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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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