Hacker News Reader

One of the things about HN I find annoying is that anything by or about certain people makes it onto the front page.

This blog post is near-incoherent, was published over a year ago (March 2013), and is a reaction to a blog post that current returns a 404 error. But hey, it name-checks Sam Altman, so vote it up, apparently.

View on HN

It seems some intellectuals take pride in being difficult to understand. As if that difficulty is proof of their intelligence. So they use big words and write big ideas, and wonder why so few others appreciate their brilliance. The truth is that it is often harder to make the big ideas easy than it is to make them hard, and that the goal of the people who do the latter is not to spread knowledge but to show off just how clever they are. I dislike this sort of writing for exactly that reason (and, interestingly, it is almost exactly this sort of writing which Orwell took to task in "Politics and the English Language"), that it is more interested in being noticed than in being understood.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com