I found the original comment unclear and hard to follow. It has some garden-path elements… like “partially fossilized”, which most people will parse as an adjective, but here is used as a transitive verb (unusual / surprising usage). The sentence has lots of clauses in it. The key idea in the next sentence is shoved into a clause behind “it is inarguable that”, which readers will stumble over like a pile of children’s toys sitting in front of the door. The multiple ideas in the paragraph are presented without connecting phrases. There are some phrases which seem nonsensical, like “fast-growing stasis”. It’s not like such a phrase is wrong, but it’s nonsensical at a surface level, which forces readers to stop and think about alternative readings.
It is just a comment on HN. I don’t think it’s fair to ask authors to edit or carefully craft HN comments. However, there are some problems with the way that comment is written.
Thanks for the helpful feedback; it is hard to get that on the internet. Although...
> There are some phrases which seem nonsensical, like “fast-growing stasis”. It’s not like such a phrase is wrong, but it’s nonsensical at a surface level, which forces readers to stop and think about alternative readings.
That was intentional, and catches what I meant. The English speaking world is improving everything with unprecedented speed. Simultaneously, there seems to be an extreme amount of political tension that is linked to stagnation of a few key measures like wages and per capita energy use.
It is a weird situation of stasis (really more decline these days) and change for the better. Without observing both, the political situation wouldn't make sense.
Yes, and I also think that we should expect readers here to respond to the most coherent reading of a comment, but I know a lot of us don’t spend the time to figure out what someone means.
In “fast-growing stasis”, because it’s an unexpected phrase, you could follow it closely with an explanation…
> …in a weird type of fast-growing stasis, where some measures grow at an incredible pace and others stagnate.
Or use scare quotes to call attention to the unusual usage…
Honestly I found it hard to apprehend the meaning of most of the text. This is a failing on my part and something I associate with reading authors like Yuval Noah Harari, it seems to be a combination of my not possessing a context which is assumed, and perhaps a logical progression which doesn't map well onto my own thought processes. Whatever the reason, the result is that the statements appear pointlessly vague and the argument which is being constructed appears to me to be merely a disorganised heap.
A sibling comment did a good job of responding to your question, but I could point to the phrase "a slowly declining society in a weird type of fast growing stasis" as typifying just this sort of (to me) impenetrable description.
> adjusted by the M2 a lot of the financial indicators haven't improved as much as people like to pretend
When you wrote this, did you have in mind particular indicators, people who like to pretend they've improved, how they should be adjusted by the money supply? Did you expect that the reader would find this statement familiar? I'm not a particularly sophisticated follower of contemporary economics, but I didn't have any idea what you were getting at here, unless it was something similar to, e.g. "median household purchasing power relative to the national budget has declined so much that the tax burden today hurts the consumer's quality of life much more than it did in 1960, contrary to recent editorials I've seen in The Economist". However I don't believe you intended such a blunt interpretation, as if you did it could have been stated much more straightforwardly.
