It doesn’t really have anything to do with HN. It’s anyone who cares about the truth.
Stuff that sounds believable because it “sounded good” and was argued by charismatic people plagued medicine until shockingly recently.
It’s human nature to believe people and your snarky reply is evidence of that. Your gut reaction should be to agree with the comment or call out the author for fabricating stuff, not to dismiss intellectual rigor.
From the author, it's a newsletter on what she's thinking. I didn't see any advertising of shoddy medicine or claims of being scientific. Do we call out authors for writing poetry on the human experience? Why should we apply intellectual rigor on some observations made by an artist?
"Two households, both alike in dignity," he says, with the confidence of a man who’s never run a census.
We are given no confidence interval, no error bars, not even a passing nod to the broader Veronese housing market. Two? Why not three? Why not seven?
Dignity, too, goes unmeasured. Are we talking patrician gravitas or the brittle self-importance of guys who name their swords? The line presumes a convenient symmetry where there is almost certainly chaos, over-leveraged family fortunes, and at least one uncle squatting in a basilica basement.
Frankly, I suspect "two households" is just the number Shakespeare could hold in his head without dropping his drink.
"call out" as a metaphor doesn't apply to the discussing of a online newsletter on a separate site; neither the author nor other readers are likely to be aware of the discussion. It does seem very apt, if poetry were posted here that makes claims about the human experience, for commenters to dispute those claims.
At the time of writing, three of the four existing replies showed no indication of understanding your point xweb; the fourth one having been made unavailable via flagging (but one can guess from context that it too didn't understand).
Stuff that sounds believable because it “sounded good” and was argued by charismatic people plagued medicine until shockingly recently.
It’s human nature to believe people and your snarky reply is evidence of that. Your gut reaction should be to agree with the comment or call out the author for fabricating stuff, not to dismiss intellectual rigor.