| > It's mind numbing and comes off as sophistry. It is mind numbing. IMO it's also a fair bit of sophistry, but it's at least sophistry that involves some amount of concept compression. Ie, you can't quite unpack those concepts into a single paragraph of similar size. Also: please remember, in these conversations, that we are talking about things written by teenagers. > Does this actually have a meaning? Yes. Here's a much better but slightly lossy way of saying this: If you talk about North Korea only as a threat to be contained, then you can fall into the trap of forgetting that it's a country of humans. That could be a bad trap to fall into for a number of reasons. One reason: if you forget about your adversary's humanity then it becomes easier to commit atrocities. It's easier to "contain the communist threat" than to "fire bomb a village". Instead of rushing ahead with policy decisions that manage North Korea as an abstract security threat, we should first try to understand the various perspectives of people within North Korea. Hopefully easier to understand. The reason it's not pure sophistry is that there are some details I left out -- the second sentence of the original, in particular, has a fair bit of additional stuff packed into it. And the last sentence of my version is a bit over-simplified. Fully expanding everything might take a page or so; idk, I'm too exhausted to try :) But that's the basic idea. And, more to the point, that's the level of detail at which this idea that would actually matter in 99+% of debates. So that's probably how it should be stated. You can't learn without making mistakes, and these types of things are great teaching opportunities. On that note: this type of writing also happens in Mathematics and especially in documentation of complicated software. We have a sequence of long sentences relating fairly abstract concepts. If the reader already understands each of those concepts and how they typically interact, then the reader can piece together the meaning of the sentences quite quickly. But for a reader without that context the paragraph is utterly inscrutable, appears to be nonsense, and takes hours to unpack. The key observation here is about technical writing in general. Describe the basic idea without too much jargon. It's okay to remove some details and over-simplify! Then, if the reader needs more details, give the more precise statement. The expert can safely skim to the precise statement. Everyone wins. What a useful teaching tool! Aside: I've always found public reaction to these think pieces off-putting. I think of debaters as kids learning how to engage with ideas. The incredibly public and harsh critiques of their failures seems... mean spirited. People will actually project all the ills of American politics onto something written by a kid who is making his first attempt at packing a lot of concepts into a small space. I tend to be a bit more sympathetic, since I see highly practiced professionals fail at this task all the time. |