Comment by tansey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tansey | Hacker News Reader

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> Good grief, it's so lame it's almost trolling.

Because it is trolling. HN is reading, upvoting, and commenting on an economics essay by someone who studied "Fine Arts" at the "School of Visual Arts" in NY and now works at "CYCLE Interactive" as a designer. The author hand waves about the 80/20 rule as if discussing things using their own common sense is equivalent to mathematical rigor or scientific evidence. It's simply a link-bait headline that evokes a response from a large portion of the users on HN.

Honestly, it's disturbing how many red flags there are in this article and yet it makes the front page of HN.

Everyone's half-baked opinion is not equal. The way I feel every time I watch a movie where a machine spontaneously "comes alive", and then have to listen to people talk about "what if it really happened", must be similar to how economists feel every day. No wonder it's the dismal science.

Ignore an idea/essay/whatever because the author doesn't have a college degree in the area?

Actually i think HN has just taken down the article on its merits, i.e. that it has none.

What remains a mystery is why this was upvoted in the first place.

It's upvoted because, after people post a comment utterly destroying it, they want their comment's unique wisdom and intelligence to be visible to others. Even (maybe, especially) when the original article is garbage.

It's a perverse incentive problem in social news.

Well, i will add that the major determinant for whether an article stays on the front page is whether there is an active discussion.

So the more chatter there is, the longer it stays on the homepage. The longer it stays on the home page, the more people upboat it without reading the post or the comments.

But that's me retreating to the study of aggregate behavior. sigh

Because it's interesting. I usually read the comments and not the article.

I've almost gotten to the point where I don't read the comments. Quality has (subjectively) been declining over the last couple of years.

Genetic Fallacy?

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