
The Necessary Talent - hoffmannesque
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n17/julian-barnes/the-necessary-talent
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anon1m0us
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
> 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.

~~~
anon1m0us
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.

~~~
mantap
The same reason that you can tell if someone _really_ enjoys your cooking,
because they will be quiet while eating it.

People tend to leave comments when they disagree. It's easy to disagree; it's
harder to agree while also adding something interesting to the conversation.

