The Necessary Talent

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n17/julian-barnes/the-necessary-talent

by hoffmannesque • 7 years ago

34 6 7 years ago

lrb.co.uk

anon1m0us2• 7 years ago

Meta: I see a lot of long form articles here without any comments and I wonder, are they upvoted by bots? What is there to learn from this? I load and read and read and read to find the significance and relevance to my life... something to learn, but I find nothing on the order of other content here. How can this have been on here 8 hours, with 25 upvotes, not a single comment and a consumption time-to-insight value that is very low relative to the majority of content at HN?

For what it's worth, what I did learn from reading this article is that it takes a "necessary talent" to understand the talent behind a work. The lay person, that person without talent, might be the kind who thinks, "I could paint that. The artist didn't even get the cheeks right" without even realizing the artist intentionally painted the cheeks that way knowing and resisting the urge to preemptively counter criticisms about said cheeks.

Maybe it's my old cynical self, but by this time in my life, I know most people don't have the capacity or experience to understand the amount of thought that goes into a work of art or architecture or ... software.

Perhaps the whole point of this article is to waste time learning something you already know.

hydrox24• 7 years ago

I see a lot of long form articles here without any comments and I wonder, are they upvoted by bots?

The Hacker News ranking algorithm penalises lots of comments. Posts stay near the top precisely because they do not have comments.

doubleunplussed• 7 years ago

Really? That's amazing, I had no idea. Shame, since I come here more for the conversation than the articles themselves. But perhaps HN wants to discourage people like me.

anon1m0us2• 7 years ago

What's the logic of that? If there are lots of comments, seems the content would be interesting to the community. It takes more to comment on something than to just click an up or down vote.

detaro• 7 years ago

Not having comments does not weigh higher than having comments.

Having too many comments relative to the votes can apply a penalty at some point, as a flamewar detector.

The Necessary Talent

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