&gt;Citation needed. Like, really.<p>I&#x27;m of two minds about this. This is an excellent piece of writing and is extremely persuasive and accomplishes all of it&#x27;s intended goals. This is very effective writing and may change someone&#x27;s opinion from emotional calls. It&#x27;s very human, easy to understand and people flock to it.<p>However; we have seen the constant and repeated abuse of using this style of writing. Advertisements are the most prominent and politics the most dystopian. It&#x27;s also very easy to convince people that certain things are facts when that may be disputed or outright wrong.<p>So there&#x27;s a weird question to come out of this: how accurate and cited do we really need our emotional appeals to be? Given the effectiveness of the writing, citations seem completely unnecessary. Given the context (letter to child; although I&#x27;m fairly certain it was orignially intended for a broader audience this is what they claim) you would assume it has no need to be entirely factual, but that context is changed now that it&#x27;s become a public letter. A public piece of writing should ethically cite or have some backing for any statistics they claim (in my opinion). Although overall hacker news&#x27; culture would probably say that if you make a decision, it should probably be based on real data.<p>Personally, I think it&#x27;s a piece of writing meant for a wide audience which in my opinion means they should cite any claims they make in this case. It&#x27;s easy to mistake it for something else entirely because of how it&#x27;s written, which is why it appears to get a pass.