Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, December 26, 2013

I Guess That Explains the Pining For Cognitive Enhancement...

Okay, I'll admit I am still a bit shocked just how many sooper-genius "tech intellectuals" declare my writing "too long, didn't read" -- "too dense to understand" -- "bad" and "convoluted" because the sentences are long and the statements qualified -- obviously trying to be "impressive" with all my "big words" and "hifalutin' phrasing" -- and so on. May I say, I am not particularly interested in impressing anyone who thinks I use "big words"? And that if you are the sort of person who doesn't have the patience to read my writing, I can't say I find it a particularly cutting criticism that you didn't read all of it or even much of it? If you want to read People magazine, you should read People magazine, there are plenty of fine and edifying things to be found in People magazine. But you're not an intellectual, not even a "tech intellectual," properly so-called, if you really cannot puzzle your way through my dense prose, and you're not capable of grasping indispensable qualifications and complexities of technodevelopmental questions either. You think you understand consciousness and you can't understand my writing? Seriously, bro? Certainly there are better, clearer writers out there on these questions than I am -- but neither are they writing for People magazine nor will they find me so baffling as all that. Some things are hard, sometimes the difficulty of hard reading helps you distance yourself from facile commonplaces that shouldn't be so easy when it comes to it.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> I Guess That Explains the Pining For Cognitive Enhancement...

But how would they get along without the Strategic Cognitive Failure?