Hacker News Reader

Nice post, but he loses sympathy with me for shaming that guy.

Normally I would agree, but it should be noted that Lubos is a major asshole, and deserves every bit of shaming he gets. He's easily in the top 3 biggest assholes I've had to deal with in my academic career, and that's saying something.

He has it all: extreme levels of arrogance, narcissism, pedantry, absolute lack of empathy, extreme aggressivity. He is also a notable science denialist: climate change denier, evolution denier...

Could be. But how difficult is it to just ignore him, or if there is such an urge, write in a way that subtly addresses him while other readers have no clue of what is going on, or use phrases such as "some people say ..."? Plenty of good options, if you ask me.

You're missing the history where Lubos was spamming Aaron's other articles on these topics with all of the claims that Aaron deconstructs in this post. Readers of Aaron's blog were rightly confused about what to think. This post is the proper response to help your readers make sense of this.

"Scott", or "Aaronson", but not "Aaron".

Nothing wrong with politely pushing back against assholes. We should not tolerate behavior like Lubos' in civilized society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com