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Comment by crispinb | Hacker News Reader

I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, Cory is probably mostly right on the specifics. On the other, Andreeson's article was so vapid and ignorant it's barely worth addressing. We only talk about it because the guy's a US ubermensch (a nation & class rapidly losing significance, to everyone's benefit). Yet here I am commenting too I suppose.

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Not properly refuting bad ideas let’s the bad idea spread.

First off, I agree.

But it's not practically feasible.

You can autogenerate bullshit, or manually do it with complete disregard for sourcing or legitimacy, but you can do neither for refutations.

I don't have a solution for this, but the old adage "truth prevails" is looking more and more dead.

We seem to live in an age where comprehensively refuted ideas readily gain adherents (not that I have an Age of Reason in mind to be particularly nostalgic about). There can be a fine line between useful refutation and promotion. A hard one to draw, I would accept.

Indeed it is so ignorant that I was amazed by the amount of upvotes the article received on HN.

Horrified and shocked. I’m deeply grateful for the technical discussions on HN. Which makes it all the harder to see such shortsighted views promulgated here.

Hacker News is - in large part - a promotional activity of a set of venture capitalists.

Naturally it attracts people (although not _only_ people) who want to suck up to venture capitalists, or who share the same hyper-capitalist mindset.

... roughly equivalent to people who can use words like 'hypergrowth' with a straight face.

If you haven't seen it, the HN summary/parody site n-gate[0] is excellent.

[0] http://n-gate.com/

I hadn't. Thanks, that's a little gem.

> a nation...rapidly losing significance, to everyone's benefit

If I may offer a prediction, and one totally meant in a spirit of friendship: that comment will not age well.

Well I've read enough over the years (Philip Tetlock springs to mind) to rarely be any more confident of my own predictions in the political sphere than anyone else's. Only time will tell!

As for the spirit of friendship, and just to be clear, I believe the US's declining significance, although having some distinctly ignoble proximate causes, will ultimately be of benefit to her own citizens also. I really meant 'everyone'.

Can someone expand on this? I found the article interesting, energetic and containing a strong and, to me, positive and useful message ("ask yourself what are you building?").

Yet parent calls it ignorant, of what? a sibling comment is "horrified" that the article gained so much attention here, although it seems to me that with it's focus on building stuff it's 100% on topic (which is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting").

As it's a little unsettling to me that other people find it horrifying that people like me found the article interesting, any details would be appreciated.

Marc's article was calling for things like building delivery drones and automating vaccines, which would be fantastic, but we're not living in a world where that's feasible right now. It was interesting, I agree, but as this response points out, there's more pressing matters right now like homelessness and internet access.

Have you read the article that you are commenting on? Because the very first paragraph starts explaining things that Andreeson appears to be ignorant of.

Yes, I have. "Every Western institution" is obviously an hyperbole, I wouldn't consider that ignorant. I started skimming the reply-article at some point, as it seemed to me like most nitpicks the author had might be correct, but missed the point of the original article. Reminding me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22854475.

(OT: 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that." ', from the HN guidelines)

OT: perhaps that guideline should be updated to say that when asking a question that appears to be entirely covered by the article under discussion, commenters should clarify that they have read and it, and explain why the article does not sufficiently answer the question. As it is, it's just a suggestion to be more passive aggressive - those two examples convey exactly the same thing except in the second one, you pretend that you are not accusing the commenter of not reading it. For example here, my response could have been "The very first paragraph says that." Would you have interpreted that differently in any way?

I'm really reluctant to say any more about this particular dead duck, but the ignorance and vapidity go hand-in-hand. The notion that we just apolitically need to 'want' the right things is risibly divorced from the reality of the complex, historical, political world we live in. It's a marketing slogan, not an analysis. "Just do it!", coming straight out of the world of the magical thinking books that so often dominate management & business categories. It pretends we're all hyper-individualist point-form existentialist entrepreneurs without history or culture or politics or .. anything much really.

The details, such as they are, are too flimsy to be worth addressing in detail. It's all too dreary - the tired conflation of the 'West' with one large outlier nation, the endless shrill calls on public provision advocates to demonstrate what's been amply demonstrated for decades, etc etc etc.

I truly make efforts to not be crudely incendiary about matters of importance. I do fail more often than I'd like because the issues matter and evoke strong reactions. But I'm not even going to try in the case of an article so flatly stupid. It merits only dismissal, and has already had more attention than it deserves. Over and out.

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