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It's not. He's directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs. In the title, the autho
by smallgovt 7y ago
It's not. He's directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs.
In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all ex-post startup advice is BS. The commenter is debunking that claim by providing sound ex-post advice.
- neilv 7y ago> directly refuting the claim made in the title of the blog post. That is: Most [...] In the title, the author is seemingly making the claim that all [...]
- CrazyStat 7y agoVery clever, but missing the point. Those two qualifiers refer to different classes: (1) Most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs. (2) All ex-post startup theory is bullshit. Those claims may or may not be true, but there's no contradiction between the two. The title does indeed seem to implicitly claim (2), in the form of the following (implied) syllogism: Most startup theory is ex-post. All ex-post startup theory is bullshit. Therefore, most startup theory is bullshit. Or, more concisely: most startup theory is ex-post, therefore bs.
- shafyy 7y agoOk come on guys. Obviously, tax law advice that is ex-post is not bs. Law advice is ex-post per definition, because the law needs to be written first. That's not what the post is about.
- ralmeida 7y agoI think you did a fine post but a wrong generalization. The advice you mentioned is bad because it's not generalizable and possibly not reproducible, but IMO claiming that the advice being ex post is the cause of that was a stretch.
- s3cur3 7y agoA more generous interpretation of the article’s claim interprets “BS” to not necessarily mean it is false. For instance, if I were to speak condescendingly on a topic I know nothing at all about, I might (unbeknownst to me) actually say some true things... but most people would consider this BS regardless (both the false and the incidentally true things). This common-sense interpretation of BS agrees with epistemologists’ definitions of “knowledge”—they invariably define it in such a way that a belief must not only be true, but also true for the right kinds of reasons, to count as knowledge (though there is a lot of disagreement about what those right sorts of reasons are). See for instance the “justified true belief” definition and its critics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/