Yep. The main reason I didn't further pursue History academia was that it was too much of a monoculture with a bit of nepotism sparkled all over it. Not to discard everyone there of course; there were some awesome courses and faculty. But there's no way I was going to dedicate my life to such environment with so little in return for it.

This is why when I taught in college I NEVER gave out group assignments.

I'm not trying to test whether the best student knows the material; I'm trying to test whether all the students know the material.

As the person who regularly carried such groups when I was in high school and college, I was especially sensitive to this.

Nah, the teacher was just wrong about the facts. If they had been right about the facts, there's nothing wrong with saying that imo. The reality was that it was the partner who should have gotten that lecture rather than the author.

So I'd say that you shouldn't say that if you're relying on your own feelings and impressions to judge facts not in evidence, because your instincts may be wrong. They may even be racist or sexist (i.e. something that the person you're maligning has to deal with constantly), instead of in this case when it was just a weakness for ass-kissers.

Too many times somebody else got a good grade from my work. I don't begrudge them the grade because I don't care when other people get nice things for free (I love it when me or my friends get nice things for free), but they certainly had no knowledge in what had been taught in the class they just got a B in.

> Those people are the reason academia is such a miserable experience for so many.

School isn't a therapy session or entertainment. If it's a miserable experience and you come out smart, it's 1000x better than if its a wonderful experience and you come out dumb.

As I understand it, the author was sharing the story to convince the audience he was a good writer and, thus, we should value his opinions on how to write non-fiction.

No you are not missing anything. This is a more recent bait-and-switch method of writing articles. I'm not sure where it comes from but if I had to be extra pessimist, I'd say it is a trope among failed writers. Sometimes they use narrative devices that work best in novels, but they end up being applied to normal every-day articles and the result is something that seems out of place.

Arguably if HN is to use LLMs to curate and administer submissions and comments (which it has been doing already), one would hope they can short-circuit this for all of us and scan the article/blog post, providing a summary directly underneath the submission/comment reply box. Reason being is, a lot of the time many paragraphs are spent belaboring one or two points that would best work in a tl;dr way and jump over these narrative passages, framings and backstories that serve very little to the points themselves.

Really? While reading I couldn't help but think about how I wish this article on writing well were... written well. That block quote loses me in the first sentence, I had to re-read it a few times.

"Good teaching requires alternating between two views, going up and down levels of detail. Sometimes you zoom out and give students one word for a big idea, calling a whole chain of events a "collapse." This 'Nomiinalization' lets them hold the idea in mind instead of the whole story. But summary words alone can lose students, the abstract loses meaning as details are forgotten. So you zoom back in with examples, stories, pictures, concrete cases. Those reinforce the idea of the summary word."

OHHH THAT'S SUCH A GOOD IDEA. I'm going to add some interactivity to the circles