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.
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.
[dead]
“Glad you got that off your chest” is what people say when the argument beat them to the punchline.
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