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Comment by nelsonic | Hacker News Reader

Totally agree! Peer review is the only valid feedback in many situations. You don’t see many ultra-successful serial entrepreneurs doubting on Elon! You see many of them driving Teslas.

As someone who has been in the kitchen since childhood, I can appreciate how difficult great food is to create! If I taste something inferior I’m going to be specific with my feedback for improvement, highlighting the good points not just focus on the negatives.

Drives me nuts when at a restaurant with friends/family who haven’t put in the time in the kitchen and couldn’t hope to create a delicious meal dissing the food … if you can’t make something better, either shut up or try to be helpful with your feedback! Being critical is so easy and cliché.

The world needs more optimistic Elons not more doubters.

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Although I think it’s always kind to be polite and constructive with feedback, I totally disagree that you have to be as capable a cook as the chef to critique their food.

You don’t have to be a culinary wizard to tell when many foods are overcooked, underseasoned, etc. Sometimes chefs just screw up and a dish has outright unpleasant qualities.

Most people have hundreds or thousands of points of comparison for high-quality food even if they can’t make it themselves. If a restaurant bills itself as high-quality and then doesn’t live up to that standard I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say so.

Is peer review more valuable? Probably. But most restaurant guests aren’t chefs so pleasing non-chefs is valuable too.

I can't make a cell phone, so if my new cell phone constantly drops calls I'm not allowed to say it's a bad cell phone?

You can, because your feedback is constructive and specific.

If you said "idk, this phone just sucks, because i feel like it does and idk how it could be made better", that would fall under "useless complaints". But saying "my phone drops calls often" is a specific complaint with a very specific (implied) improvement suggestion ("make phone not drop calls").

So the cooking thing would be totally valid if the person just said "It was too salty?", allowing the relatively uneducated/unskilled to make claims about quality even though they could never reproduce it? That's not how the original claim was framed.

I agree thay even with "it was too salty", it could be entirely baseless. However, "it was too salty" is still infinitely better than "idk it isnt good". Even if "it was too salty" was incorrect. But that is purely a personal opinion, and imo there is nothing that can substantiate it much.

> Totally agree!

Um, your response is not agreement.

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