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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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