[Eudaimion]

> It's pseudoscience, author would benefit from reading (and memorizing) the current scientific literature on learning and cognition.

How so? Can you share what you have read and that is relevant and applicable in real life?

> There's a bad trend, Hacker News gets this kind of blog-style self-promotion every month that gets much comment attention, but the essays are not well-researched and with made-up assertions written by programmers talking out of their lane ("Engineer's disease") and not having done homework on the subject.

You are on the wrong site, this is not a scientific journal there is no need for scientific rigor in every post and comment.

P.S. The real life world is full of events and things happening if you cannot learn by yourself (create theories models on how the world works aka. pseudoscience apparently) and need academic verification for everything. Then you some kind of disorder :/ good luck

[shw1n]

Appreciate this, that's exactly it -- not challenging any existing theories or academia.

Not even saying I'm right or novel.

Just sharing a framework born from my observations that is actively working for me.

Honestly didn't even think this was that controversial, imo the best criticism on here is that my essay was "semi-obvious"

[calf]

Except that commenter had construed my sarcastic point and made it about academia. It is an irrelevant reading of the remark. They had a reading comprehension problem.

Without sarcasm, my point was/is not that you need to know all the theories or engage with academia or write a formal paper.

Rather, my point is that if you're going to write on a topic, at least know what the basic science has to say on it. You wouldn't write about mask wearing, or recycling plastic, etc., based purely on anecdotal evidence. You would include information from scientific sources and consensus.

Doing that raises the level of discourse and forces you, the author, to be responsible for not propagating misinformatiom and pseudoscience. Especially so in the area of self-help and learning psychology.

So again, my original comment while making a sarcastic remark about memorizing scientific literature was really about communicating your ideas in a scientifically literate way just as any lay person has a personal responsibility when discussing a topic, be it about technology or psychology or sociology, etc.

[shw1n]

I disagree, I think writing purely based off anecdotal evidence is fine as long as you're not making scientific claims (which I'm not).

Simply sharing what works for me and why I think it does for something as personal as creativity is not the same as contesting mask wearing or recycling.

Is there some specific point in my piece that disagrees with consensus that's not just contesting the definition of "memorization" (as seems to be common in this thread)?

[calf]

There absolutely is a need for fact checking and basic scientific literacy and you're helping foment the opposite by suddenly making this about academia and scientific journals. What's the harm of that? Snake oil promotion and creation of filter bubbles.

There's absolutely an expectation of not rejecting science just as with discussing global warming or Covid.

But explain, why do you pervert an expectation of scientific literacy into an expectation of professional scientific expertise?

Just as there are scientifically informed books and articles on a e.g. health and fitness and dieting, there is a ton of material on education psychology. Why do you allow the author to not do due diligence and at least read the basics which are very much accessible to nonexperts? Why make an exception when in every other STEM topic this would be incredibly ignorant?

If it were a Time magazine article or a newspaper article they would surely include scientific sources in an effort to be truthful. Surely any high-school student knows the steps to write a well-researched essay, so why are you making this about the irrelevant standards of professional academia here? Could it be due to a misunderstanding of the role of science in public education? Are you some kind of Covid vaccine denier or anti-science on some other topic?

In summary, you have wrongly conflated scientific literacy, being scientifically informed, public scientific awareness on a topic, etc., with professional academic scientific expertise. That is irrelevant and absurd. It also offends me that you made a bad faith construal of my statement.

As to your remark about HN, my criticism applies to ANY scientifically informed public discourse, even as HN is a STEM website.

Finally: I'm a reader giving my time and attention to a badly written essay because it got posted on a forum. It is not my job to fix their essay if it is antiscience in the way an antivaxxer makes up pseudoscience reasons why their idea is right. I'm not going to patiently explain to the nth antivaxxer why they are spouting pseudoscience, I'm just going to say that bluntly. This endless handwringing that HN people have over self help and rote memorization is just more of that, it's on them to have read a few simple books and articles on the topic before choosing to write about it for the public.

PS. In "real life", people express sarcasm and maybe your 'disorder' (completely out of line of you to say that, BTW, and against site guidelines to use personal attacks of that sort at fellow users) was failing to detect a sarcastic comment if you actually, literally, thought I meant "the author needs to memorize scientific literature" in context of their argument about memorization. That would have nothing to do with the actual accusation of pseudoscience, where being scientifically informed on a topic is just a basic standard of discourse to avoid misinformation and snake oil promotion.