[dang]

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There's nothing wrong with someone posting their ideas on a website. This forum is an internet watercooler, not an academic journal. Someone not being a specialist is no reason to shut down conversation.

[hackcasual]

I would disagree that pointing out a paper or idea has no cites to existing work is a shallow critique. It at the very least means the commenter glanced through the content. And while it's possible for someone who's an amateur to contribute to a topic, not engaging with the existing work is a sign that you're going to get less out of the content they've put together.

[dang]

I don't know what you mean by "pointing out a paper or idea". The comment seems to me a classic example of superficially skimming an article in order to find reasons to reject it. Ending with "reminds me of", followed by a link to someone else the commenter rejects, is also a shallow cheap shot. What do these things really have in common? Basically nothing.

I don't mean to pick too much on one comment and certainly not personally on the GP! This is just a common problem on the internet. What we want on HN is the kind of comments that enrich curious conversation. If you really don't think there is anything curiosity-gratifying in an article, that's what flags are for.

[hackcasual]

Sorry, edited to actually complete my thought in the first sentence.

While I do agree, in general a lot of novel ideas get dismissed out-of-hand, a conversation about to what extent an idea engages with the existing community/literature around that idea is valuable. For example, if I saw a paper posted here that claimed it solved P!=NP, my first question would be as to how much it addressed the existing work, as mathematical ideas tend to attract cranks.

[gotostatement]

if you don't want that type of comment on HN, feel free to remove it - it's not a big deal to me. But it's not a shallow critique - this article makes grand claims about how the brain works that are not backed up by any experiment or reference; it's reducing an extremely complex phenomenon - music and subjective experience of music - to a simple cognitive processing and meaning-making framework; and none of this makes any reference to work that other people have done on the matter. If you consider this a shallow critique, then I have to think that the only thing you wouldn't consider shallow is engaging deeply with the content, but that's not fair - for the reasons I gave, my contribution is claiming that this not worth engaging further with - it's crankery

[dang]

I don't want to remove it! But even if you had just said what you said here, the comment would already have been less shallow:

this article makes grand claims about how the brain works that are not backed up by any experiment or reference; it's reducing an extremely complex phenomenon - music and subjective experience of music - to a simple cognitive processing and meaning-making framework

The difference is here you say something a bit more specific about the content and topic of the article, whereas the GP comment didn't. Also, the style of what you wrote here is more conversational. The GP comment felt more like a pedantic putdown to me, although admittedly that is more of an interpretation.

[gotostatement]

I see your point, especially about tone

[emsy]

This is hardly a shallow dismissal and the comment didn’t actually criticize the lack of credentials.

[dang]

The point is that the comment isn't reacting curiously to anything in the article, just finding reasons to categorically reject it. That's not the intended spirit of this forum (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). And yes, I would say that all of the listed reasons are shallow. Someone not experimentally testing their theories, for example, is not a good reason to shut down conversation.

Keep in mind that threads are super sensitive to initial conditions. Shallow dismissals often appear early in the life cycle of a discussion, precisely because they're so quick to jump to - and then we get a thread, and ultimately a culture, which is characterized by a mean dismissive spirit. Internet defaults already tend to mean dismissiveness, so we need to work to avoid that where possible.