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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

> The chart below summarizes our research.

The chart is some cherrypicked bullshit that ignores the importance of outlier rejection. Put your thumb over Google, Zoom, and Tesla and then look at the chart again.

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> The chart is some cherrypicked bullshit that ignores the importance of outlier rejection

The vertical axis is the author's subjective opinion on a scale of "I’m a professor of marketing who likes dogs" to "I am a spirit Dawg that unlocks self-actualization." That should give away that it's, at best, a back-of-the-envelope gut check.

"This thesis doesn't fall apart on basic scrutiny" is the best point it can make. Which, given it's leaps and bounds more scrutiny than Theranos or WeWork got, is part of the joke.

> "This thesis doesn't fall apart on basic scrutiny" is the entirety of its point

The thesis DOES fall apart on basic scrutiny. The chart represents the entirety of the exploration, and the chart doesn't support shit. Minus the outliers, the chart presents a conclusion entirely different from the author's.

> The thesis DOES fall apart on basic scrutiny

Based on what?

To be serious for a moment, it has been repeatedly found that "prospectus conservatism is positively related to underpricing, with the relation more pronounced for technology than nontechnology firms" [1]. While the ability for "prospectus conservatism...to predict the firm’s post-IPO operating performance" has historically been limited to non-tech IPOs, it's plausible for that effect to now incorporate all IPOs.

> the chart doesn't support shit

The chart's underlying "data" are shit. It's "guy rates mission statements." It's a joke.

(Or maybe it's not. Bullshit isn't something one can objectively measure. It's dependent on context and the specifics of the observer.)

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Grace_Hao/publication/2...

That's a fair response. I've given you an up triangle.

Totally apart from the fact that it's a joke-

As the one jumping up and down about statistics here, you should know that

"The data does not exclude the null hypothesis"

and

"The thesis falls apart (hypothesis is invalidated)"

are two very different things.

There's a point and a joke. It seems like you didn't get the joke and missed the point.

The point being made is that the bottom is falling out of the bullshit market, and it's about damn time. It's made with humor and snark, which is the point of the graph.

Dropbox is 8/10 on their BS index. Dropbox may not produce enlightenment, but it sure solves a useful problem of storing and sharing files online. I think they're doing well financially too?

I seem to remember reading a Paul Graham article about the early days of Y Combinator (can't find the article now) where he mentioned that basically 2-3 startups including dropbox make all the money, and the rest is just noise. Seems like it wasn't such a BS bet after all.

But Dropbox's mission statement from their S-1, which is what this article is referring to, is an 8/10: "Our mission is to unleash the world’s creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working."

Google’s mission only seems non-bullshit because they actually did organize a good fraction of the world’s information. When they were just a search engine with better relevance, it seemed like a stretch.

But yes, the chart is more impressionistic than rigorous.

I mean the chart was drawn with comic sans, I doubt it is intended to be axiomatic.

No, that's just the style of the blog. The post has zero supporting data other than the chart.

Yea, it undermined his point and methodology (both of which I'm inclined to agree with more than disagree with). I actually like the idea of rating the relationship of mission to business and seeing if there's any kind of trend there, but he clearly made his hypothesis, drew the chart, then started to look for data to support it.

I'd like to see the stocks' performance relative to the whole market, or at least some relevant index (e.g. S&P 500).

The chart is the worst thing in that article. That hilarious line through the middle! Is that suppose to show some kind of trend!?

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