Is Sam Sethi a nut job ? Also no clue.
Is Dvorak a troll ? Again, it doesn't register, he might be.
What I do know is that "Is X a Y ?" where 'X' is the name of some guy that's in the public eye and Y some hyperbolic term (preferably derogatory) will get immediate traction.
Your basic complaint is that concise and sharp headlines do better than detailed, dull ones? Welcome to humanity.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771303
For the record, I think Doug Engelbart is an absolutely amazing visionary and a person to who we all owe more than we probably are aware of.
You're annoyed that sharp rather than nice fluffy headlines work. You know what I'm annoyed about? How pointless meta-whining like this floats to the top. I was looking forward to hearing from some finance savvy types.
To call people names in order to attract attention to your 'prose' (I use the word lightly) is a pretty low tactic.
It's false advertising just the same, because X really isn't a crank or X would be spending his time in an institution with rubber walls.
Disagreement does not have to be expressed in such terms.
It's been the "meme" in far more than HN headlines for years, though.
Coming up, are swing sets potentially hazardous for your children? That and more, after the break.
Even though we all know what the "answer" is, the fact that it's phrased as a question activates some stupid part of our lizard brains that will keep us glued to the tube.
That is true.
But I'd hope for HN to be populated by people that have a larger part of their brain switched on than the 'lizards' portion of it and a glut in this type of titles in the last week or so is what prompted my post.