HN readers dumping on him (many without reading the entire article) is another sign of the intellectual decline of the quality of HN.
A writer who can't seem to get to the point because he needs more paragraphs to showcase additional literary allusions is not going to hold me hostage indefinitely. If the first two thousand words of an essay are not a sufficiently representative sample on which to base conclusions about the essay, then the writer is not a good writer. He may of course reveal the cure for cancer in the final paragraph, but given the opportunity cost of missing out on more important things I could be reading, I'm willing to take the risk.
I discovered long ago that "intellectual" did not mean "intelligent"; it was about style of presentation, not importance of ideas. You be the judge of whether that is a symptom of intellectual decline.
A writer who can't seem to get to the point because he needs more paragraphs to showcase additional literary allusions is not going to hold me hostage indefinitely. If the first two thousand words of an essay are not a sufficiently representative sample on which to base conclusions about the essay, then the writer is not a good writer. He may of course reveal the cure for cancer in the final paragraph, but given the opportunity cost of missing out on more important things I could be reading, I'm willing to take the risk.
I discovered long ago that "intellectual" did not mean "intelligent"; it was about style of presentation, not importance of ideas. You be the judge of whether that is a symptom of intellectual decline.