"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
There is nothing there to engage in a "deep", rational manner. Are the guidelines supposed to protect "work" like that also? Should we spend time and energy carefully rebuffing every psychic, UFOlogist and astrologist, who is linked on HN, also? Or should we accept such articles as if they have something useful to contribute, just because someone took the time to write them?
The particular guideline that dang brought up makes a lot of sense. I don't understand why he applied it in this case, but as a guideline, it's sound and solid.
Then there's the actual human interaction. We suck at communicating; adding tools to improve communication would help the discussions stay calmer.
Finally, there's the in-group mentality where people who perceive themselves as the same will act nicer to each other and perceive threats less often. By increasing the ways people can relate to each other, their empathy toward each other increases, communication becomes more friendly, and people try to work together more often.
Big Brother's approach was to attack all three of these areas rather than just create laws and police. It seems that utopian societies are a bit like gardens; if you want them to look really pretty, you'll have to do a lot of pruning.
Calling them out is enough.
It's possible to put many of the scientifically validated insights of modern psychotherapy into language that would make a lot of empirically-minded people sneer. In fact there are people who have done exactly this in the past.
No post gratifies everyone's curiosity. When something fails to reach yours, please just find something more interesting to read. There are lots of choices on the front page and endlessly more at https://news.ycombinator.com/newest and https://news.ycombinator.com/front. Please don't rush in with shallow dismissals when something irritates you: that doesn't gratify intellectual curiosity. Worse, it leads to poor-quality discussion—so its signal-noise-lowering impact goes beyond just a single comment.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity_trial_of_Ulysses_in_...
Yes, Gurdjieff's pupils were famous artists and intellectuals of their time. It is striking, reading his wikipedia page, how much of it is devoted to the account of who joined his circle, who travelled with him when he moved, who left his circle, etc. There is as much focus on Gurdjieff's pupils as on Gurdjieff himself.
Still, that makes him a guru with famous pupils. In fact, he is probably still remembered today because he had such famous pupils; certainly not because of his teachings or any kind of personal contribution to knowledge.
He clearly must have been a charismatic figure to gather all those people around him. Nobody becomes a cult leader by being boring and bland! But, charisma and imagination are gifts squandered if they are spent cooking up some ad-hoc "path to enlightenment" with the only purpose of seducing people into becoming your faithful followers. It is exploitative to use one's gift to inspire, only to steal your "students" time, to force them to believe your every word, follow you around and practice your silly little "system" in hopes of becoming "enlightened"- to promise everything when you have nothing.
I also know well the impact that meeting such a man can have: one becomes bound to them, perhaps for life. Having once basked at the glow of the Master, you can check out but you can never leave. Like human opiates, they offer brief pleasure and take everything from you in return, holding you captive with false promises and empty dreams. It is not they who are fascinating. It's the tendency of the human mind to fall down holes, forever.
No account of Gurdjieff's life is complete if it does not put the fact of what he really was, left right and centre. Especially not if it detracts from that fact with such exhuberant praise as the article above.
Would you leave the same remark under a comment dismissing some flat-earther?
I still don't quite get why my comment broke that guideline. What would be a non-shallow dismissal of Gurjieff? I mean, give me an example here, because I'm a bit confused, really. The man had no "work" to dismiss, he was just full of hot air and making it up as he went along. What else can be said about him than the fact that he was a charlatan?
What, at the end of the day, is counter to HN guidelines about calling out cranks?