Persuade xor Discover, Parkinson Remix | Hacker News Reader

Persuade xor Discover, Parkinson Remix

paulgraham.com

20 pointsbrlewis33 comments

I am speculating, but I believe this was because so many people focused on the Michael Arrington reference which was just a starting point, not the main focus of the essay.

By switching that to something completely noncontroversial (a bicycle shed which may not even exist physically) he was showing how you can come to the same conclusion without the lightning rod in there, and also at the same time emphasizing what he was really writing about.

I don't think people "missed the point" of the original. Rather, a lot of people prefer talking about Michael Arrington's personality instead of talking about technique in writing and communication. Essays do not come with Taser-equipped topicality guardians that electrocute you if you don't talk about what the writer thought you might talk about.

Is there an in-joke here? I can see the difference between this and the original, but who is Parkinson, and why is this a remix?

There's something I'm not understanding. Am I the only one?

See here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=839237

and here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality

Ah. Definitely insider knowledge, although no doubt widely known in appropriate circles.

Thank you.

What I learned from the comments (and comment voting) on the first version: surprisingly, the HN community is more passionate in their disdain for Mike Arrington than they are in their worship of pg.

Hopefully this article will allow people to focus on the real points of the first, because he explored some interesting territory there.

An alternate conclusion is that given the opportunity to discuss two ideas, where one is inflammatory and simple, and the other is abstract and nuanced, people tend towards the inflammatory. Conversations, then, are like physical systems: they tend to find the lowest energy point.

Doesn't remixing the article to eliminate a distraction from the main point suggest PG actually is trying to persuade with this piece?

Not quite. The bicycle shed is a far stronger example than Arrington. Indeed, the pointlessness of trying to persuade someone about the proper color for a bicycle shed is a long accepted fact in the open source community at large.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/mailing-list-faq/bike...

I think tightening up your argument so the essay flows better is different than modifying your argument to persuade. Essentially Paul removed something that was railroading the discovery process for many people. If there's something in an essay that is so vastly disruptive that people can't talk about the main point, there's nothing hypocritical about removing it.

Would you consider correcting a distracting spelling error an effort to persuade?

This isn't a serious essay. I made this version to demonstrate what an egregious instance of Parkinson's Law of Triviality the comments on the original were.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality

It was a trivial point to you, but perhaps not to people who read your essay. You don't get to control what your readers take away from an essay. If you have one point to make, don't make two.

There's a meta-point in here somewhere though, as his essay was about the fact that pandering to readers isn't his highest priority [1]. His essay also would have offended unionists and people who hold a religious devotion to the "greatest generation," but since those groups aren't well represented on HN, only the friendly coloring of Arrington caused controversy.

[1] Which is not terribly dissimilar from his feeling that programming languages shouldn't pander to bad programmers.

When I read the essay I wasn't offended about Paul's thoughts on Arrington, I simply thought they were wrong. There's a difference between being offended by something and thinking something is incorrect. I think the main focus of the discussion about Arrington was about the fact that the reason why most people dislike Arrington is not because he is un-ingratiating.

I'm taking issue with the parent's assertion that a writer shouldn't make two points in the same essay. The implicit reasoning is it is distracting -- which is true whether you think the point is offensive or just wrong. That's a good reason to avoid extraneous points if your purpose is to persuade. If your purpose is to explore though, it is counter-productive to suppress intermediate waypoints.

It depends on if you look at your own essays more as a vehicle for exploring ideas, or for expressing ideas.

But they don't need to be mutually exclusive. We take down scaffolding once the building is finished.

Your second sentence is correct, but it implies your third is impossible.

If you know your audience, you can guess what might distract them from the point you want to make.

And if your purpose is to discover rather than to persuade, then you might not care. Which brings us back to the title of the piece.

Maybe, but the identified harm was adding fluff in order to persuade. If you subtract mostly irrelevant if colorful anecdotes, you keep the point and the concision, basically making it more persuasive for free.

And yet, this version's cryptic title and bikeshed-cliche-intro only make sense when considered in contrast to the original.

So while one message sent by this version is "look again at the part I thought I was important", another message is, "wow, that 'bikeshed' was a powerful distraction". That calls yet more attention to the 'bikeshed' itself -- both the specific instance and the general phenomenon -- and the author's own self-conscious rhetorical choices about how to influence readers.

The many levels of semi-contradictory subtext are making my head spin!

It's hard to persuade people if they don't even sit through what you have to say. The colorful anecdotes usually serve to expose many people to the point who wouldn't have otherwise bothered reading it.

I don't need Google Analytics to tell me that a lot more people thought and spoke (and will continue to think and speak) about the original article than if the article had resembled this "remixed" version. Many of those people will at least observe the point behind the anecdote, even if they don't linger on it.

I appreciate the change. I almost abandoned the essay when I saw it was going to talk about Mike Arrington. Luckly I continued reading, and enjoyed it full.

The question that remains in the back of my mind is: is this an intent of pleasing me (as an audience)?. The other question is: Is Mike's anti-fan base so big that this remix is useful?

Above all, I enjoyed reading the original article and liked the remix.

This would seem a less... sarcastic if the author had tried in good faith to find another real example, rather than woundedly choosing something deliberately boring.

The color of bike sheds has special meaning in the technical community.

Yes, and it is a very sarcastic choice. The author implies that Arrington was just a totally arbitrary choice in the previous article, absolutely irrelevant to his point, and this is more than a little disingenuous.

How dare you call MA a bikeshed!

There's another reason people "dislike" the color of the bike shed: they love participatory righteous indignation, and the bike shed's color is something convenient to complain about. That so many bike sheds are this color makes me think that people enjoy complaining about things more than they actually dislike the color.

It strikes me as very male to disregard the presence and feelings of others in the pursuit of making a point.

Invoking Parkinson's Law is incorrect. That would require Arrington to be uninteresting, and your main point to be intimidatingly profound, neither of which are true. This was plain old Distraction By Shiny Objects. I think "see randomness" applies here.

Well, this is not a simple substitution in the original. There are entire paragraphs removed. The ending remains pretty much the same.

I am not getting the point.

Basically, the XOR essay he wrote wasn't at all about Arrington. It was merely a starting point for the real point of the essay--why pg writes the way he does and the reasons for doing so.

However, there are certain things that just set people off--even if it has nothing to do with the main point--and go off on a berserker rant. In this case, people disagreed with the reason pg gave about why people thought Arrington was unfriendly.

So then the question is, does pg's essay still hold up and make sense about the reasons why he writes the way he does, if Arrington was unfriendly for a different reason than what pg gave?

One way to test it is if you replaced the entire section about Arrington with a similar analogy and see if the essay still holds up.

Pg decided to pick one about Parkinson's bike shed color as a nice little meta-commentary about how we are arguing about things that don't matter to the main point of the essay.

XOR is not an English word. The either...or construct is used to be explicit with regards to mutual exclusivity.

Does "persuasion" even work? To me it just comes across as smarmy.

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