[gunshowmo]

The more time you spend on this site the more you realize that it is not immune to the same problem that other sites have of people acting as if they have something insightful to say when they're just regurgitating common talking points.

The few contrarian opionions typically get buried here, althougn not hidden or lost in a massive sea like Reddit for the most part.

This place is better to glean insight from the more technical threads or the ocassional debates that don't immediately devolve into emotional appeals.

[cpleppert]

I can't agree with this enough. Certain threads are almost as bad as reddit. It isn't quite on the same level as having a current ukraine war thread and literally every comment is completely wrong about the weapon used. That doesn't happen on HN much but its clear a lot of the time the comments are just not what they used to be. I'm disappointed because it reduces any value in the comment section. I mostly only stick to technical threads at this point.

[VictorPath]

Yes. Someone ran some ML algorithm on HN book threads once

https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app/category/0/all-t...

Putting aside books like the Pragmatic Programmer and Lean Startup, big authors in order were Richard Dawkins, Ayn Rand, Yuval Harari, David Foster Wallace, Malcolm Gladwell, Jonathan Haidt, Henry Hazlitt etc.

Kind of the typical middle-brow stuff you'd expect some white college educated FAANG L5 to be reading on the weekend at his house in Sunnyvale.

Steven Pinker wasn't high up on the list but someone like him would be typical. He has studied the brain and linguistics and visuo-spatial thinking and writes about that (actually I think he's wrong about adaptationism, but anyhow...) Then he writes some Hegelian type books about how human history is a series of progressive steps to our current state, the best of all possible worlds. He's in the same boat as his typical readers - he has some specific technical knowledge, and that plus the weltenschauung of a 67 year old son of a lawyer who got a doctorate at Harvard results in his books.

It's living in a bubble. It's good someone like Pinker rejects some irrational views, the problem is when he can't see his own prejudices and irrational views.

[zozbot234]

Come on, Hegel thought of social progress as the side-effect of a literal World-Spirit, an actual ghost trying to haunt the entire planet in increasingly "self-realized" forms. You can't be seriously criticizing Steven Pinker on that basis, he shares nothing of that basic worldview. There are books that try to tell an "inherent self-propelling progress" story along the lines of Hegel's basic intuition (I can think of "Non-Zero" as one) but even those try to make a better-phrased argument to hang that intuition on than just talking about a mysterious World Spirit.

[reducesuffering]

Are you expecting most to read Kant and Joyce? Curious about your definition of non-"middle brow." Imo, both Hegel and Pinker are routinely discussed and criticized here.