Why are middlebrow dismissals so tempting? (2015)

>If you can tell a new company is obviously flawed, congratulations! You don’t have a useful opinion. Only when you can articulate why a reasonable person would have built the company that way, and what that reasonable person is missing, can you escape the Curse of the Middlebrow.

Merely saying "a new company is obviously flawed" you'd be right most of the time. Which must be something, right? Being right most of the time sounds like a good quality - and dismissing things that are failing 99.9% of the time is also a good default.

This critique on middlebrow dismissals misses that they're not supposed to be "construcive criticism" (which is what it laments they lack), they're supposed to be summarily judgements. Hey, it's even in the name you gave them.

It also cherry-picks the ultra-rare cases where they are wrong, like when a startup ended up worth billions. What about the majority of cases they didn't go anywhere, and the middlebrow critique was right? This is not a stopped watch which is right "twice a day". This is more like a watch that is right most of the time and shows the wrong time only for a few seconds per day.