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Comment by hydrox24 | Hacker News Reader

While there is good thought behind this article, I found it unnecessarily difficult to read. For instance:

> "Get Compact when you find a rule you can follow that makes it Worth It to Get Got."

Now, he defined "Get Compact" earlier, and "Get Got", but why is "Worth It" capitalised? I am not sure if it is a typo or if it is also referring to some abstraction made elsewhere in the piece or in another piece by TheZvi. The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.

There are many more examples of the kind of grammar that makes you read a sentence twice, or second guess yourself, etc. Ultimately, I think this sloppy writing elevates the author's system of writing over helping the reader understand quickly.

Is there a reason to be particularly forgiving? Is English not a first language or is there something else Hacker News knows that I don't?

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> why is "Worth It" capitalised?

To make it clear that it has to be really, really Worth It. Not just sort of "worth it", or "probably worth it", etc., etc. You have to be really, really sure that it's Worth It.

> The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.

I think what the author is doing is defining technical terms--those are the Capitalized Things. They are to be treated as having a particular meaning in the context of the article, which the author doesn't spell out but which can be built up from context. They're technical terms because they either don't have a well-defined meaning in ordinary usage (like Get Got) or have a meaning in ordinary usage that might not be emphatic enough (like Worth It). The point is to get you to think very carefully about what those terms really mean. Which is part of thinking carefully about the underlying issue the article describes.

> The language is, in general, difficult and abstracted where it doesn't need to be.

I think this has a lot to do with Zvi being a member of the competitive magic community. Magic players tend to speak in dense, abstract, reductionist overstatements at all times.

I have much love for the community, but its nerd-jock culture is grating at times.

I liked the style. I found it notably easy to understand. Maybe it follows the structures of my internal thought patterns or something. The sentences are all unusually simple.

It sounds like the article wasn't Worth It and you Got Got

But since it was free, it was Worth It...

It wasn’t free in terms of the time cost.

If you value your time, then maybe it was Worth It, and maybe not.

Yes, it takes a bit more cognitive processing to follow, but I feel that the idea of the piece couldn't have been expressed much more clearly, given that the subject is so abstract.

The level of abstraction reminds me of Baudrillard's _Simulacra and Simulation_. Now _that's_ a tough read (though it should tickle the fancy of any HN'ers not already familiar.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Baudrillard,Jean/sim...

I agree completely. I love the idea of the article and the concept he's trying to get across, but it's extremely difficult to read.

I did upvote it still because I think it makes some interesting points, but the execution definitely could have been much better.

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