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You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

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Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

#11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In my opinion, it's relevant to Card's credibility. If he shows poor judgement in one area, why would I want to listen to his opinion on something else, even something which is considered to be in his wheelhouse? Poor judgement is poor judgement.

Everyone shows poor judgement in one area.

It sucks that he has those ideas, but he's a good writer.

Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

#12

[flagged]

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

it did not make me wish to engage in political or ideological battle, i found it an interesting reflection of a complicated person's thought process. So, any battling is on you (you no doubt have a lot of company: "don't you dare feed us raw meat, we'll jump up and down in our cages and spill the poop buckets")

Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, it's relevant to Card's credibility. If he shows poor judgement in one area, why would I want to listen to his opinion on something else, even something which is considered to be in his wheelhouse? Poor judgement is poor judgement.

Everyone shows poor judgement in one area. It sucks that he has those ideas, but he's a good writer.

He's a popular writer, but hardly good. No one is going to be reading his books in 50 years, let alone 200.

Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

#17
post #13

This is a great blog post and very sound advice. I, however, miss twitter's "twitterness". 140 characters and a link.

I am not sure how this is "sound advice".

Maybe in this case the editor's comments were not helpful, and maybe OP is right for that. I do not see how this generalises to a rule "do not take advice from editors that reject your manuscripts".

For one, in scientific publications, when you get rejected based on reviewers' comments, chances are if you send the manuscript to another journal the article will be sent to the same reviewers, and if unchanged will be rejected again. Not taking advice into account, as a general rule, sounds like very bad advice.

Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

#18
As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it.

"It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.

If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.

Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

#19

[flagged]

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don’t like when people use this without all the important context. Showing other quotes from the same person that is giving subjective advice on topics, lends to curiosity around how to filter their advice.

> It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter. > > I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here: > > https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373246

Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts

#20
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone shows poor judgement in one area. It sucks that he has those ideas, but he's a good writer.

He's a popular writer, but hardly good. No one is going to be reading his books in 50 years, let alone 200.

That's an extremely high bar. But to the extent that critics and awards are the metric we have, he is an objectively good writer.
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