This was my guess, but I wanted to make sure. Because I’m inclined to disregard the advice on the basis of all Strange7′s previous posts having been downvoted.
There are grounds for being suspicious of quality of advice given in this post. But it’s bad epistemic hygiene to signal disapproval with incomprehension.
Eric S. Raymond has a good explanation in this post: “Mystical poetry and mental postures”.[1] In short, poetry should be thought of as creating a mental stance in the audience, rather than conveying analytical explanations. Your post neglects this large inferential gap, hence it fails quite flat here.
One problem is that contemporary poetry has spent nearly a century losing itself in clouds of increasingly meaningless abstraction, or pandering to the political cause du jour. Nowadays, the place of poetry in folk culture has mostly been taken by song lyrics, although even here the quality is very hit-and-miss.
Strange7 is teaching us how to write persuasively, like Eliezer.
This was my guess, but I wanted to make sure. Because I’m inclined to disregard the advice on the basis of all Strange7′s previous posts having been downvoted.
There are grounds for being suspicious of quality of advice given in this post. But it’s bad epistemic hygiene to signal disapproval with incomprehension.
You’re right, I’m probably not the best person to be teaching this particular lesson. Anyone else is, of course, welcome to give it a try.
Eric S. Raymond has a good explanation in this post: “Mystical poetry and mental postures”.[1] In short, poetry should be thought of as creating a mental stance in the audience, rather than conveying analytical explanations. Your post neglects this large inferential gap, hence it fails quite flat here.
One problem is that contemporary poetry has spent nearly a century losing itself in clouds of increasingly meaningless abstraction, or pandering to the political cause du jour. Nowadays, the place of poetry in folk culture has mostly been taken by song lyrics, although even here the quality is very hit-and-miss.
[1] ESR also has a nice tutorial on writing riddle-poems.