Yeah. I love HN and many of the thoughts expressed on it, but if there's one thing that always jumps out at me as being an incredibly widely held cognitive bias in the tech community, it's a tendency to view certain things in a very black and white, binary fashion, and to treat certain very complicated, messy problems with lots of social nuances as if they were simple problems, if only everyone could be rational about it. Grades and hiring are obvious examples, but you can also see plenty of it in discussions about open source business models and codes of conduct and copyright and so on.

Throughout my life and career I've seen so many statements of this nature from my peers: "the status quo will only ever be a 90% solution at best, therefore we should throw all of that away and just do everything on a case-by-case basis in isolation from one another, then we'd all live in an ideal meritocracy (or something)".

See also any discussion about flat management. "Explicit management hierarchies obviously aren't perfect, therefore let's get rid of them altogether and assume that everyone is awesome and will magically self-organize and do the right thing."

I guess the common theme is, someone is greatly overestimating their own rationality, and projects it onto other people, and ends up with an almost religious faith in the self-organizing competencies of unmanaged people, or the natural inclination of unregulated schools or industries to always do the right thing even when it's not in their own self-interest.

IME there are lots of fundamentally messy or imperfect things in life, where any choice you make has negative consequences. There's also a personality type that is repelled by this sort of messiness and will always be drawn towards throwing everything away and starting from scratch, often with a childlike belief that things they don't understand aren't important, and why can't everyone see how obvious and elegant their solution is? IME they're usually wrong about those situations, but I guess I'm still glad people less pessimistic than I am are tilting at those windmills.