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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity, what do people think the social version of this?

I've noticed that certain people can say nearly anything and people will gush all over it, even when it's clearly foolish or someone else said the same thing just 10 minutes previous.

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Essentially any extremely wealthy person can pontificate on a topic and be taken seriously, even if they have zero background in the topic and their opinion is easily dismissed by those with knowledge of the field.

That's what happens when you make financial success equivalent to wisdom.

Also see: HiPPO

https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/HiPPOs-highest-paid...

I generally find that just about every "What Worked For Me" success essay gets praise and careful parsing. We seem to think that success is a product of either being or doing the right type of thing rather than luck. We seem to think advice is universal enough to apply to everyone rather than being highly contingent. I am suspicious of both.

Case study: a certain pg essay and recent discussion on HN. ducks

If you want to criticize an essay/oppinion to make a point, just refer to it by name and state why you think it supports the argument you're trying to make

That's dangerous to do here when the essay in question is written by someone with a massive cult following.

What's is dangerous about it?

That's not always necessary, and it's a good way to get dragged down into quibbling. The GP rings true to me, even though I'm not sure precisely which of the PG essays they most had in mind.

They could at least state which essay so its not just randomly out of the blue

This was just a little swipe, I didn’t intend to go deep into it, and actually planned to delete the comment after a few minutes. Of course that plan was foiled by your reply.

As an example, PG's "submarine" essay gets cited here all the time as amazing insightful when all it does is talk about basic concepts of PR, an industry that is hundreds of years old.

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