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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

The comments on this Hacker News page are a bit odd. The linked article is clearly offered as a bit of playful satire. In the same way that you are not suppose to read "A Modest Proposal" and conclude that we should all eat babies, likewise, you are not suppose to read this and believe these are Bret Victor's thoughts.

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OT, but the casual reference to an obscure 18th century article by Jonathan Swift might make this comment indecipherable without Google for most people.

As a counterpoint:

For my social circle it's not remotely in the obscure category. I suspect that none of my friends or coworkers would have to look it up on Google...

This is what a liberal arts education is for.

Of course I realize that not everybody is lucky enough/even wants to get a liberal arts education, but the social/educational structure of America is not something I'm looking to attack this comment.

I thought this was part of a standard HS education? That is at least where I first encountered it.

I also have a liberal arts education, but those fruitful years were reserved for prevaricating on and dissecting various obscure and convoluted logical arguments related to phenomenology.

>I thought this was part of a standard HS education? That is at least where I first encountered it.

If you assume everybody on HN is an American, maybe.

> If you assume everybody on HN is an American, maybe.

I also attended a French school, where it was covered, and I've had at least one conversation with my Norwegian family in which it came up.

I got to read it in Swedish upper secondary school.

US education is inconsistent. At my school, we never had to read Swift, or many of the other books that seem to be considered canonical "high school" literature.

In the United States, most public education is administered at the town level. Because towns are so small compared to counties/states/nations, the variance among towns in parameters is very high -- two towns only 15 minutes apart can easily vary twentyfold along parameters like average income and percentage of adults with graduate degrees.

Thus, what passes for a "standard high school education" in the United States varies wildly -- in some schools, you can graduate without even being able to read and comprehend a magazine article. In others, the top graduates often find Harvard less intellectually rigorous than their high school (because Harvard has to help their students from worse high schools catch up).

The essay itself may not be widely read, but the phrase is anything but obscure—it's closer to cliché.

This is why even CS students should study humanities. "A Modest Proposal" is the opposite of obscure; it's one of the most famous pieces of satire ever written.

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