[onebaddude]

>Perhaps Simon Sinek is right, but after reading the article, you are no closer to understanding why he thinks he's right than you were before.

What do you know, the top comment is a pseudo-intellectual tear down of an article, asking for evidence and proof, admitting that the original article wasn't even read to completion, but offering plenty of criticism.

>Perhaps Simon Sinek is right, but after reading the article, you are no closer to understanding why he thinks he's right than you were before.

Guess what? This is a book excerpt. Maybe if you want some answers and notes you can buy and read the book? Of course, that would require you to read and synthesize something for longer than 5 minutes, fighting the urge to show how smart you are by instantly going to an internet message board to ask for line-by-line bibliographical references.

The fact that this community holds itself in such esteem is hilarious. Reddit redux.

[weland]

What you say:

> What do you know, the top comment is a pseudo-intellectual tear down of an article, asking for evidence and proof, admitting that the original article wasn't even read to completion, but offering plenty of criticism.

What I said:

> I tried to read this all the way to the end but I wasn't quite able to do it in a single round.

So actually, yes, I did read it to completion. Some of the paragraphs I read, well, several times. I just gave in to the urge of angrily closing the browser tab once or twice, before I forced myself to go through the whole thing.

> Guess what? This is a book excerpt. Maybe if you want some answers and notes you can buy and read the book?

I don't see how this changes my criticism of the material. Do you mean to say that the book contains, say, a list of all the New Jersey accountants who noticed something weird about the patterns in which people pay taxes?

> Of course, that would require you to read and synthesize something for longer than 5 minutes, fighting the urge to show how smart you are by instantly going to an internet message board to ask for line-by-line bibliographical references.

This is fairly presumptuous of my ability to read, coming from someone who hasn't carefully read even the first line of my reply :-).

[larrys]

I mean you really can't get any worse than using something like this to support your point:

"A New Jersey-based accountant told me that he sees a clear difference between his older clients and his younger ones. “My older clients want to work within the confines of the tax code to do what is fair,” he explained. “They are willing to simply pay the tax they owe"

In court that is "hearsay" evidence. It's not even coming from someone who is an accountant who is writing the book but someone just talking to the accountant. For all we know the accountant said that at a party after having 3 drinks. Separately, from my experience with people of the older generation I have definitely not found that to be the case. Not to mention that even that would vary by ethnic group, geography and I'm sure many other factors.

[benched]

Have an upvote. HN comments have long been a ghetto of a different kind. They're as constructive as YouTube comments, only instead of "ur a fagot", it's all "Not peer-reviewed, replicated, statistically rigorous science!"

[weland]

I don't have a problem with opinions that are not based on peer-reviewed, replicated, statistically-rigorous science (not that there's any other kind of it). What I do have a problem with are opinions expressed as if they were scientific opinions, but are in fact thinly-veiled prejudices.

If someone claimed Jews are formed as thieves by their culture because he knows a guy from San Diego whose Jewish clients are always behind on their payment, he'd rightfully be labeled not only as racist, but also as stupid, and with good reason. I see no reason to treat someone who claims, as a proof that people born in a certain period of time are more egotistic than others, the fact that an accountant told him so, any differently. That's not only as insulting as racist pseudo-science, it's as idiotic as racist pseudoscience.

There is probably sufficient truth to find among those as well, perhaps, but in my opinion, it's intellectually lazy.