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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if she was or not, nor if that idea would particularly count as crazy. It's a little silly to misread pg as saying that every such idea must be true. Also, why be so mean? It only makes things worse.

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Are you sure that a community idolizing the utterances of a winning gambler isn't what makes everything worse?

There are many things making things worse, and one does not rule out another, so that question is a bit of a distraction. I'd like to know what you think you gain by being so mean. Surely that's not the kind of person you want to be?

The idea that this community "idolizes" PG is trivially disproven by glancing through any recent thread on his writings, including this one.

There is some irony in invoking ad hominem arguments while claiming my critique is a distraction. I'm simply acting as an arbiter of which intellectual sausage makes the world worse, just as you are. We have different opinions about which wurst is worse. If your view of reality is that these people don't idolize a gambler masquerading as a philosopher, then I'd absolutely love to agree with you if I could.

I suppose you could say that my question were an ad hominem argument if it were an argument, but it's not - it's a question. Your comments shocked me by how mean they were, even relative to the other stuff that I read on here. And I have vague memories of having been shocked in the past by how mean you were on other occasions—I don't remember anything specific, but I have a residual Pavlovian wince about it. All of that made want to ask you why.

You're getting a bit semantic in defending what you certainly know is ad hominem misdirection. But if you want to double-down on it, it doesn't faze me. Your contention is that it is more important that I, a random commenter on the internet, am psychoanalyzed than to consider the substance of the argument I made. Your concern was how it was presented, not its content. I'll take that as a concession that the argument had enough validity that you'd prefer not to address it.

I answered your argument in my initial reply (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27070820): pg isn't saying that all crazy ideas by domain experts must be true, so a flagrant counterexample doesn't prove anything. Indeed, flagrant counterexamples are to be expected, since almost by definition, crazy ideas will have more variance than conventional ones.

The problem is that there wasn't really much of an argument there. You converted his point into something stupid that he didn't say, and then did a bunch of name-calling. Since the "argument" was so flimsy and the name-calling so mean, I asked why you would bother to do that. I'm still interested in the answer, even if the answer is that you don't think you did that. It's not really personal, I'm just curious. But yes I understand how it could come across that way.

No, your reply was a flagrant straw man. "every such idea must be true" != "confusing chance with wisdom or luck with skill." A straw man is where you're evading an argument by pretending it's something it isn't.

I certainly didn't "convert his point" into anything more "stupid" than what he said. In a somewhat farcically stereotypical way, this venture capitalist argues he makes decisions -- better than a coin toss presumably -- based on the notion that "domain experts" know what they're talking about. My contention was that venture capitalists don't pick winners better than a coin toss at all. They are simply gambling. When they win a jackpot, they construct a fiction that the win was predestined on some rational basis and not simply chance.

(Persisting with your ad hominem, by the way, isn't working.)

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