4 ms·
I'll give a short explanation as to why I flagged this: This piece irrationally pisses me off, for purely petty social dynamics reasons. 1) There's a first-mo
by natural219 11y ago
I'll give a short explanation as to why I flagged this:
This piece irrationally pisses me off, for purely petty social dynamics reasons.
1) There's a first-mover advantage to thinkpiece responses. Everyone obviously is going to read the first response, many people are probably writing responses of their own. This seems like a quick way to jump into a discussion and say "hey, look at me!" You better have something useful to say.
2) It's just a really poorly thought out response. It rehashes basically the same points everybody knows, adding zero new information or insight, without responding to the meat of what Paul's saying.
3) There was a time when I sincerely believed Hacker News was the one place to go to escape from petty thinkpiece nonsense. It continues to sadden me to see this community in decline. PG should start another website.
- gph 11y agoI'll give a short explanation as to why I downvoted this: This is about as obnoxious of a comment that could ever exist.
- cryoshon 11y agoI'll admit that I read PG's piece coincidentally when it was just posted and formed my article shortly after, but I'd have been writing something else ("thinkpiece") around that period of time anyway if I hadn't come across it. I've wanted to start writing about economic inequality for quite some time, and this was a convenient stepping off point. I take issue with #2, though: if everyone knows those points, why did PG fail to address them adequately in his original piece? The data supporting my perspective are quite compelling and not yet disproven. I'll agree my piece isn't insightful: I considered it a diligence to reply point by point (by the book, perhaps) specifically because influential people cannot go unchallenged when they make faulty arguments.