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Comment by stackghost | Hacker News Reader

Exclusionary isn't the term. I'm not sure there is one specific term in English, but today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment, or pretending to have a deep understanding.

My wife's sister did an art degree, for example, and she and her friends wouldn't stop gushing about purposefully-inscrutable postmodern nonsense like Derrida, who was an absolute hack.

All that aside, N+1 sounds like it's the sort of thing I would enjoy read. I didn't get the sense that it was written to be exclusionary, but maybe I just didn't get the full picture from TFA.

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High culture can feel obscurantist to me.

Writers like to impress that they and Derrida are in on a shared secret, but if this secret is not interesting then the reader must not be allowed to know it before doing some work. A barricade of allusions and references and filler is necessary to make readers feel like they really earned an insight.

Whereas if we took a step back and stripped off the allegories, we'd realise that Derrida's argument to Lacan about the nature of the phallus is not interesting and does not tell us much.

> today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment

That must be the marker of "high" culture throughout history generally, right?

I like this quote from a funny video on ancient Greek philosophy (although I'd probably be less amused by the layers of nonsense if the people around me were deep into it):

> Philosophy is known for being equal-parts Pretentious and Needlessly Confusing, and that’s definitely true, especially after Descartes shows up, but there is one thing that Philosophy is not, and that is “Boring”, because it is WAY too stupid. Anybody who tells you that Philosophy is the unflinching pursuit of objective truth is lying to you and to themselves — Philosophy is a mess where everyone is competing for the most galaxy-brained take on the world, and that’s why I Love It, dammit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ve3BARdFI

n+1 painted itself into a corner by escaping from this failure mode of philosophy.

That's why it's biggest discernible audience-class was lower-middle to "blue-collar" grad students in architecture or design. Who knew this was a great place to learn the form=function* of the writing that they need, but not feel so strongly about it that they'd push it on their colleagues.

I think the early editors should have marketed it to compiler engineers, like a reverse-Wired

@DuaneMclemore, help me out here

*Appeal to the most discerning of [ie old money] aristocrats while being painfully aware that the writing has to distance itself from "champagne socialists"

I should've been clear that I was responding more to the comment than the article or N+1. I skimmed it and agreed with the root comment "[I've] heard nothing about anything this article references".

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