An Observation about News.YC | Hacker News Reader

An Observation about News.YC

7 pointsmyoung86 comments

In too many threads on news.yc someone points out a pattern only to have someone else refute it based on perosnal experiences.

I just want to point out that this is flawed logic!

It's not quite as simple as "don't make generalizations" (although many would do well to remember that). Danah boyd really crystallized this in one of her blog posts by pointing out that patterns are just that, patterns. There will always be exceptions (and maybe you are one of them), but exceptions and patterns are not mutually exclusive. Duh, right?

If it's so obvious, why do so many people craft their arguments this way? Just check out the comments in the post about how to find a co-founder for non-techies.

Maybe they just want to foster discussion, but it seems to me that we would get a lot more out of the forum if people qualified/quantified their comments.

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Not all threads here seek answers. Some seek data.

Counterexamples don't refute a pattern, but they often elaborate on it. After all, the original pattern is often derived from a series of examples itself. For people that are looking to draw their own conclusions (which is most of us, right? I'd hate to think that my or anyone else's contributions here are taken as gospel truth), this is invaluable. "Quit your day job" hides a lot of complexity. "I had this crazy idea for a suborbital flight startup while I was getting drunk with my chimney-sweeper, and we quit our day jobs, took on $100K of debt, then failed miserably when nobody would buy our flying broomstick" is a lot more useful, because then you can judge whether your situation is like the unfortunate chimney-sweep and decide accordingly.

Based on my personal experience, I have to say you are completely wrong :)

I think given personalities, different solution sets are viable. A charismatic person might bet more heavily on their charisma and ability to sell something, while a technical person might assume a "build it and they will come" strategy.

Both are viable and both can be write just a bit; but what if a charismatic person could also build something, or a hacker could actually sell something?

I love seeing all of the different opinions on YC.NEWS.

If each of us was aware of all the personal experiences of other people here on the site, then maybe we could make more qualified statements. I for one, don't know any of the rest of you in person, so all I can offer are my experiences.

If enough people offer personal experiences, the reader should be able to extract his own pattern from them (that is, after all, what we humans are good at). Just because we are offering raw data (in the form of personal experience) instead of analyzed data (in the form of qualified statements), doesn't make the data any less true (but probably a bit less insightful).

I agree that one person's experience doesn't disprove another persons research about the overall pattern, but nor is the experience completely useless.

Typically when someone points out a "pattern" on yc, it's also just mainly based on their own personal experience... instead of say research that spans companies or even regions.

Ofcourse it's possible someone could prove me wrong with several examples...

I believe there are several problems with the premise of your question:

1) It assumes that the poster has described the entire problem. Due to the nature of printed material, things like background, emotions, personality, etc many times are not conveyed completely. Most questions are woefully under-detailed. Most times you are answering what you _think_ the person really asked.

2) It assumes that there is a generalization or rule that the question falls under. Things like "Do I like ice cream?" don't have any kind of generalization to have exceptions from. Not everything is quantitative.

3) It assumes that only one set of patterns can be determined from the same initial data. Many times, multiple patterns apply to the same data.

4) It's not the way people communicate. People are not logicians.When you are a kid and touch a hot stove, your mom didn't give you the formulae for thermodynamics. She probably said something like "Don't do that!" As you got older and our problems got more complicated, the stories got more elaborate. But they were always stories. This is because people naturally communicate by anecdote, something anthropologists have been observing for decades. An anecdote is always true -- but more specific theories and generalizations suffer from 1-3 above.

I admire your quest for certainty. I was that way myself back when I was younger, that is, until I realized -- -yikes! I'm doing it! See what I mean? It's everywhere.

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