Hacker News Reader

Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

So of your 'six' citations, [1] is a book I don't have access to, [2] and [4] aren't citations at all, and [5] and [6] has nothing to say about companies getting better at their thing.

It doesn't say much for 'being easy' when you have to pad out your list of six with two non-citations, two irrelevant citations, and a difficult-to-source one.

> When you eventually provide evidence for your claim that people exercise their willpower less, I won't require citations for everything.

"When I give you evidence, you won't require evidence"?

> I hope this is enough evidence for you.

It's worth noting that I didn't demand evidence for the original claim; I only demanded it as an illustrative point to people that were demanding it of me.

View on HN

I did not attempt to provide six citations. I provided a six-step argument (evidence), added footnotes to each step to explain why that step holds (evidence) and some of these footnotes contained citations to works (also evidence) that support the step.

You also didn't seem to be very interested in the book, since you couldn't find it on the internet: https://mises.org/system/tdf/Henry%20Hazlitt%20Economics%20i...

Your problem seems to be that you conflate evidence (something that gives you more information) with citations (a means to point to evidence someone else has already collected). When someone asks for evidence, they don't necessarily need citations. You could just refer to something they already know, and provide a logical argument from there. That is also why I didn't bother linking to a mathematics textbook for [2], since I'm pretty sure you have already been exposed to the necessary concepts.

> When someone asks for evidence, they don't necessarily need citations. You could just refer to something they already know, and provide a logical argument from there.

Maybe that's the case in the lunch room in an academic department, but it's definitely not the case in internet forums. When someone demands evidence on a forum, they don't mean "walk me through it", they mean "show me the external source that supports it". They mean 'evidence' like a lawyer or a historian would use the term, not 'logical reasoning'.

You could still choose to respond as if they were willing to listen to your reasoning, instead of just demanding external validation. Sometimes that happens to be the case. Do you really care about the times when it isn't?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com