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Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, i

by rfrey 6y ago

Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them.

ardy42 6y ago
> Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them. That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempting/ http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal... > Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.) > But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.
- milesvp 6y ago
  That last paragraph was oddly hard for me to parse this morning, possibly because I havn’t thought enough about this aspect of confirmation bias. Be conciencious when dismissing something that’s inconsistent with your world view, seems like very good advice, at least if the source is credible.
ghufran_syed 6y ago
Ahh, that's helpful, thanks! I think I unconsciously strip out a lot of that tone when I read, but I can see how it would be unhelpful
irq11 6y ago
A bigger problem on HN these days is the highbrow lowbrow dismissal, wherein people come up with fancy-sounding reasons for rejecting comments, that are actually themselves lazy/incorrect arguments. For example: when the paper itself says that the cognitive declines seen in people who don’t spend time hospitalized are a small fraction of the magnitude of the cognitive declines seen in hospitalized patients (Figures 2, 3; in some cases a cognitive benefit is seen in mild cases), yet a comment observing that the effects are confined to a small population is dismissed for the reason that “professional medical researchers would have thought of that”.
- rfrey 6y ago
  I was specifically referring to the claim the effects were probably due to sedation, etc. , not the observation that the study was of hospitalized cases.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - irq11 6y ago
    So? The OP observed that the most severe effects were in a very small population of hospitalized patients. You fixated on a (plausible) hypothesis made that this could be due to sedation, and used it to reject the entire argument, even though the OP’s point is right, and your argument is a lowbrow dismissal that “experts would have thought of it”. By the way: as far as I can tell, the paper doesn’t discuss this issue anywhere.
    - rfrey 6y ago
      Given that nearly every one of your comments over the last 8 months had to do with denying Covid is an issue, claiming it is milder than the flu, or claiming that statistics about Covid are inflated and/or fabricated, I'd say the fervor of your response falls under the descriptor of "it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias".

by rfrey 6y ago

ardy42 6y ago

> Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them. That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too: http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissals-so-tempting/ http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal... > Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.) > But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.

milesvp 6y ago
That last paragraph was oddly hard for me to parse this morning, possibly because I havn’t thought enough about this aspect of confirmation bias. Be conciencious when dismissing something that’s inconsistent with your world view, seems like very good advice, at least if the source is credible.

ghufran_syed 6y ago

Ahh, that's helpful, thanks! I think I unconsciously strip out a lot of that tone when I read, but I can see how it would be unhelpful

irq11 6y ago

A bigger problem on HN these days is the highbrow lowbrow dismissal, wherein people come up with fancy-sounding reasons for rejecting comments, that are actually themselves lazy/incorrect arguments. For example: when the paper itself says that the cognitive declines seen in people who don’t spend time hospitalized are a small fraction of the magnitude of the cognitive declines seen in hospitalized patients (Figures 2, 3; in some cases a cognitive benefit is seen in mild cases), yet a comment observing that the effects are confined to a small population is dismissed for the reason that “professional medical researchers would have thought of that”.

rfrey 6y ago
I was specifically referring to the claim the effects were probably due to sedation, etc. , not the observation that the study was of hospitalized cases.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- irq11 6y ago
  So? The OP observed that the most severe effects were in a very small population of hospitalized patients. You fixated on a (plausible) hypothesis made that this could be due to sedation, and used it to reject the entire argument, even though the OP’s point is right, and your argument is a lowbrow dismissal that “experts would have thought of it”. By the way: as far as I can tell, the paper doesn’t discuss this issue anywhere.
  - rfrey 6y ago
    Given that nearly every one of your comments over the last 8 months had to do with denying Covid is an issue, claiming it is milder than the flu, or claiming that statistics about Covid are inflated and/or fabricated, I'd say the fervor of your response falls under the descriptor of "it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias".