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Comment by kypro | Hacker News Reader

Thomas Sowell has had a huge impact on me and my views on economics. I'm from a poor working-class background and am often irritated by the needless language barriers of academics.

> “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech.”

Sowell is unique in this respect. He's book, "Basic Economics" is full of extremely relatable examples of economics in practice. It's one of the few books on economics that's a great read regardless of your background or level of academic achievement.

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I wish other writers would take this to heart. Reading The New Yorker it’s as if their language is a shibboleth and if they didn’t use it, it would alienate their audience for using average language, yet they are the same people who pontificate and pretend they advocate for the lower classes.

The New Yorker is an upper-middle class publication. That is its target audience. Other magazines owned by the same media conglomerate, Conde Nast, are broadly similar in orientation: Vogue, Bon Appetit, Vanity Fair, GQ, Architectural Digest. I don't think they 'advocate for the lower classes', subjectively or objectively. I read very few socialists and communists in the New Yorker!

As OP said,"pretend they advocate for the lower classes"

Hence why I wrote 'subjectively or objectively'. They have no pretence to being a working-class magazine, or to advocating a working-class politics.

OK.

Maybe we're not so different after all!

Do socialists/communists really advocate for the lower classes?

Nope, they advocate for "control", with them in charge, of course.

Who better to control the money and know how best to use money than the people?

I think you’re talking past each other. In communism, in principle, things belong “to the people”, but in reality they belong to the state which can decide what you get, and taken away (as form of punishment). On the other hand, in democracies governments rarely leave things to “the people” they take the money to the feds, the state, county and then the local gov... Do I want my money going to podunk or a mismanaged (corrupt city), or locally where we have more of a voice?

People should be in control of the money they earn, because that's the only time there's any skin in the game.

If you think The Government == The People, you're out of your mind. It's a nice ideal, but it's never been achieved in a modern nation state. Some nation states are less abusive than others, but that's as good as it gets.

The government is careless with spending and can't be trusted with people's money because they didn't earn the money they have. They took it out of people's paychecks, and if they run out, they can levy more taxes or just print more, there's no incentive to be thoughtful, careful, or diligent. At any rate, when the government is reckless with people's money, it's never the government that has to feel any pain.

Depends on the socialists or communists, but historically - often, yes. Certainly more so than capitalists, who are either indifferent or actively hostile, but may pretend to be otherwise as a matter of political expediency.

That's entirely the point of the idealogy. The problem is that after the anti-communist purges of the 60s', there's no representation of the lower classes in academia or political science. This is less of a problem in European countries where their socialist parties actually have a strong working-class background.

Let them. If you have the psychological need to constantly show how smart you are, your life will be very stressful indeed.

You will want to manipulate others to get confirmation of your acrobatics and always be on the lookout for disproof. This will lead to you limiting your life severely for fear of actually finding it.

-former smartness showoff who now acts betterer

> Let them.

Very sound advice.

Somewhat a tangent. I used to play a lot of poker. One angle that would work frequently to get information from people is exactly this.

Say something like "Ah you had AJ", even though you don't believe that. Then you might get a response "No I had __" or they might even show you their hand.

It's all tide to the need to prove how smart we are as humans.

> Years ago my mother used to say to me, "In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.

Great line. For those who do not recognize the source, it's from "Harvey".

They are the anointed ones of which Thomas talks about in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3044.The_Vision_of_the_A...

Amazing book.

I don't think they're signaling intelligence as much as they're signaling a specific subculture of East-Coast WASPy humanities-focused aristocrats that the most "prestigious" papers are steeped in. For example, the famous blind animus that that memeplex has towards tech certainly isn't rooted in looking down on the _intelligence_ of those steeped in Californian tech culture, but rather their will and ability to signal social class effectively.

It's a weird inversion, since the signals being defended are deeply illiberal: they exclude individualism, weirdness, inclusiveness, systems striving to be built on merit, etc etc.

I'm pretty familiar with this tendency because I come from a family who's pretty steeped in this kind of subculture. Growing up in CA and moving to the Bay as a teen, I absorbed the tech/Burning Man/CA memeplex of humanism and inherent equality and individualism way too deeply not to overwhelm my upbringing, but there are certain class markers I haven't shed, and un-self-conscious use of dense prose is one of them[1]. I actually did try to make my speech more casual when I became aware of these class markers during a period of teen rebellion, but changing how you communicate is a pretty complicated uphill battle, so I ended up with a weird hybrid of big words and idiomatic expressions (and lots of cursing, in verbal communication -_-)

[1] I want to emphasize again that this isn't quite an intelligence thing: my best friend is definitely smarter than me, and he speaks significantly more casually/colloquially than me because of his family's background.

I can understand this point of view but the point of elevated language and academic jargon is to allow for a more accurate and nuanced discussion without having to re-state assumptions and underlying principles. It's often not done well or used to obfuscate ideas, but the core principle has merit.

Yes, but. Somewhere along the way science, research, the topics science "concerns itself with" and everything suddenly exploded over the last hundred or so years, and especially since we have this thing called the Internet the number of published papers, science journalism and journals grown exponentially.

One one hand, it's great. More science/research is being done, but on the other hand it becomes less and less accessible due to the extreme specificity, very narrow scopes and due to simply being on the very edge of human knowledge accumulation.

And of course, theoretically whatever paper one is reading one can "simply" follow the references and look up the introduced technical terms. Occasionally there are great survey papers that take a look at a (sub-sub-sub-)field, and again from time to time there are amazing science communicators that allow laypeople to have some kind of real grasp on these questions and topics.

Yet, I think, it's clear that publishing terse PDFs is not the best way to communicate research and results.

And we know, we - as in DARPA, but anyway, as in civilization - did a trial, and it's very enlightening: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00672-7

And one of the big finding is that being stubbornly terse is bad.

And it's just a step, that this trial did not check, but maybe requiring researchers to spend a few days of their precious time to write a few pages about what they are actually doing, introduce the terms, techniques, methods, wouldn't be that bad, maybe even it would be helpful ... and this is basically pre-registration, and this is basically the grant proposal. And it'd be double-plus-good to link all of these in an open and really accessible manner in those fancy PDFs. (Or better yet, just use a HTML site. LaTeX is nice, but.)

It's not just the vocabulary, but the structure, the whole style. It's long, it's very meandering, it's very illustrative, but rarely direct and informative. Not many people have the time and desire to read something that presents so little value to them.

Not many people read, full stop.

I might be a minority, but I'm willing to stick out my neck for meandering, illustrative, and indirect writing.

Don't get me wrong, if it was the only thing available, I'd probably go crazy, too. But I believe there is a time and place in my "reading diet" for this kind of long-form journalism.

As your adjectives suggest, New Yorker articles are less bullets of breathlessly-repeated facts, and more illustrations of nuanced scenes and interactions. I think it's natural, because life is messy and meandering, too.

That being said, most of their articles have very well-defined and well-informed points. They don't make them by stating it up front, but by drawing a picture, observing some of its details, and asking you to form your own opinion. We can disagree, but to me it feels more intellectually-honest than other forms of journalism.

Yes, it takes longer to get there. Yes, some of the details (what clothes people are wearing, what the rooms smell like, whatever) could probably be removed without compromising the structural integrity. But the New Yorker is about structural integrity and style. It's like the "literary fiction" of news. I don't read each article in each magazine, but it's still pretty rare that I've regretted finishing one; maybe once every other month.

What about the bleatings of a person like Kevin D. Williamson, whose prose I identify as horrifically boring, not only because he isn't a deep thinker on any of the subject matter he writes about, but also because he spends about 80% of any essay trying to beat his audience over the head with how familiar he is with obscure and / or inconsequential tangential topics to the matter at hand. I don't have an issue with writers being descriptive. I very much have a problem with writers trying to prove they're the Dennis Miller of serious thought.

I can't say I've heard of Mr. Williamson, but it looks like he hasn't written for the New Yorker.

I'm talking more of the style used by Ben Taub [0] [1], or Sam Knight [2] [3]. More investigative than "think piece", although there are some big ideas in the presentation.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/22/guantanamos-da...

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/iraqs-post-isi...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma...

[3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/30/theresa-mays-i...

I can't stand most articles in The New Yorker.

I personally find much of the prose in the New Yorker clear, even inspiring. Especially w.r.t. its travel writing, I don't think any publication better captures the magic and the essence of the experience. [0] [1]

I also think Emily Nussbaum is a wonderful TV critic and more or less deserves credit for elevating TV criticism to equal status with art & movie reviews.

Having said that, I quite take your point and I am always pleased when a researcher takes the time to write clearly. It's a skill that needs to be practiced and developed, but unfortunately, for most academics, investing in that skill isn't obviously a good career choice.

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/how-prosperity...

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/11/the-enduring-r...

Overall, I like his writing, but his style can also come across as dismissive; as though he is obviously right, before he has really addressed all lines of criticism.

When used to explain something, this style is great, because he gets his point across efficiently and provides enough backing so that you can remember it. And if you read enough of his writing, he brings out the nuance in other books and the intellectual detail is clearly there.

But I can see how his straightforward style would be unpersuasive. Any one statement or paragraph or essay can be picked at by someone looking to do so.

As a teacher and thought leader, he's been very successful. As a political commentator, he's preaching to the choir.

That's a standard rhetorical technique you'll see in much right-wing writing. Statements are made as if they're simply correct by definition, and there is no space for argument or dissent.

Is he genuinely objective and data-driven? How many of his studies have been replicated? How many competing studies - which he fails to mention - disagree with his conclusions?

It's easy to be right when you simply assert your idea of truth. But that's rhetoric, not science. Science is peer review and open debate, and I don't see him engaging in that.

Not just right-wing. I've seen the same approach from marxists. (Not an exaggeration or a projection - from literal marxists.) The unstated, unproven assumption is that Marx was right, and the analysis proceeds from there to make dogmatic statements about the economy and/or society. That's fine, if the readers are also convinced marxists. But if someone else reads it, they very quickly think "Wait a minute, I don't agree with your premise, and you did nothing to convince me. Why should I believe your conclusions?"

If you're familiar with Lakoff you'll know there's a difference in tone which is based on a difference on associated family positioning.

Conservatives tend to paternalism. Marxists are more likely to be oppositional, because Marxism and socialism are underdog discourses, and they don't have the advantage of assuming that general readers will agree - especially in the US, where the default position for most of the population is aggressive hostility towards Socialism and incandescent fury towards Marxism, without really knowing much about either.

That may be true. But in response, they should write differently. If you're the underdog discourse, don't start the conversation by assuming that you're right. Worse, don't start it by assuming that the reader agrees that you're right.

It's also a common technique among teachers, because teachers are not trying to persuade skeptics. You are presenting it as some kind of manipulation, but it's really just a different audience. And it's a lot easier to read the straightforward style, and learn a lot of stuff quickly.

His conclusions are not really the most important thing about his writing, anyway. He brings forward a lot of good approaches that are an improvement over other common approaches. For instance, he avoids grouping people by a snapshot in time, and instead analyzes them over their lifetime, or even generations.

And he also just asks a lot of interesting questions and dives into the data and finds interesting results.

He's also less US-centric than many writers. Sometimes that alone is enough to advance the conversation by breaking us our of our bubble.

Personally, I prefer my teachers with some humility and the ability to admit that they're sometimes wrong.

You’d like Sowell then. He has done a complete 180 and completely changed his views as he learned more.

This is why I've never been tempted by his books. His editorials come off not so much dismissive as smugly dismissive: he's not only obviously right, anyone who questions him is obviously stupid.

I don't know about him as a teacher, but as a thought leader, he is successful because he says the things that the right people want to hear.

I would guess what you’re seeing is not an arrogant man who anyone would be stupid to question (though most would, to be honest), but someone who has devoted 50 or so years to learning and seeing every new generation make the same mistakes that he once made. He was originally a marxist.

But if you aren’t even willing to listen to him, it’s moot anyway.

Try a Conflict Of Visions. It's not at all smug or dismissive. In fact it's one of the most balanced books I've ever read. I didn't know who the author was before I read it, and by the time I finished, I felt I still knew nothing about the author. But I also felt I suddenly understood politics and the world, for the first time in my life. It was a mind-expanding experience. I immediately bought several copies so I could give them away to friends and family.

Later I found his videos and was surprised to learn he's a black conservative. That wasn't apparent from the book.

You (and other repliers to you) may be interested in George Orwell's excellent essay "Politics and the English Language".

>Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_poli...

I picked up on that too, such a shock of recognition when the author hit us with that one. It's so true, there's something effectively plainspoken about his prose that has such economy to his words. It's incredible stuff how crystal his writing can be.

I recently started to read his book Intellectuals and Race, but stopped because his putative citations did not support his claim that whites in America are at a disadvantage relative to Asian Americans w.r.t. mortgage applications and keeping their jobs during downturns.

I think he has interesting things to say, and is certainly a great interview subject, but I would approach his claims with caution.

I spent months working 20 hour days on a major project. Got a huge bonus. More than half removed for taxes. I suddenly had opinion on tax policy.

Basic Economics was such a huge eye opener on how things really work. Not just aristocratic theory talk. So much better then college economics class I took.

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