HN Debrief

I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers

  • AI
  • Education
  • Culture
  • Writing

The post is a long, playful defense of "thick" art and writing. The author says they once thought canonical literature was a fraud pushed by English teachers, then later realized the good stuff is not self-explanatory on first contact. It is dense with decisions, echoes, structure, and craft that only become visible with time, context, and rereading. That becomes a broader argument against AI slop. Machines can produce writing-shaped objects, but not the kind of work whose choices keep paying off when you ask why this word, this scene, this image, and not another.

If you want people to value hard things, do not just assign them. Add context, performance, and examples of what is worth noticing. The same lesson applies well beyond literature to product design, teaching, and any work where taste depends on seeing the hidden decisions behind the surface.

Discussion mood

Strongly positive and a little self-reproachful. People liked the essay’s language for depth, felt seen by its account of bouncing off classics in school, and mostly blamed bad pedagogy, missing context, and lack of life experience more than the books themselves.

Key insights

  1. 01

    Use time as the rating scale

    Thinking in terms like "book of the month" or "book of the decade" is a better fit for serious work than star ratings. It shifts attention from instant reaction to staying power, which matches the essay’s claim that durable art reveals itself over time. The follow-up adds an important twist. You often cannot know a work’s rank when you finish it, because the ones that keep shaping your thinking can be the ones that felt quiet at first.

    When you evaluate writing, products, or hires, add a delayed judgment pass. Ask what still feels alive a month later instead of locking in a score from the first impression.

      Attribution:
    • exmadscientist #1
    • jihadjihad #1
  2. 02

    Creative feedback fails without shared intent

    The problem with learning to make art is not just finding critics. It is finding critics who understand what the work is trying to become. Feedback gets dangerous when the reviewer optimizes for their own imagined version of the piece, not the creator’s actual aim. That makes the usual advice to "just get feedback" too shallow. Good criticism has to separate craft problems from attempts to rewrite the work’s identity.

    When you review drafts, start by asking what the piece is trying to do and who it is for. In your own team, reject feedback that changes the mission before it fixes the execution.

      Attribution:
    • cattenwallen #1
    • Folcon #1
  3. 03

    Shakespeare needs staging, not recitation

    The repeated complaint was not that Shakespeare is inherently inaccessible. It is that schools often teach a performance medium like dead text. Seeing a production, hearing the lines acted, or even lightly staging scenes in class turned confusion into comprehension for many people. This changes the diagnosis. The barrier is often not the language alone, but the loss of voice, gesture, pacing, and joke delivery that carry the meaning.

    If you are teaching or introducing difficult material, use the medium it was built for. Demo the software, perform the play, show the artifact in action, then analyze it.

      Attribution:
    • NobodyNada #1
    • dredmorbius #1
    • tcmart14 #1
    • conductr #1
    • abighamb #1
  4. 04

    School optimizes for baseline, not ignition

    Public education has two jobs that pull against each other. It must get everyone over a minimum bar, and it is also supposed to spark durable interest in a subject. The first goal wins because tests, staffing, and funding all reward compliance and coverage. That explains why so many people remember literature class as deadening even when they later came to love literature. The system is built to standardize exposure, not to create conversion experiences.

    If your goal is genuine taste or curiosity, do not copy school-style delivery. Build for engagement first, because systems designed for coverage almost always flatten the thing they are trying to transmit.

      Attribution:
    • matherial #1
    • johnnyanmac #1
    • obviouslynotme #1
  5. 05

    Integrated history and literature works better

    Several concrete examples pointed to the same fix. Literature lands better when it is taught alongside the period, politics, and social world that produced it. Classes that paired Dickens with industrial history or novels with their historical moment were remembered as unusually effective. This is more than a plea for extra background. It is a claim that humanities subjects should reinforce each other the way calculus and physics do.

    When you train people on any complex domain, bundle the artifact with the world around it. Pair the manual with the use case, the codebase with the system history, and the reading with the era that made it.

      Attribution:
    • allturtles #1
    • alistairSH #1
    • throwforfeds #1
    • joshgachnang #1
    • TacticalCoder #1
  6. 06

    Thickness is hidden reasoning, not more output

    A useful refinement was that thickness should not be confused with complexity, length, or ornate style. The better term points to the chain of decisions behind the artifact. That is why some people saw the same pattern in software, docs, and interface design. A tiny widget or a clean sentence can still be thick if every part is there for a reason and keeps making more sense the longer you inspect it.

    Do not measure substance by word count, feature count, or lines of code. Look for whether the decisions cohere and whether the work stays intelligible under repeated inspection.

      Attribution:
    • basilikum #1
    • dredmorbius #1
    • astatine #1
    • apsurd #1
  7. 07

    Exposure before understanding still has value

    Even people who hated literature classes often said the early encounter mattered later. The first pass may not produce appreciation, but it plants references, rhythms, and questions that only become useful years afterward. That makes the value of hard material partly delayed. The payoff is not always immediate comprehension. Sometimes it is future recognizability when life experience catches up.

    Do not judge every introduction by immediate enthusiasm. Early exposure can still be worth doing, but be honest that it is seed-planting and design the experience accordingly.

      Attribution:
    • locallost #1
    • pavel_lishin #1
    • yipinwong #1

Against the grain

  1. 01

    Canon and depth can be self-reinforcing myths

    A strong dissent argued that the essay blurs real depth with institutional habit. Teachers, libraries, and curricula keep recycling the same works, which can make survival look like proof of greatness when it may partly be path dependence. The same comment also pushed on literary analysis itself, saying the hunt for themes often rewards apophenia and unfalsifiable claims rather than genuine insight. That is a useful check on the whole thickness framework. Not every recurring motif is treasure.

    Treat longevity and consensus as evidence, not verdicts. When you claim a work or product has hidden depth, be specific about what repeated inspection actually reveals.

      Attribution:
    • janalsncm #1
  2. 02

    Readers can manufacture thickness themselves

    Another dissent said some of what gets called depth may really be a reader’s willingness to project significance onto a text. On this view, canonized works benefit from prestige and interpretive labor that could also be applied to schlock. That does not fully erase differences in craft, but it does challenge the comforting idea that value sits entirely inside the object waiting to be discovered.

    Watch for cases where your team is defending a weak artifact with increasingly elaborate interpretation. If the meaning only appears after heroic explanation, the problem may be the work, not the audience.

      Attribution:
    • Bratmon #1
    • recursive #1
  3. 03

    Some students were told this already

    A quieter pushback was that the failure is not always the teachers. Some people said they were in fact told that classics take patience and maturity, but as teenagers they simply could not hear it. That matters because it limits how much better framing can fix. Certain experiences really do need time before they become legible.

    Better onboarding helps, but it does not eliminate timing. Accept that some lessons will not land yet and build ways for people to come back later.

      Attribution:
    • cm2012 #1
    • nyeah #1
    • SamBam #1
  4. 04

    Human-made work may not beat slop by default

    The essay’s optimism about thickness as a defense against AI slop met skepticism from people who think cheap, shallow media is already winning in large markets. Microdramas and other disposable formats show that many audiences do not need thickness to engage. Human provenance may become a premium niche, not the default standard.

    Do not assume quality will automatically sort markets. If you are making careful work, plan for distribution and signaling, because a lot of buyers will choose convenience and speed.

      Attribution:
    • wxw #1
    • buredoranna #1
    • locallost #1

In plain english

AI slop ↩
A dismissive term for low-quality, mass-produced content generated with artificial intelligence.
apophenia ↩
The tendency to see meaningful patterns or connections in things that may not actually contain them.
open source ↩
Software whose source code is publicly available for people to inspect, modify, and share.

Reference links

Books, essays, and literary references

  • Against Interpretation
    Recommended as a companion essay about how art moves people and the limits of over-interpretation.
  • A Mathematician's Lament
    Cited as an analogy for how education can flatten a subject instead of revealing its beauty.
  • A Deepness in the Sky
    Mentioned as a science fiction novel with a related idea about art, language, and hidden social meaning.

Art and museum references

Performance and adaptation examples

Music and cultural references

Other referenced resources