switching from X to Y, because our use-cases aren't that of X (anymore)" But they write it like "We're switching from X to Y and you should too, because X is really bad for everyone!" If you ignore the holier-than-you writing style, and try to read these articles like the first example, they have some useful information :)
- jrcii 11y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?query=considered%20harmful&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byPopularity https://hn.algolia.com/?query=considered%20harmful&type=stor...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mallamanis 11y agoSo, is this essay also considered harmful by self-reference?
- amelius 11y agoYes, it is considered harmful to the "Considered Harmful" essays.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoAnother possible title: How to Argue Against Yourself For Fun and Profit.
- jwp729 11y agoMaybe not self-referene but reference to the class to which it belongs, cf. Quine's paradox: "Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
- emodendroket 11y agoDid you really not see the part of the article at the very beginning addressing this?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 11y agoI was just enjoying this essay when I double checked the title and wondered if I could believe it anymore since it is also a considered harmful essay(?).
- CatsoCatsoCatso 11y ago28 December 2002 Still relevant, unsurprisingly.
- gambogi 11y agoThank you
- FreakyT 11y agoThe thing that always bothered me about "Considered harmful" titles is that, when you title your own article that, you're just pompously referring to yourself in the third person. The reason they are in the passive voice is that the original "considered harmful" essay was a letter to the editor, and therefore was titled not by the author, but by the editor[1]. Therefore, to expand out the subject of the sentence, the title was actually saying "Go To Statement Considered Harmful [by Edsger Dijkstra]". [1]: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1308.html http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EW... Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful
- lectrick 11y agoGlad to see this, as I was surprised that there was an entire post about the harm that "considered harmful" essays caused without even citing the original reference that started the whole hoopla, the very-opinionated, very-brilliant and very-legendary Edsger Dijkstra.
- jballanc 11y agoOn the "very-opinionated" point, I'm particularly fond of Alan Kay's quote: > I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
- lectrick 11y agoHa! Yeah. The older I get the more immune I feel to arrogance; to me it's a symptom of frustration coming from high skill colliding with the rest of the world's lack thereof.
- tincholio 11y agoI've always found that quote to be particularly douchey. Then again, I do think that Dijkstra's contributions to CS were more important than Kay's, too, but I suspect that I might not be in the majority there...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- davesque 11y agoThe grammatical construction "Blah Blah Considered Harmful" has always bugged me...it doesn't seem proper. Shouldn't it be something like "Blah Blah Should Be Considered Harmful"?
- acbart 11y agoTechnically speaking, if anyone has ever said that Blah Blah is harmful, than it has been considered harmful. The latter construction with Should Be is a more polite form, but the former is also correct if it's ever been true once.
- davesque 11y agoI know what you mean and I agree. I still think it sounds awkward.
- freyr 11y agoThink of it as a newspaper title. There's an implied "XYZ Considered Harmful [by Experts]." That is the original context, a letter written by Dijkstra to the editor of Communications of the ACM, where the editor penned the title.
- emodendroket 11y ago"By the author of this piece" is implied.
- ninjakeyboard 11y agolol META - was this post a retort to the "gitflow considered harmful" article?
- 88e282102ae2e5b 11y agoNot understanding the hate for the title. It's just the author trying to be ironic and clever. Not everything has to be taken literally.
- peterkelly 11y agoI've always seen the inclusion "considered harmful" in a title as sort of a comedic device, not to be taken as seriously as the author does. It's a signal that "I'm about to say something opinionated; if you're easily offended, you probably don't want to read this". The article itself is such an example. I'd much rather read a forceful, strong argument that contains some controversial claims than a piss-weak "perceived benefits and weaknesses of" essay, as the author suggests. Sometimes treating a topic brutally can get your point across more effectively. For example, some of James Mickens' more colourful writing demonstrates this.
- aoeuasdf1 11y agoSo, tl;dr, you consider "'Considered Harmful' Essays Considered Harmful" harmful? :)
- peterkelly 11y agoAlmost to the extent of goto statements :)
- leothekim 11y agoI would personally like to replace the words "considered harmful" with "is bad news bears"[1], as usually that fits better with whatever it is that's.. well, considered harmful. Come on, Hacker News! If we all focus, we can make this happen! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_News_Bears https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_News_Bears
- Thetawaves 11y agoI personally love the 'considered harmful' essays. They are usually used to describe faults in popular technology that most people seem to be blind to. They offer the reader a chance to move problems out of the unknown unknown. Many times I find the points identified in the articles to be unfounded, and those points are easily dismissed. But every once in a while there is a real genuine problem. I would rather dismiss 10 irrelevant points than miss the one show stopping fault identified in the article.
- ak39 11y agoWhat a great piece of writing. This could do so well as a preface to my all time favourite "programming" book: "The Pragmatic Programmer" written by Hunt & Thomas. Also, IMO, the worst of such "considered harmful" essays were those that advised against the use of stored procedures and programmatic constructs directly on relational databases in favour of the shiny new hive-mind created ORMs. The funny thing is, just as the best ORM technologies are beginning to sort their shyte out, we are seeing essays that they are now considered harmful. Reboot.
- ajkjk 11y agoYou know, I think there might be a meta-analog to Godwin's law: that any meta-argument about arguing on the Internet eventually contains a reference to Godwin's law itself. Since Hitler references are invariably followed by someone pointing out that Godwin's prophecy has been fulfilled, this reduces to a simply corollary of the law itself.
- normloman 11y agoEveryone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say. So we get this glut of self important "considered harmful" essays. And we're all guilty.
- dragonwriter 11y ago> Everyone says we should write essays because it will get us noticed, make us more employable, and sharpen our writing skills. But few of us have anything important to say. The advice needs to be updated slightly, then, to clarify the apparent confusion: you should, if you can, write essays for all those reasons, but step one of writing an essay for those purposes is find something meaningful to say.
- vonmoltke 11y agoSo only people with meaningful things to say or build should get noticed and hired?
- normloman 11y agoNo. Employers need to realize they don't need to fill every damn position with a "rockstar." But until then, we'll keep playing the game.
- AdieuToLogic 11y agoPerhaps we can help educate employers by bringing an X-Box with Guitar Hero to interviews. When the inevitable "why did you bring that to the interview?" comes up, we fire it up and reply with "well, your advert did mention wanting a rock star..." He's a juke box hero, got stars in his eyes Yeah, juke box hero, got stars in his eyes (http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/foreigner/jukeboxhero.html http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/foreigner/jukeboxhero.html) :-D
- dragonwriter 11y ago> So only people with meaningful things to say or build should get noticed and hired? ...based on writing essays. There are other ways to get noticed and hired. And, writing essays that reveal that you have nothing meaningful to say probably isn't a valuable use of time to get noticed and hired (if you are trying to get noticed and hired for a tech job, taking the same time to increase your portfolio of open source contributions you can point to is probably more valuable.)
- knieveltech 11y agoNo. I'm getting pretty tired of the notion that the only valuable discourse is pleasant, up-beat, and optimistic. This notion attempts to stifle entire swaths of the emotional spectrum and has at it's heart censorship based on a mainstream aversion to anything that smacks of confrontation or conflict. Up with opinionated, confrontational speech.
- techiferous 11y agoI disagree. If you look at what happens to the brain when it gets angry, nuance is lost in favor of over-simplified black-and-white thinking. I do agree with you that sharing conflicting points of view is good. Too much passion, however, can cloud reason.
- knieveltech 11y agoTo clarify I'm not advocating for rage-filled screeds as a viable method of communicating nuanced information, or even as a viable method of communication. As you said sharing conflicting viewpoints is valuable. I take issue with the suggestion that this is only valuable if the conflict is framed in appealing language or "toned down" to "acceptable" levels, whatever those are. Conflict is ok. Resolving it is how we get shit done.
- bevacqua 11y agoIt's funny that I was thinking today about writing an article with this exact same title. "Considered harmful" articles are just one person's opinion, most of the time.
- Thrymr 11y ago"They’ve become boring clichés. Nobody really wants to read “considered harmful” essays any more, because we’ve seen them a thousand times before and didn’t really learn anything from them, since we were too busy being annoyed to really listen to the arguments presented." It's a boring and pompous cliché. In 1968, it was original. Now, write your own title.
- hamburglar 11y agoMy sentiment exactly. If I wrote this post, it would have been titled "Considered harmful" Essays Considered Boring
- smitherfield 11y agoI've always thought of "considered harmful" titles as a cute bit of nerd humor, precisely because it's such a pompous and ridiculous-sounding phrase that it's very hard to say with a straight face. I'd usually take it to mean that the author doesn't take him or herself too seriously and knows that the matter they're discussing is ultimately pretty trivial.
- newobj 11y agoYeah, burn this tired rhetorical device to the ground, along with the "open letter".
- thekevan 11y agoEvery time I see one of these "considered harmful" essays, I immediately assume the person writing it considers all their own opinions to be facts and dissenting opinions to always be wrong.
- pc2g4d 11y ago"Considered Harmful" is a cliche but not really harmful, unless you're the author and want to be viewed as hip/cutting-edge/cool. I'd say that driving "Considered Harmful" out of the conversation should be considered harmful. The "considered harmful" titles are great because they provide a very concise encapsulation of the contents of the essay. When I see "X considered harmful" I immediately know that the work will be arguing against X. I've read a number of these because I want to see what there is to be said against things that I often take for granted, e.g. the utility of Angular or whatever.
- johnx123-up 11y agoContext https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744059