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Comment by xena | Hacker News Reader

This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like:

> When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary metaphor, but as a kind of political vocabulary, one destined to spiral into paranoia and violence.

Into something like:

> This idea of the "Butlerian Jihad" horrified me. We are misunderstanding Herbert's subtle warning about humans being forced to become like machines as a rallying cry against AI companies. I fear that this will lead to paranoia and violence.

I think that if the entire article was edited like that it would be a lot more readable.

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I find that the first paragraph tells a better narrative. I prefer it muchly. The second paragraph doesn't make sense and is saying more than the first. It feels both dumbed down and more confusing.

They’re saying that the popular conception of a “Butlerian Jihad” is a pale shadow of what Frank Herbert outlined over the course of four novels, all of which are… look, have you read any of them? Whatever virtues you care to ascribe to Dune, “succinct” is not one of them.

I strongly prefer the original to your edit.

Your version is considerably worse, and imo, more verbose. It misses a multitude of subtleties that the author packs into a single phrase, and frankly, doesn’t even come close to saying the same thing.

I chalk it up to an American technical class who consider the height of good writing to be an O’Reilly book.

In particular, GP's version reads as introducing a defense of "AI companies", and this piece is not that.

To the extent that the article has a political thesis (the author was pretty careful to avoid one), I think it's "don't throw the LLM baby out with the OpenAI bathwater". But it's pretty clear to me that OpenAI being bathwater is taken as near-fact.

Maybe he should run it through AI to get a more readable version.

Style is a thing. Your version is not better.

The author did not say they felt horror, nor fear, nor misunderstanding.

They winced at repetition and predictability, and they let the reader experience their own emotion that followed.

As well intentioned as it is, these kind of edits subvert the author's intent -- and in this case, also erases evidence of a culture that uses apostrophes for quoting.

Why not ask an LLM to summarize it for you if you don't have the patience to sit with some prose for a bit.

It's not prose, it's logorrhea.

It's what people write like when they think that using lots of big words and flowery phrasing makes them sound clever. It makes them sound like stuffy 15-year-olds who have just moved beyond looking up all the rude words in the dictionary.

I disagree, I thought it was well-written.

Its' greater sin in my view was attempting to present simple pedantry as politically relevant. The literary criticism I found enjoyable, convincing, and devoid of actionable political insight.

Your proposal does not mean the same thing as the original paragraph.

Why would you argue yours is better?

A few things (written on my phone, forgive the SEO list):

* One idea per sentence, more than one tends to make massive run-on sentences that go too far.

* Removes irrelevant details. Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?

Essentially the trick is to take your ideas down to the bare minimum required to express them portably and then write that. It makes things much easier to write (you don't have ans many words to put in the document) and the end result is much easier to read (there's less irrelevant details to scan through).

Sounds very Hemingway.

OP might benefit from using https://hemingwayapp.com/

>Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?

Why? Isn't that kind of obvious? He says he fears that it will enter public life as a kind of political vocabulary. It was in the Guardian, read by millions, shaping discourse. It already entered public life at that point. It's relevant.

He's also implying that the original Guardian article missed the significance of the detail - indeed, this alleged inattention from mainstream media sources is part of the justification for writing the piece at all.

>> Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the name of the magazine — and the fact that it is a magazine — matters very much when we are talking about something that is "entering public life".

If the author had read this little tidbit on a "daily dune fan blogpost", he wouldn't have any ground to claim that butlerian jihad is a part of relevant political vocabulary.

Are these kinds of things imperative for all written word in your mind? Or just certain classes of text? Certain audiences?

Why do you think writing in the complete opposite way to every great work of literature is optimal?

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