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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

He’s a social critic. “What have you actually done?” is the most common non sequitur used to silence critics and dissidents since time immemorial. It’s irrelevant. Anyone is allowed to be a critic. Their accomplishments have no bearing on the veracity of their arguments. That would be an appeal to authority.

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If his arguments were clear and interesting, it would be a different story.

This person purports to have "a theory of everything" up his sleeve yet won't communicate it properly because he doesn't trust the physics community. That doesn't stop him from lengthy podcasts and interviews, like with Lex, where he uses a firehose of specialist jargon against a general audience. To what end? I can't imagine.

The obscurantist IDW stuff appears to be nothing more than a vaguely libertarian stance mildly against progressives and mostly in academia-- boring and not even close to "dissident".

It’s an appeal to the authority of credibility. The more you speak through the language of results, the more credible you are. It’s this appeal to credibility that people rely on when they choose doctors or lawyers.

You say it like credibility in those two contexts are a bad thing.

Doctors and lawyers are about the only occupations where a professional’s mistake could cost a client his/her life. No other professions come close, which is part of why the training is long and the practitioners require a license to practice.

Our modern world is so tightly coupled that lots of us are working in professions where mistakes can cost lives.

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