3 ms·
The myth of "The myth of the fast learner." Please don't post pseudoscience on HN.
by torstenvl 4y ago
The myth of "The myth of the fast learner."
Please don't post pseudoscience on HN.
- drewcoo 4y agoIt was a clickbait title, but I don't see how it was pseudoscience. Care to explain?
- dang 4y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- torstenvl 4y agoPseudoscience is when people use scientific-sounding words and phrases in non-scientific writing, particularly in support of a prescriptive belief system. That is what this is, and no rational person could argue otherwise. Could it have been explained with more specificity? Yes, as has been done above, admirably, by codeflo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35709930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35709930. But it is nowhere near shallow to call a spade a spade.
- dang 4y agoI'm not saying you're wrong about the paper, I'm saying that your comment was unsubstantive and broke the HN guidelines. Those are completely different points. The fact that another commenter posted a substantive explanation is admirable, but it would have been better to upvote that other comment and leave it at that. It's much better to post nothing than to post something unsubstantive/snarky/namecalling.
- torstenvl 4y ago> something unsubstantive/snarky/namecalling That is not remotely close to what happened. You may very well wish I had explained my comment further, but pseudoscience is an actual word with an actual, substantive meaning, and it is what I actually meant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoscience My comment was not shallow. It was not snarky. It was not namecalling. It was a succinct and accurate specific criticism.
- dang 4y agoSorry, but that's just not empirically accurate in terms of how these words get used in internet comments and the sort of effects they have on threads. If you sling pejoratives around like that without a substantive justification, that's name-calling and flamebait in the sense that we use those terms. This isn't some arbitrary whim of interpretation—it's based on a decade and a half of trying to dampen flamewars in this forum. Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that it was your intent to produce such effects. I'm sure it wasn't. But the rest of us don't have access to someone's intent, which forms part of the state in their head. You need to include enough information to communicate it explicitly, and the burden is on you (i.e. all of us) as a commenter to do that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=burden%20disambiguate%20by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
- torstenvl 4y agoYour interpretation doesn't render a specific and concrete word ambiguous. There is nothing to disambiguate. However, even if it were ambiguous, that does not mean I broke the guidelines, as you allege. Your unwritten rule about the burden of disambiguation is not part of those guidelines. If you're going to hold people to it, and claim they broke the guidelines when they fail to follow it, perhaps it ought to be.
- dang 4y agoYour GP comment definitely broke the site guidelines - at a minimum the ones asking commenters not to post shallow dismissals and not to call names. I know that's an interpretation, but it's one that's well within the standards that we've applied here for years and years. It's not a borderline call.
- lelanthran 4y agoDoesn't look like pseudoscience to me. What did I miss?