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Comment by koliber | Hacker News Reader

Good writing advice says that each sentence has a single goal. The goal is to draw the reader in, and convince them to read the next sentence.

This article does it masterfully. The title drew me in. The opening sentence finished the job. Well done.

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Scott Alexander is not for everyone (as I've learned by unsuccessfully foisting him on friends for years) but for people who are even remotely interested he is probably the greatest internet writer alive.

I'd love to hear alternative GOATs.

Going back a bit: Hilzoy, from Obsidian Wings, springs to my mind. I'm still sad that she stopped writing (at least publicly, under that name).

But Scott's also great, etc etc.

For me, Sam Kriss takes that title by a large margin:

https://samkriss.substack.com/

thank you thank you! i clicked in and gave it a read.

he's a curmudgeon with love in his heart. and style. i'm laughing my head off. love it, thanks!

I read a couple of articles and he seems to blur line between truth and fiction. I couldn't tell when he's making things up. Did he really write about Taylor Swift for four months? Is anything he wrote about Swift true? Did he actually go to a protest where they started chanting "from the river to the sea?" (Soon after, it’s obviously fiction.)

When I have to read something else to find out what actually happened, I think the writer is being too clever and too obscure for me.

Then again, there are people here who clearly don't get Scott Alexander and it's clear to me when he's joking, probably because I'm a long-time reader. So I guess it's all context-dependent.

Rob Beschizza.

Peter Welch

Myself I closed the tab at the second sentence, so I can't attest to that.

And yet that first sentence was reason enough for you to leave a reply. In a way it did evoke something in you that probably most texts don’t do.

I think it's more hacker news that I'm interested in, and how the article was representative of the crowd that gathers here.

Start-up founders are often of the age to start having children I guess. Even if having a child and a start-up at the same time is most definitely not a good idea.

The average age range of startup founders is 35-45. The average age of people having their first kid is 30.

That said, there's a lot more than startup founders here. Always was.

What about the median?

In this case, the hook effect was so strong that I immediately thought about that writing advice. It's one of the best examples of that working on me that I can remember.

Because the second sentence mentions the Bible? Or some other reason?

If it’s the former, I’m a Christian but I don’t just close out articles if they’re written by Richard Dawkins or quickly proclaim that they’re an atheist. There’s still a very real chance that they have some wisdom to share. Just because people share a different religious view than me doesn’t mean I can’t learn from them.

I stopped when they grouped the NYT journalists with murderers and drug-dealers. Clearly someone biais, that also use the bible to make their points. No thank you.

I don't agree with the grouping, but he is making a very specific, personal reference: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slate_Star_Codex#New_York_Time...>. It's referenced elsewhere as well, as noted in this comment here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38734207>

That's a half-joke, for what it's worth.

It's because in Scott's recent past, an NYT journalist lied about wanting to write a positive article about him and being OK with using his pseudonym, then instead wrote a very negative article and doxxed him instead. The author is a psychiatrist with some unstable patients, and a blogger with some controversial opinions. It's a whole thing, I read that and chuckled at the tongue-in-cheek humor.

As an atheist, mention or quotes from the bible are interesting to me because they help explain our current culture. I'm just challenging your proposal that (all) atheists are not curious.

Ah sorry for the confusion! I chose atheism because it seems diametrically opposed to Christianity in the US, but my intention wasn’t to single out atheists :) . The same sentiment I voiced in my first comment could be said about any religion or belief system: I won’t close an article with Buddhist, relativist, Muslim, etc views just because they mention their belief system.

I'm an atheist; I've read and studied the Bible as part of my catholic education 25 years ago.

Not that I'm strongly against it, but my attention is challenged by many things, and a man who starts an article about becoming a father with a clear sex-is-for-procreation Bible quote makes it sound like his experience of life is not relevant to mine.

You're behaving foolishly. If you spend just a moment looking at it you'd see the author isn't even taking the religious text he's quoting seriously! So your great fear of accidentally interacting with a religious individual is overblown.

Well, since you chose not to read it, and continue to choose thusly in similar situations, you'll never really be able to confirm or deny whether or not"his experience of life is relevant" to yours. Not sure what the point of engaging in discussion on an article you admit to refusing to read is...

So you are basically refusing to read this simply because the author is even willing to be aware of what's in the bible. What a bizarre and anti intellectual stance.

I've been seeing this strange kind of attitude more lately -- for example, I encountered a young person who refused to read books that were more than 20 years old "because they might have bigoted ideas in them since they're old"

But avoiding reading about the past because it scares you is a great way to remain stupid and cede control of the world to others without such hangups.

> God smote Onan, starting a 4,000-year-old tradition of religious people getting angry about wasting sperm on anything other than procreative sex.

I'm not "refusing" to read it. I just reacted on a comment.

Please don't comment on articles that you are unwilling to engage with beyond the headline alone. This is part of HN's rules to keep the discussion from being so superficial

I dunno. 'Ignorance is Bliss'. I only have so much brain capacity and attention, I'd rather direct it to what's important to me than leave it wide open to the sewage-infected firehose of incoming information that is life in the 21st Century.

An article who's title implies the inevitability of parenthood is probably not good mental fodder.

Oh, it didn't interest you enough to read? But it did interest you enough to comment!

In the paragraphs that follow he goes on to explain how people twisted their god's intent while writing the bible, at least on this particular topic.

> a man who starts an article about becoming a father with a clear sex-is-for-procreation Bible quote makes it sound like his experience of life is not relevant to mine

It's not like he believes any of it. He just quotes the bible because that makes for a funnier article.

You missed a great joke about provoking God to laughter.

I always feel like the goal of every Scott Alexander sentence is to show how he is smarter and/or more rational than other people.

It might, but does it come off as pretentious or genuine? It doesn't read like he keeps a thesaurus next to him to sound smarter. Keep in mind he's been doing this for a very long time as well. Also he's well-versed on the subject of rationality, so I would argue that he's probably more rational than most people.

I am not familiar with the author, and read it as genuine, examples where they exhibit humorous self-awareness and humility:

"If your brains are still too small to process such esoteric terms"

"It’s a crazy thing to try, when even your own local predictions are so far from perfect accuracy."

"I cannot quite remember why I thought this would be a good idea. I blame the pronatalist influencer conspiracy."

I just feel like a genuinely smart and rational person would not want to describe his newborn kids as "engines" or robot AI's in training as OP does here. That's just ridiculously out of touch, it reads like satire of what some AI-obsessed founder or VC might post here to pitch their new startup. And OP has even written satire of his own about SV social attitudes, how could he possibly fail to see this?

It is, of course, intentionally satire, with a "maybe it's actually true?" cog-sci perspective. I found this piece very funny and charming.

He's the Mike Judge of Rationalists.

I closed the tab at "cognitive engines." Overwrought balderdash masquerading as prose.

It is not 'balderdash', it is a reference to Scott's longstanding interest in Karl Friston & predictive processing paradigms in neuroscience & psychiatry. If you don't get the allusions, that's your problem, not his.

Oh, it is Scott's problem. I got the references and I still found them to be too much.

There's a segment on HN that comes out of the woodwork to poo poo artful writing. Parent commenter was not going to appreciate this article. I'd say it's a testament to the author's writing ability that they were able to pull parent commenter in a couple hundred words before they recognized it was "balderdash"!

When the writing sounds like something you'd hear on an episode of Frasier, it's overwritten. Reading Strunk and White would greatly benefit the author.

I saw the scrollbar and hit CTRL+W. Sleep deprived by an autistic 3 year old who can't speak but only cry all night. I have no energy to do anything. I am surprised I typed this long a response.

I also just wrote a subquery as a column instead of inner join or something. Dunno it might be right. It worked though.

I hope you find some time to rest soon.

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