That’s interesting. I wasn’t aware of the Thoreau-Emerson debate. I have to say, I am on the side of Emerson.

There is a classic computer text from Edsger Dijkstra (I believe it is “A Discipline of Programming”, but I am not certain) where he says something like “if you find this hard to read it is because the concepts are difficult”. In fact, they are not that hard, as many other authors have taken his ideas and made them accessible. But Dijkstra’s writing style verges on the impenetrable so I am very grateful for those who took his brilliant insights and made the digestible for ordinary mortals such as me.

Similarly, the book “Systems Architecting” by Eberhard Rechtin is almost unreadable, but the jointly authored “The Art of Systems Architecting” by Rechtin and Meier is much easier to understand.

I am also reminded of an anecdote by Michael Jackson (the computer scientist, not the singer or writer on beer) about a company where all the honours in programming went to “George”, who famously solved difficult problems with difficult code that nobody else could understand. Sometimes when George was not available they asked “Jane” to solve a problem. She did and amazingly it nearly always turned out to be much simpler than at first sight. Strangely, the company didn’t take the obvious lesson.

As a general rule, if somebody makes something seem difficult, ask yourself if it is really difficult (some things truly are) or if the person presenting either cannot or will not express it in a simpler way. I’m not sure if Peterson is a cannot or will not, though I veer towards the latter.