To write non-fiction, draw the trunk, then the rest of the tree

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.

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.

>In history I noticed that articles tended to be introduced with some narrative that illustrated the central idea, then consolidated it through arguments that were in turn exemplified by historical facts and narrative, in order to end up explicitly stating the conclusion at the end. (This is a huge simplification but you get the idea). So for my essays I followed the same structure that the required reading had. That way I made sure that professors would like the style and pace.

The author was able to pass courses although the prof’s hated him thank to his skills as a writer and his style, which later allowed him to proceed to data engineering. The trunk here is explaining how he writes.

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.

"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."