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Comment by isityouyesitsme | Hacker News Reader

What did I just (halfway) read? This person is incoherent and rambling, raptured with their own brilliance.

There may be solid points in there, I will never know. I automatically cannot take anyone as serious who writes this way. They do not want to be taken seriously. They want to be congratulated on their keen observations.

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You may lack the background reading to understand him, but he is certainly not incoherent.

I do not disagree that I may lack sufficient background for this. It was clearly written for "those in the know," people who already share a common viewpoint and vocabulary, and only differ on minor nuance. A bit like getting a bunch of mechanics to argue about cars.

In this regard, the writing is definitely rambling and incoherent. It's one big mutual academic exercise (I am avoiding the use of a sexual term here).

Most articles written by experts are written for those "in the know." To extend your analogy, I'd much rather read a bunch of mechanics discussing the repairability of various cars than a bunch of lay people sharing anecdotal experiences. If I didn't understand the jargon and their concerns, I'd assume that they'd spent a lot more time thinking about these problems and possess insights that I don't have.

If I didn't have a software background, I'd likely find much of the more interesting articles here to be similarly dense and impenetrable, because expert discussion often assumes a certain level of expertise from the reader.

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