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Comment by ww520 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. You really invoked some hates. All your long and thoughtful comments have been voted down. I would say you have hit a nerve.

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I, like pg and hopefully other Hacker News readers, am pretty sick of every story about something cool being immediately derailed by a know-it-all in an industry dismissing the innovation as "not cool enough". pg calls it middlebrow dismissal[1]. Rather than being treated as an imperfect launching-off point for further innovation, everything has to be world-changing perfect to have a reasonably sane comments section.

I'm actually glad this thread got pushed down, so maybe some actually informative discussion can rise up rather than an analysis of how minutely the people behind this screwed up.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

Well, there are a lot of Apple fans here, and a core part of the Apple aesthetic is "if it isn't perfect and doesn't have that 'wow' factor, better to leave it out".

The only way you know if your product is imperfect is by other people constructively criticising it. But instead you would rather all of us stand around in a circle cheering them on about how wonderful it is and politely ignore any problems.

Sounds like a guaranteed way to fail.

Dismissal is not constructive criticism. There's a sizable difference between "meh, nothing to see here" (which is the original comment in this thread) and "here's how this could be better".

Dismissal is absolutely constructive criticism if you're looking at it from a business perspective.

If the product does not provide a decent ROI then you are right to dismiss it.

Ruling out a product and dismissing it based on projected ROI is not criticism. That would be called "making a business decision," not providing constructive feedback.

Another negative trend that's clearly happened in this thread is drive-by voting: all of your interlocutor's posts have negative points, whereas the only posts in the thread that deserved any downvotes were the initial post (the only legitimate instance of the poorly-named 'middlebrow dismissal' that I can see) and the one where you put words in his mouth at the end ("Oh, so they're liars now?"). Postulate: very few people read anything but the first post and its reply, and upon doing so most upvoted all of your posts in the thread and downvoted all of your interlocutor's. Intelligent discussion indeed.

I didn't put words in his mouth, he wrote that they were lying to managers and possibly being deceptive. You also misquoted me, which is ironic given your criticism.

Your postulation is unwarranted, by the way, since my posts have been going up and down based upon their depth in the thread. The top comments have been upvoted more than the lower ones, and the lower ones have actually been muted somewhat. I would actually suggest that people are reading the thread and voting appropriately, and probably aren't making it deepest into the thread.

Your sweeping characterization of mindless Hacker News voters acting by whim is disconcerting, to say the least. That we're so fixated on the voting here when karma is absolutely worthless is equally annoying. I am, however, intrigued by the shift from very light gray back to legible that has taken place on his comments since the beginning of this meta discussion (starting with ww520's remark); there might be something to what you're saying, which is that people are acting based upon what others are saying -- that's troubling.

When I see dismissals I look for a particular kind of fallacy, which this is an example of: Reasoning backwards to support the opinion. "This tool is unknown to me and their claimed improvements are dramatic" - "I would not trust an unknown tool and I do not trust their marketing efforts" - "Here's some mix of facts and expert's assumptions that supports the idea that you can't trust it."

When you're reasoning backwards you're on thin ice because it's easier to let a logical fallacy through as you start assembling your "facts and assumptions" in the rush to make your point known. You can "win the battle" (by being quick) but "lose the war" (by being wrong), and when I catch myself doing it I have to either cancel the post or put extra effort into it to make sure I have a valid argument(and often, after doing enough research, I don't, or I have gone too far outside my domain to know for sure).

Forward reasoning usually results in very straightforward critiques like "I used this but it was not appropriate for these situations..." or "it completely failed in this case..." or "it turned out to be unnecessary for the project I was on." Kevin's posts(both the initial one and follow-ups) get muddled because he has to weave together several minor points; as each successive rebuttal comes forward, so does his target, so that the final opinion remains the same, even though by the end he's reduced to "they're lying."

(A good example of a game developer who has put some serious effort and notetaking into finding ROI on a new tool is John Carmack and his forays into static analysis.)

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