Comment by habinero
23 days ago
I don't get it, either. There's an entire class of people on here who just run around looking for anyone to lead them.
I had a guy crash out after I told him that "so and so said Thing was good" was not sufficient to say whether Thing was good or not.
I told him he needed to develop enough skill to determine that for himself or he'd constantly fall for hype.
My dude pasted a ChatGPT list of engineers who had ever said anything about LLMs and was like ARE THEY ALL WRONG??
... did you listen to nothing I said? lol
You’re still not responding to what I actually said.
No one claimed “X said it’s good, therefore it’s good.” The point was that ignoring what experienced people say entirely is just as dumb as following them blindly.
You told me to “think for myself.” Great. Thinking for yourself doesn’t mean pretending expert opinion doesn’t exist. It means weighing it against your own understanding. That’s literally how learning works.
Calling it a “ChatGPT list” is just you dodging the question. If those people are wrong, explain why. If some are right for bad reasons, name them. Laughing and changing the subject isn’t an argument.
You’re shadowboxing a strawman and congratulating yourself for winning.
The reason is the crypto pump & dump - literally no other reasoning is required for my personal conclusion.
If “crypto = scam” is the full extent of your analysis, then you’re not being skeptical or careful. You’re just running a reflex and pretending it’s reasoning.
People who actually understand things can explain how they’re wrong. People who don’t just announce they’ve already reached a conclusion and declare further thought unnecessary.
If that’s your bar, then yes, no other reasoning is required, because none was applied in the first place.
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The irony is thick here. You’re mocking people for “following,” while repeating one of the oldest, laziest superiority tropes on the internet and congratulating yourself for it.
Treating any appeal to authority as invalid isn’t critical thinking. It’s simplistic. Authority isn’t a command to believe something, it’s evidence. One piece of the puzzle.
And here’s the part you keep skipping: your own reasoning is also just an opinion. It’s fallible, incomplete, and shaped by your experience. The difference is that, on HN, most people don’t have much of a track record for others to weigh.
When someone has decades of relevant experience, that doesn’t make them right. It does mean their opinion carries more information than that of an anonymous commenter with no reputation beyond a username and a tone.
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