[WikiEN-l] On Clarity and Generalists

Sat Oct 15 08:22:31 UTC 2005

Snowspinner wrote

> Not going to go into the bulk of this here, but I think this is the  heart 
> of the disagreement here - yes, the Cambridge degree and the de  Man 
> controversy are, from an academic perspective, largely gossip.  But 
> they're gossip that has generated a tremendous amount of  generalist 
> interest, and it's irresponsible of us not to focus on them.

Agenda slip! Agenda slip!

I mean, 'populist' is _not_ necessarily well written.  Jimbo's point about 
the Gates and Fonda articles was not that that they were arcane and 
highbrow, but that they were done in such a poor style that you wouldn't 
want to tread in them, let alone read in them.

_Just adding in 'what everyone knows'_ to an article does not make for good 
writing.  This is entirely clear with celebs.  It is trivially easy to 
research stuff about high-profile people and munge it all together.  That's 
the enemy here.

So, I think 'irresponsible' is off-beam here.

Charles 