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The Morgen Housel posts always get on the front page of HN and they are always full of pablum. You can take anything he says and turn it around, say the exact o
by soniman 6y ago
The Morgen Housel posts always get on the front page of HN and they are always full of pablum. You can take anything he says and turn it around, say the exact opposite, and it would also make you nod your head. For instance "Important things rarely have one cause." Or you could say "Important things usually have one cause." The pandemic has one cause, the virus. Or "People believe what they want to believe" is literally a tautology. Or "progress requires optimism and pessimism" could be turned into "progress requires blind optimism" which would be equally true. Finally, I don't think Morgen Housel exists. Look at his photo, it's obviously generated by an AI, as are his tripe-filled posts.
- johnr2 6y ago> tripe-filled posts I enjoyed the article and found it thought provoking. Maybe I have tripe for brains.
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- sbdmmg 6y agoVery much agree. I prefer"The Lessons of History" by Durant [1], more focused and less "fluffy" IMHO. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lessons_of_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lessons_of_History
- TT3351 6y agoI would reach a different conclusion than you based on the flaws you identified, namely that argumentation and language is a flexible instrument in the first place. If I was reading a (peer reviewed) history text and the author suggested something like the Great Depression had one cause, frankly I would put the book down.
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- soniman 6y agoAccording to Wikipedia the most famous book on the depression, Friedman and Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960 offers a single cause for the great depression, falling money supply. That might be right or wrong, I don't know. But I know that Housel's "it was a lot of things" is lazy thinking that sounds like wisdom.
- borroka 6y agoHe is the narrative fallacy made human. And the fact that so many people enthusiastically support his platitudes is truly a sign of the intellectual barren that the current social-media era is.