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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of a weird article. There were two cuts:

>There were mornings following marriage blackout nights

Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.

The second cut was taking "the usual briefs and t-shirt" out of this sentence:

>The other day I was sitting on my bed, the usual briefs and t-shirt, camera on the lines of my face and the new grey of my beard, when my wife came in the room as she was taking off the t-shirt she’d slept in

"the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement.

From what I can tell they've taken edits meant to improve the flow of the paragraph and, for reasons I can't see, taken them as editing sex out.

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Well he explains both what he meant by "marriage blackout nights" and he also says he knew it was an awkward translation that needed editing. So I submit that you may not have read this carefully enough.

I do not dispute that. But with a clickbait headline and a long meandering path to the point I don't feel bad about skimming.

I think if you're skimming longform and then criticizing it you'd be better off just not reading it at all.

edit: okay that was a bit harsher than it needed to be, for internet points. Uh, just maybe don't criticize it without a closer read.

The irony of this is delicious. You presume that the author had a "point" aside from the story that you mistook for a "long meandering path." One might wonder why an author would even care about reaching such an audience. Irony being that the author talked about exactly that cultural divide, but I'm guessing you missed that too.

> Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.

The author explains the term and agrees it needs editing.

> "the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement

It makes the author's comment about his wife sexual. The author is suddenly fully clothed and mocking his naked wife, instead of sharing in their shared hungover, underdressed state.

You also fail to mention the second example which is explicitly sexual. It seems as though you didn't read it all.

As I read it, the author and wife both had t-shirts on, and the wife was taking hers off. There was no previous shared state where they were both less dressed than that.

Even more bizarre is that he feels the same! He agrees that this phrase needs editing and is still confused that it was flagged by his editor.

> In my version, that writer is also in his underwear, and the reader is informed that the couple is having some sad, drunken nights (« marriage blackout nights » doesn’t sound right and would have needed editing anyway, but bear with me).

>Even more bizarre is that he feels the same! He agrees that this phrase needs editing and is still confused that it was flagged by his editor.

Yeah, it's not like he spends 10 or more subtle paragraphs explaining both why he feels the phrase was important (despite needing editing for other reasons) and why he felt the shame (despite knowing he had not done anything shameful, except under a puritan gaze: he felt the shame because he was forced to view his prose under a different culture's understanding of sex).

As things are described, he writes paragraphs about his assumptions about the editor's reasoning for crossing out a nonsense phrase and fails to consider that the editor was not critiquing his artistic notions but rather just crossing off something that both of them agreed was bad. There's no particular evidence that the editor would not be amenable to simply rewriting the passage to make sense.

It was bad writing and the editor removed it. The fact that he felt shame doesn't make his assumptions any more valid.

>fails to consider that the editor was not critiquing his artistic notions but rather just crossing off something that both of them agreed was bad

That's because the editors they worked with, and others he discussed such things, had a pattern to cross off specific things (regardless of whether both author and editor agreed they were bad), and those "crossing offs" revealed not just an editorial hand, but also an underlying ethics/ideology behind what they chose to focus on...

>It was bad writing and the editor removed it. The fact that he felt shame doesn't make his assumptions any more valid.

Way to miss the whole argument. It's not even like he didn't spell it out...

> That's because the editors they worked with, and others he discussed such things, had a pattern to cross off specific things (regardless of whether both author and editor agreed they were bad), and those "crossing offs" revealed not just an editorial hand, but also an underlying ethics/ideology behind what they chose to focus on...

That's obviously not exclusively true. Otherwise the sole purpose of the editor would be pure ideological shifts. That would be dumb. Ergo I conclude most of the edits are just competent editor edits.

> Way to miss the whole argument.

And I'm saying the author seems like a sensitive soul that has jumped the gun far too quickly. His argument is incorrect.

>That's obviously not exclusively true. Otherwise the sole purpose of the editor would be pure ideological shifts.

That wasn't the argument I've made. I didn't say every edit suggestion was based on ideological shifts. I said that (actually, merely summed up the author's experience) they discovered a tendency for editors to also (keyword: also) make suggestions that not only result in ideological shifts, but have an ideology/ethics and not "how best to serve the text" or aesthetics as the underlying drive.

And some those corrections can even coincide with a "better expression" edit.

To make the claim perfectly clear:

(1) editors make mainly "better expression" edits

(2) they also make a certain class of ideology/ethics edits. Some of them they make them explicitly with ideology in mind (e.g. they find situation X, that is acceptable to a French sensibility as yucky because of their culture), and other times unconsciously as mere not understanding the point of the text (but again, not because it doesn't have one, but because of conceptions rooted in their culture about what is included, not some "universal" needs of the text).

(3) they make enough of the latter that the writer can see a pattern - also shared/expressed by other writers of the same culture as him (different to the editor's culture)

(4) many people reading about those, can't even understand that the latter kind of edits are of that kind, not only because the change might be suble subtle and they can't understand what's at stake, but also because they share the same ethics/ideology (in short: culture) with the editor.

I don't really care about your argument here. Mine is very simple. If you write a crap sentence a good editor will flag that sentence for being crap. Maybe the editor cared about ideology. Maybe they did not. But if they didn't flag that sentence they would be a bad editor. Because it was a bad sentence. For us to assume that there is additional reasoning behind it would be pure conjecture.

It's not a convincing piece of evidence to point out that an editor removed a nonsense statement as evidence that the editor has ideological motivations. It's not proof that they don't have ideological motivations. It's just an irrelevant edit of a bad phrase.

This feels like the classic Community scene in which Chang is trying to pitch "Bear Down for Midterms" as the school's slogan, and everyone says "What does that mean?" to which he tries to defend by asking if their issues with it are a race thing.

The author's thesis can be correct even if his evidence and persuasive reasoning are bad.

>I don't really care about your argument here. Mine is very simple. If you write a crap sentence a good editor will flag that sentence for being crap. Maybe the editor cared about ideology. Maybe they did not. But if they didn't flag that sentence they would be a bad editor

Well that's how editing works. I'd be charitable and say that, certainly, both I and the author know this.

On top of that, basic function, however, an editor can have other causes in mind for flagging a sentence (either explicit or unconscious motivation), besides it "being crap". And if they do this frequently enough, one can spot a pattern.

To put it another way, sure, a cigar is something people smoke. And sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar" as the quote goes. But also sometimes a cigar is NOT just a cigar. It was put conscisously as a phalic symbol, or even uncosciously so.

Similarly, an edit it's not always an edit - sometimes it's imposing an ideology behind the editing - even if it thinks it just removes a bad sentence.

Now, about the "no evidence" part.

Part of the essay is about how for some of those cases there's no evidence, but you can see it if you come from the right (constrasting to the editor) background. And where it's more obvious, there's still "plausible deniability".

It's more about about the emerging pattern of editing decisions that you get a feel for.

So, there's no "evidence" or "proof", in the sense of a court case or math, the same way you can't prove a comedian is funny to someone. They either find them funny or not, and there are no real arguments and explanations that can change their mind.

At best you can point that many agree with you and find said comedian funny (though, of course, that wouldn't convince anybody that the comedian is funny - it might just give them some doubt about them finding them unfunny, or merely make them think those "many" have no good humor either).

>The author's thesis can be correct even if his evidence and persuasive reasoning are bad.

Certainly.

Tho in this case, I think he makes a good case at the literature level: how what's conveyed changes by the proposed edits they point out.

And how even when the sentence is not good, the suggested edit doesn't propose an improvement that removes the "bad expression" and retains what's conveyed, but completely removes what was conveyed.

Not because they're a bad editor and don't have a feel for improving phrases while retaining their meaning in general, but because they have a different mindset/culture.

That is, the editors can handle the "improve-but-keep-meaning" fine for phrases where the ideology is not an issue, but get a "blind spot" when it is...

>Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.

It means drinking inside the house into a blackout stupor (actual or not but meant for effect) during covid nights where you couldn't get outside.

>"the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement.

It's not to you, because of what the author already covered: you want sex to be a story, not a fact hanging in the air.

In other words, you look whether the description has an explicit a sexual purpose.

But this introduces nakedness and the human body without explicit sexual purpose. The sexuality is a background, not a plot, and the details help paint a picture, don't tell a story, and don't serve as plot devices.

That's also what the american editor couldn't understand - and for the same reasons.

> Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means.

The author explains a few lines after:

Ah okay. IMHO the editors suggestion is way better. It's more impactful and to the point instead of diverging for a sentence about sad drunken nights:

>We used to do it without video, but last March we started feeling the need to be visible to one another. The need to be seen and acknowledged by people you respect.

>We used to do it without video, but last March we started feeling the need to be visible to one another. There were mornings following marriage blackout nights where you only wanted to be seen and acknowledged by people you respect.

It's really funny from the perspective of the code review:

Reviewer: This block of code is a bit confusing. Could you replace with a simpler and shorter version like this? (Suggest edit)

Reveiewee: I agree with you. But nah I will keep it. Oops shipped!

Learning to say no was the single best thing I could do to improve my shared coding experience.

The proposed changes were "cuts". The reviewer said "remove these lines, we don't need them" not "can you clarify". So more like:

Reviewer: I don't like this code - so we don't need it. Take it out.

Reveiewee: Umm what? I can clean it up, but it's kind of essential

> and the new grey of my beard

if I ever write my novel, I'm going to include the line "I studied my face in the mirror before starting to scrape last night's hoar from my chin"

Agree, the writing seems off as an American, and it seems there are some comma splices. A good editor will tighten up the writing.

also very weird use of French-style « guillemet » quotation marks?

(not weird because they're guillemets, just kinda weird because they're in an English language article and being used for emphasis instead of quotations)

This reminds me of Thomas Sowell’s take on writing and editors specifically https://www.tsowell.com/About_Writing.html

The section on editing is about 2/3 of the way through, although the whole thing is a great read.

TLDR: writers don’t like being edited (particularly by bad writers acting as editors)

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