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loboftayesterday at 5:53 PM1 replyview on HN

I did.

The point can be made very quickly yes, but the background and context provided is what made this a good read to me. Sometimes we need to marinate in a topic for it to enter into deeper layers of the brain.


Replies

robomcyesterday at 10:24 PM

This is one of the things about the novels he describes too, and their impact on empathy. Like, you can explain to someone in 3-4 sentences that slavery is cruel but that's not the same as inhabiting a characters circumstances for 500 pages.

It's a natural instinct for engineers, to think you should always convey information in the most efficient way possible, but it's actually not how real understanding tends to occur in the real world. You need a lot of noisy carrier signal and time and context etc.