6 ms·

Author here. First, I did say, but perhaps not strong enough, that I include myself in the list of people who do not what they are talking about (or, more prop

by lbrandy 18y ago

Author here. First, I did say, but perhaps not strong enough, that I include myself in the list of people who do not what they are talking about (or, more properly, in the group of people that do not have strong opinions). I’ve done a fair bit of reading on topics like the Federal Reserve and money creation, like any good amateur, and the only thing I know for certain is that it’s insanely complex. More importantly, however, you've missed my point. Nowhere did I want to claim that you shouldn't have opinions, beliefs, or the desire to argue about topics you are interested in, even as an amateur. "Its complicated, trust us" is not my point. It's missed my point by a wide margin. My point is that bringing a false sense of expertise, or authority to the issue makes the discussions worthless and turns them into flamewars. People in online discussions want to pretend they are experts in macroeconomic theory. That makes them defensive and emotional. That makes the discussions uninteresting.

Tichy 18y ago
Can you point to any negative examples of such discussions? No doubt the web is full of stupid discussions, but I mean specifically on geek sites like HN?
- lbrandy 18y ago
  Alright, at the bottom of this thread is a downmodded discussions about macroeconomics (started by someone who read only the last paragraph of my post and decided to argue with me about my facetious assertions). Last week, there was a post here about the youtube video "money as debt" that ended up getting killed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461720 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461720 Equally, you could peruse Reddit (espsecially, say, politics). I don't know about digg, because I stopped going there for awhile, but it was as bad as reddit is now. Now, you could argue that these discussions are all fairly above board, with none of the emotion-laden rhetoric that I appear to see. I'd disagree though but we can leave that as a matter of perspective. I think there is an -obvious- tonal difference in matters of economics (or politics, or religion) versus other topics.
  - Tichy 18y ago
    Thanks for the examples. I must admit that the tonal difference is not so obvious to me, at least not in the example from this thread. I am trying to think about some topics that might be less "heated"? Startups? Nutrition?
- redrobot5050 18y ago
  For a list of intelligent discussions that quickly go libertarian apeshit, merely find any Reddit.com/r/politics or reddit.com/r/economics dicussion regarding the bank bailout or the Obama-planned economic stimulus (which, according to some dicussions has already failed, will never work, or is proof that non-libertarian governments are inherently socialist.)
  - llimllib 18y ago
    To be fair, that same discussion will also claim that the need for the bailout is proof that libertarianism has already failed, that Milton Friedman was the dictator of Chile and that the infallible analogy to today's ciris is a babysitting club.
timr 18y ago
Well said. I think it's funny that he accused you of an ad hominem, when his whole argument is a dressed-up variant of "I don't trust the bastards, therefore, I assume that they're wrong." You're saying something relatively uncontroversial, logical and restrained; he's arguing from little other than a base sense of mistrust. Alas, once again, the comment questioning the value of the experts' knowledge is the top-rated one in a thread. If you ask me, the biggest threat to HN's discussion quality is the anti-intellectual tendencies of many of the loudest voices.
- falsestprophet 18y ago
  I think it is pretty silly to call skepticism and empiricism anti-intellectual. Those, rather, define intellectualism. I would describe my post as anti-pseudo-intellectualism. Whatever the author of this post meant, it reads like a classic appeal to authority (this, the late Carl Sagan taught us, is a dangerous form of anti-intellectualism). I wrote primarily to defend those laymen that spend a little time thinking and writing and talking about macroeconomics or psychology or any other soft science. Why let everyone have their say? Because, the standards in the soft sciences are materially hardly different than in a reddit-flame war anyway. It is intellectually dishonest to hold soft scientists to no standards at all and, in the next breath, bemoan laymen for doing the save very things. Last semester, I read through the entire literature on interest rates in England in the industrial revolution. I found it could very well have been a reddit thread (although with much more fetching typography); it was uncivil and lacked any hope of scientific resolution. As far as I have read, most other macroeconomics literature is no better. (Check out the Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review if you can.) I think that partitioners in those fields forfeit the right to be snooty about lay opinion when their opinions are no more scientifically substantiated. Let me be clear. My standards for the hard sciences are different. When there is hope of empirical resolution one must work very carefully in that framework. For instance, I feel pretty comfortable saying young-earth creationists are loony. But maybe because I spend most of my day working on actual science, I am being too snooty myself.
  - lbrandy 18y ago
    I think you'd be hard pressed to actually make the case that my post represents an appeal to authority. I've read it again and again and the only way I can see that interpretation is if someone didn't actually bother to read it fully. Either literally, in the sense that they skipped parts, or figuratively, in that they already heard what they wanted to hear and the words weren't actually being processed in the brain. And considering all of this high-minded intellectualism, maybe we need to go back to step one: hearing what the other person is saying so we don't argue with phantoms. So while I appreciate the impassioned defense of the laymen, I could do without both the strawmen and the rampant ad hominem. Normally, I wouldn't get so formal, but it seems to be your thing.
tolmasky 18y ago
I think its not only geeks, I think its anyone, and perhaps with good reason. I think a big factor is that clearly the experts have more or less proven themselves to be as clueless as the pretend-experts, perhaps worse. Essentially what we've seen take place in the economic world is equivalent to some winner-take-all wild west where anything goes, leaving us to not put so much faith in the theoretical prowess of the CEO's, the FED, and Wallstreet as we did before. When you have people at the top making incredibly bad mistakes, it removes respect for them and instills a (false?) sense of authority in everyone else. The same thing takes place when a religious leader is shown to not be so moral, all of a sudden, despite you not having taken priesthood lessons or anything, you may now have a right to express morality more than him/her.
robak 18y ago
Dude, what are you talking about? Look at Maestro Greenspan. He kept interest rates so low for so long that we will have another great depression. Ben Bernanke - another genius who thinks that THE answer for all the problems in the economy is to: print, print, print, print!!! Truly, one needs to have phd in economics to be such an idiot (forgive me my french). And all these "experts" who didn't see bubble in dot-com and housing??? Including Harvard professors. When regular folks like Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber saw it coming since 2000. Are you kidding me??? There is nothing complicated about the economy. This reminds me something from my own experience. Discrete Mathematics. I was forced to go through 15 pages of "evidence" why 2+2 is 4. And then another 15 pages of "evidence" why it is not. After that painful experience I just quit the university. Why? Because I didn't go there to become an idiot. Programming is easy, you don't need to read this kind of cr*p to become a programist. This would just make you look intelligent and do all the things wrong. The same is true with all these so called "economists". As Lenin called them: useful idiots. This is what they are.
mattmaroon 18y ago
People don't like hearing that they don't know as much as they think they do. They mistake intelligence for domain knowledge, or at least totally dismiss the importance of it.

by lbrandy 18y ago

Tichy 18y ago

Can you point to any negative examples of such discussions? No doubt the web is full of stupid discussions, but I mean specifically on geek sites like HN?

lbrandy 18y ago
Alright, at the bottom of this thread is a downmodded discussions about macroeconomics (started by someone who read only the last paragraph of my post and decided to argue with me about my facetious assertions). Last week, there was a post here about the youtube video "money as debt" that ended up getting killed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461720 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461720 Equally, you could peruse Reddit (espsecially, say, politics). I don't know about digg, because I stopped going there for awhile, but it was as bad as reddit is now. Now, you could argue that these discussions are all fairly above board, with none of the emotion-laden rhetoric that I appear to see. I'd disagree though but we can leave that as a matter of perspective. I think there is an -obvious- tonal difference in matters of economics (or politics, or religion) versus other topics.
- Tichy 18y ago
  Thanks for the examples. I must admit that the tonal difference is not so obvious to me, at least not in the example from this thread. I am trying to think about some topics that might be less "heated"? Startups? Nutrition?
redrobot5050 18y ago
For a list of intelligent discussions that quickly go libertarian apeshit, merely find any Reddit.com/r/politics or reddit.com/r/economics dicussion regarding the bank bailout or the Obama-planned economic stimulus (which, according to some dicussions has already failed, will never work, or is proof that non-libertarian governments are inherently socialist.)
- llimllib 18y ago
  To be fair, that same discussion will also claim that the need for the bailout is proof that libertarianism has already failed, that Milton Friedman was the dictator of Chile and that the infallible analogy to today's ciris is a babysitting club.

timr 18y ago

Well said. I think it's funny that he accused you of an ad hominem, when his whole argument is a dressed-up variant of "I don't trust the bastards, therefore, I assume that they're wrong." You're saying something relatively uncontroversial, logical and restrained; he's arguing from little other than a base sense of mistrust. Alas, once again, the comment questioning the value of the experts' knowledge is the top-rated one in a thread. If you ask me, the biggest threat to HN's discussion quality is the anti-intellectual tendencies of many of the loudest voices.

falsestprophet 18y ago
I think it is pretty silly to call skepticism and empiricism anti-intellectual. Those, rather, define intellectualism. I would describe my post as anti-pseudo-intellectualism. Whatever the author of this post meant, it reads like a classic appeal to authority (this, the late Carl Sagan taught us, is a dangerous form of anti-intellectualism). I wrote primarily to defend those laymen that spend a little time thinking and writing and talking about macroeconomics or psychology or any other soft science. Why let everyone have their say? Because, the standards in the soft sciences are materially hardly different than in a reddit-flame war anyway. It is intellectually dishonest to hold soft scientists to no standards at all and, in the next breath, bemoan laymen for doing the save very things. Last semester, I read through the entire literature on interest rates in England in the industrial revolution. I found it could very well have been a reddit thread (although with much more fetching typography); it was uncivil and lacked any hope of scientific resolution. As far as I have read, most other macroeconomics literature is no better. (Check out the Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review if you can.) I think that partitioners in those fields forfeit the right to be snooty about lay opinion when their opinions are no more scientifically substantiated. Let me be clear. My standards for the hard sciences are different. When there is hope of empirical resolution one must work very carefully in that framework. For instance, I feel pretty comfortable saying young-earth creationists are loony. But maybe because I spend most of my day working on actual science, I am being too snooty myself.
- lbrandy 18y ago
  I think you'd be hard pressed to actually make the case that my post represents an appeal to authority. I've read it again and again and the only way I can see that interpretation is if someone didn't actually bother to read it fully. Either literally, in the sense that they skipped parts, or figuratively, in that they already heard what they wanted to hear and the words weren't actually being processed in the brain. And considering all of this high-minded intellectualism, maybe we need to go back to step one: hearing what the other person is saying so we don't argue with phantoms. So while I appreciate the impassioned defense of the laymen, I could do without both the strawmen and the rampant ad hominem. Normally, I wouldn't get so formal, but it seems to be your thing.

tolmasky 18y ago

I think its not only geeks, I think its anyone, and perhaps with good reason. I think a big factor is that clearly the experts have more or less proven themselves to be as clueless as the pretend-experts, perhaps worse. Essentially what we've seen take place in the economic world is equivalent to some winner-take-all wild west where anything goes, leaving us to not put so much faith in the theoretical prowess of the CEO's, the FED, and Wallstreet as we did before. When you have people at the top making incredibly bad mistakes, it removes respect for them and instills a (false?) sense of authority in everyone else. The same thing takes place when a religious leader is shown to not be so moral, all of a sudden, despite you not having taken priesthood lessons or anything, you may now have a right to express morality more than him/her.

robak 18y ago

Dude, what are you talking about? Look at Maestro Greenspan. He kept interest rates so low for so long that we will have another great depression. Ben Bernanke - another genius who thinks that THE answer for all the problems in the economy is to: print, print, print, print!!! Truly, one needs to have phd in economics to be such an idiot (forgive me my french). And all these "experts" who didn't see bubble in dot-com and housing??? Including Harvard professors. When regular folks like Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber saw it coming since 2000. Are you kidding me??? There is nothing complicated about the economy. This reminds me something from my own experience. Discrete Mathematics. I was forced to go through 15 pages of "evidence" why 2+2 is 4. And then another 15 pages of "evidence" why it is not. After that painful experience I just quit the university. Why? Because I didn't go there to become an idiot. Programming is easy, you don't need to read this kind of cr*p to become a programist. This would just make you look intelligent and do all the things wrong. The same is true with all these so called "economists". As Lenin called them: useful idiots. This is what they are.

mattmaroon 18y ago

People don't like hearing that they don't know as much as they think they do. They mistake intelligence for domain knowledge, or at least totally dismiss the importance of it.