"Simply put, this is wrong. There are not three kinds of laziness." This, especially, summarises my feelings about a vast number of HN submissions and articles

"Simply put, this is wrong. There are not three kinds of laziness." This, especially, summarises my feelings about a vast number of HN submissions and articles on the internet in general of the form "The X kinds of Y" or "The 10 reasons Z" or "The Blahblahblah Principle". We all know this type of article. Many books too, especially in self-help and dieting, etc. At best the writer has described a model which is useful for understanding some aspect of a larger picture, and at worst they are just doing reasonable-sounding pattern-recognition from a largely anecdotal pool, and then building what they believe is a bulletproof system from it all. I remember when I was in university I wrote notebooks full of this kind of thing. I go through them from time to time and find interesting ideas wrapped up in way too much rigidity in search of a neat formalised system. There must be half a dozen "guru" bestsellers to be refined from those notebooks, if anyone had the time and lack of internal honesty to write them. For a while now, variants of "Simply put, this is wrong" have been what my brain returns whenever I see such articles, yet I do still read them and I do still find nuggets.