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Comment by klochner | Hacker News Reader

It's an odd format - the results of author pontification presented as "mini-research".

I found little to no hard data, little to no justification for the conclusions reached, and as a bonus, this was one of those rare cases when you can correctly say that the author was begging the question.

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Also, dilemma is not what author thinks it means.

You don't always need hard data to prove a point. I could relate to this article from my personal experience. Smart people tend to be harsh on themselves and on their solutions.

The "most smart people" part could be revised to something else so it doesn't seem like the conclusion was from hard data.

Actually, you do need either hard data or some kind of logical argument to prove a point.

The author of this post makes an assertion (smart people can't solve their own problems), but never proves that assertion, nor does he give any reasoned argument as to why it may be true.

A better title for the post (though the author probably likes the current link-bait title) would be:

   "Why other people's problems may be easier to solve than your own"

According to your title, you are trying to say that, Every person can solve every other person's problem. But not his own problem. That may not be true and that is not what author is trying to say.

He is talking about the (smart) people who can solve other's problem. But not about all the people.

Thanks for the clarification. Looking at the discussion here itself is a validation for the article at some level. It is a simple article presenting conclusions from a series of interviews with reasonably smart people.

The conclusions are being over-analyzed which is the characteristic of very smart people. HN is a community of such smart people and I am not at all surprised that it is being over-analyzed here :)

Cheers.

Here what he says in the blog post, "It is one thing if they don’t have capacity to solve those problems – we are not talking about that category of people. We are talking about people who have demonstrated that they can solve those problems when they are presented by other people."

OK the term "mini-research" refers to research done in less than six weeks and the method used was a series of interviews. I am not selling the research data only presenting the conclusions from the research.

You are welcome to make your own conclusions of course :)

Then you should explain how you're drawing your conclusions.

What I'd like to see in the post (and is missing):

  - what motivated this "mini-research"
  - how you verified that the problem exists
  - how you got to the cause of this problem

Yes of course. Your questions are valid. I will add more context to it soon. For a quick summary:

a) Ongoing mini-research is part of my next book which will come out only next year or the year after. b) The intermediate findings are being written as short blog posts as people don't have time to read long ones. c) How I know the problem exists - it comes out during my interviews and discussions. The focus of the research is centered around smart people. I am not going to interview people with pre-conceived notions about certain problems existing or non-existing.

Having said that, your points are valid and I plan to include responses to that and more in the final version of the book. It is too much to add to the blog posts.

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