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Comment by akanet | Hacker News Reader

Why? Its prominence.

Do you admit it has advantages over the alternatives? It sure doesn't sound like that in the article, where all you do is bash the company, without mentioning how it is an improvement.

Exactly ^, Lambda has gotten a lot of mindshare quickly, based on some provable misrepresentations. That’s not good for either bootcamps or startup ecosystem generally.

"How do you propose that people learn these skills- or learn if they are capable of achieving these skills?"

Is that too difficult to answer for you?

There might not be a good answer, but that doesn't make the existing attempts good. That argument is the same logic I could use to say "Why did you criticize their plan of hitting people in the head as treatment for stage IV cancer if you haven't got a better proposal?"

Can you explain in what sense people voluntarily signing up for an educational course that they only have to pay for if they make a solid living within 5 years is the equivalent of hitting terminal cancer patients in the head?

Well, I can try. So, are you familiar with the general construction "A is to B what C is to D"? If you're American, you might have seen these analogy questions on the SAT.

Yes, I understand what that kind of comparison is, but you haven’t substantiated it.

It’s a pretty horrible analogy - demeaning to cancer patients aside from anything else, and seems to seek to tarnish a seemingly well-intentioned business by linking it to something awful, without any basis.

I don’t suggest the company is beyond criticism or without a need to improve; it’s still a fairly new company after all.

Demeaning to cancer patients? Huh. I thought I was writing out a really incredibly obviously clear instance of "if a thing is bad, you cannot criticize it unless you provide an alternative - if you cannot provide a better option, then the thing must not be bad". I didn't realize I needed to scaffold this so much for people to actually focus on the logic being criticized and not get hung up on "but this thing isn't bad!?@!??!" How would you have presented it? Or, do you think it's not actually possible in this context to explain why that construction is illogical without upsetting people who like the school?

Anyone who is committed to serious enquiry and good-faith discussion understands that there is a very large class of things that might seem bad at first glance, but turn out not to be so bad, or indeed quite good, when compared against the available alternatives.

This class of things includes pretty much anything that's really important in the world - including economic systems, government policies, human behaviours, and, yes, companies, including ones that offer deferred payment for education that can lead to higher incomes and better standards of living for the customer.

You're clearly intelligent enough to know this but are poisoning the debate by making a comparison with something that is horrible but not at all comparable.

What the hell. Obviously I know that many things are maybe not bad. That's why I picked an example where people would not argue about whether it was bad in order to demonstrate the logical point.

It is clear that I not only didn't get my point across but that people don't even believe that the point existed, and I miscommunicated so badly that you're not even willing to believe that I was ever arguing in good faith. Fuck this.

It's more like, these guys are offering a plan where you get treatment for stage IV cancer and you only have to pay if it works. The other options require you or someone else to pay huge amounts up front, regardless of outcome, and are no better at getting results.

I wasn't commenting on whether it works. I was showing that his objection to criticism that didn't include a suggested better alternative was illogical.

It wasn't just criticism without an alternative. It was saying, this thing is bad, don't use it. If the other things are worse, you still have to use it. This is why your analogy was ineffective, because you used a thing that was obvious worse than the other approaches.

People need to learn things. If funding education through an ISV is the best way to do that, then they should do that, even if there are problems with it. What the article really seemed to be implying was that they shouldn't do it that way, that there was something wrong with it, which justified an extremely negative view of the company, and leaves people with no option to learn to code without large upfront costs or loans to pay back if they are unsuccessful.

Describing the very best option in purely negative terms is misleading.

If you are telling people to stop doing a thing with a x% chance of working, but the other options have a lower chance of working, you are effectively saying don't do the thing at all.

You are assuming here that you and the speaker have a shared belief that this way to accomplish the thing has a chance of working and is worth doing in the absence of alternatives (or that it is obviously better than alternatives). That is almost certainly a false assumption when someone tells you "don't do that thing". Instead of continuing to hold those assumptions, you should either ignore their opinion altogether or attempt to find out which of those beliefs you don't share.

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