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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

It's essentially a Socratic dialogue. Personally I find it really refreshing to see something like this outside of Philosophy.

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Socratic dialogue isn't actual dialogue. It can easily come off as condescending to explain something in a dialogue with yourself. It can easily BE condescending (tvtropes, no link: "The Watson").

This site starts off on a long winded "Socratic" lecture (and an allegory to boot) without even telling us who the author is or what he aims to convince us, in short why we should care.

And he seems to have been submitting his own writings to hacker news a lot. I'm pretty sure I saw this exact link a few days ago, in fact.

Causal statistics lecturer and old time blogger Cosma Shalizi used to start off all his blog posts with an "attention conservation notice" summary.

This author is an example of the opposite, someone who does not respect very much that the reader's attention is precious to them too.

In the hands of a master like Plato, this style is heuristic; that is, it allows the reader, indeed leads him, to discover things for himself. [...] "A master like Plato," we said - but there is no one "like" Plato. Other philosophers have attempted dialogues - for example, Cicero and Berkeley - but with little success. Their dialogues are flat, dull, almost unreadable. It is a measure of the greatness of Plato that he was able to write philosophical dialogues that, for wit, charm, and profundity are the equal of any books ever produced by anyone, on any subject. Yet it may be a sign of the inappropriateness of this style of philosophizing that no one except Plato has ever been able to handle it effectively.

Mortimer Adler

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