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Comment by hedgew | Hacker News Reader

The amount of low-quality, negative comments here is surprising. I read the whole article carefully and it seems quite reasonable.

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Agreed. I'm quite glad your comment is near the top. I normally read the comments before the article. Fortunately, after seeing your post, I went to the article first. If I just looked at the comments here I would have skipped it, to my detriment. It was well written, with lots of actionable advice. Most of the comments here are either nitpicking slightly clickbaity headings (and ignoring the useful content beneath them) or complaining about 'science/evidence', again probably without reading more than the headings.

I agree. It's remarkable - and rather depressing - that a well-meaning article aiming to help people improve their lives, and mostly offering decent advice, is attracting such intense dislike.

I believe that any work that describes itself as being "evidence-based" has to open itself, and the evidence it bases on, up to rigorous criticism.

Oh, absolutely - I'm not talking about the comments debating the level of evidence in the article. Those seem like absolutely fair comments, and the author of the article is responding to them well.

I'd like to know how many actually read the article versus how many skimmed it just to shit on it.

I almost always assume on forums, discussion threads, and social media, that no one has made an honest attempt to understand the thing that they are disparaging.

Jesus. Brutal but probably true.

It is true though; the number of comments I see on HN directly responding to just the title of an article - even when their response has been rebutted by the article itself - is very high.

Most commenters also seem to not know the context. 80000hours is not just some random blog, and this is not a random self-help article. This is the site that does very in-depth analysis aimed for people who want to optimize their career to make maximum positive impact in the world.

The article seems to be quite reductionist in it's approach. Like many things claiming to be "evidence-based".

Most of such advice works quite well for people who don't need it. Especially for the people with low income, low social capital, poor health and low personal skills, much of the advice will be outright wrong. And for some accomplished ones, it will serve as an extra prod to shame the former:

"Well of course they are not successful, they don't follow what scientists say."