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Comment by badclient | Hacker News Reader

Well I read a quote on HN that went something like "if you want people to see something, show them one thing."

You mixed up too many issues. If your intention really was to just focus on the evals, why mention their impact on your salary at all, especially in the conclusion?

That was poor judgement on your part. As a reader, it is natural to conclude from your post that you are most upset about the salary loss resulting from the evals(and thus you've learned a lesson to do better on evals so its negative impact on your salary won't repeat).

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Mea culpa. I just wanted to close the loop and identify a point that people would relate to. (I was not sure that people would relate to the fact that the student evaluations dropped. Apparently most people do not even know that student evaluations are used to determine salary increases.)

In retrospect? One of my biggest mistakes to even mention it.

I think one of your biggest mistakes was to only mention your ideas about how to reduce double parking, I mean cheating, right at the end of a very long essay with a linkbait title that was basically the equivalent of "Why I'll never write another parking ticket" in this analogy.

Don't get me wrong, I read the whole thing and I thought it was a great article. But while I don't believe for a second that you did it on purpose, if you had wanted to create a media firestorm focussing on the wrong issues you couldn't have found a much more effective way to go about it.

Personally, I would hate to see the essay form get replaced by something more like a newspaper story, with the conclusions at the start and the exposition after. But maybe that's going to become essential on controversial topics like this, I don't know. The lesson I'll be taking away is to ensure that the key point makes up the bulk of the writing, and if it doesn't then keep cutting other stuff until it does.

I imagine it's been rather an unpleasant ride, but thanks for giving us all the opportunity to learn something.

Yes, indeed, the post was supposed to be "a story with the twist." Had I known that I was going to have hundreds of thousands of people reading the post, I would have followed the standard journalistic practice of writing a summary at the very first section. (See http://t.co/2kJEkJW for a copy of the post. Note: I asked the post to be taken down until I repost the original article but the journalist is really playing childish games.)

I kind of felt this a few hours after the post went out, so I added two clarification points early on in the article: 1. I am not giving up the fight, I will just fight differently, please see the conclusions (link), 2. This was not about NYU and people cheating in business schools; people cheat everywhere: the story gives an explanation why they remain undetected.

Oh well, people could not even read these two points.

But I want to write stories in my blog, not papers with an abstract, executive summary and table of contents.

If your intention really was to just focus on the evals, why mention their impact on your salary at all, especially in the conclusion?

Maybe his intentions were not to "just focus on the evals". Maybe he wanted to, oh, I don't know:

1) show that cheating is a lot more widespread than we think

2) describe several reasons why simply pursuing and punishing cheaters is a bad strategy

3) use that to point out that we need a better solution (such as designing better evals, perhaps, but it's not the only option)

I mean, he know best what his intentions were, but that's my interpretation of his posts, both of them, taken together.

But I agree with you, it was evidently poor judgment on his part to "mix up too many issues", since most of his readers can't be bothered to try to separate them ;)

:-)

Admittedly, I got the impression that most people do not bother to read anything longer than 140 characters.

Well said. That was my reaction to the post too.

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