... and yet Steve Pavlina was a Windows developer.
Do we have to quote cult leaders on Hacker News?
Steve Pavlina is the guy who writes blog posts about winning blackjack through ESP. His wife is a professional psychic. He sells magic CDs for hundreds of dollars that will give you psychic powers when you listen to them in bed.
Steve Pavlina has one essay, in particular, which changed the way I thought about my business and directly contributed to my later success. (The five-second version: improvements in your funnel are multiplicatively effective. Does that sound obvious? It wasn't obvious to me, and it set me down the road of A/B testing and other hillclimbing, and I climbed my way right out of my day job.)
Yes, he later went seven flavors of kooky... but no amount of kooky retroactively disproves good ideas. That's also a level of discourse which I'd prefer to avoid on HN.
Since Steve Pavlina makes something like a million dollars per year on his magical blog, he has credibility when it comes to making money.
The real question to ask about Steve Pavlina though is whether his blog posts are designed to help YOU make money, or to help HIM make money. He typically doesn't provide objective evidence indicating you will be helped. And if he wanted to, he COULD get this evidence.
So for instance he claims that using various magical powers you can make money. He could invest $50,000 in running scientific trials of these methods and objectively prove to his readers that it works.
THAT would be worthy of Hacker News.
But if Steve Pavlina is fair game to be quoted on HN, I am gonna start quoting Jesus. Cause they have about the same level of credibility.
If someone quoted Jesus (or their favorite spiritual icon) on HN in the same positive and relavent manner that Steve Pavlina is being mention in this thread, and nobody flipped out, it would come close to a watershed moment of maturity for tech forums everywhere.
I believe it was an article called "Shareware Amateurs vs Shareware Professionals". His old Dexterity is no longer available, but he released the copyright on all his material so I mirrored it (and all his old Dexterity articles) on my site:
No, because failing to ignore the history of the person telling you something and their motivations is how you get slippery slope logic that leads to things like using Eugenics to validate killing people who are poor or mentally ill.
I generally am not concerned with who said what but whole "wind-up" of OP kind of hinged on this "1-7-8" conceit and Steve Pavlina as the authority documenting it.
The truth of a statement can be determined by two things:
1. If the person is an authority or expert on the topic being discussed. In this case, the person has credibility and it is smart to give them a level of trust.
2. If the person is providing a reference to some objective, public evidence that can be independently evaluated to determine if the statements are valuable.
The post in question did not provide either #1 or #2.
Steve Pavlina is popular because he's a good writer, not because his ideas are supported by evidence or because he has credibility or legitimate authority.
With the general public, all it takes to be influential is good writing. e.g. Jesus Christ is popular.
Hacker News should aim for a higher level of discourse: discourse based on verifiable facts, or based on credible authority. Not sophistry by well-spoken demagogues.
We're not quoting him because he's a cult leader. We're quoting him because it was a reasonably insightful blog post that is relevant to the topic. I, in fact, have no clue who Steve is, and found the posted link a valuable addition to the discussion. If you believe it was not so, I'd love to hear your reasons.
The author was saying something philosophical. It wasn't a question of correctness (philosophy isn't real enough to be judged so) but a question of well-spokenness. I found it a well-written peace which offered interesting insight. None of that requires evidence, and none of that depends on author intent. I had (and still have) no idea who the author is, and found it a good piece nonetheless.
It is striking to me how often a world renowned expert, really top-notch in his field, can turn around and say something spectacularly dumb in an area that isn't his field. You'd be surprised how often people just don't know what they don't know, or get emotionally attached to something foolhardy. You get an expert entertainer talking about statecraft or a hard scientist talking about religion or even just a software guy talking about hardware. It can be gobsmacking.
There is a train of thought that tries to classify people into reliable and unreliable -- worth listening to or not. And I think that's a very bad idea. No one is perfectly reliable. No one has a completely rational and educated worldview. No one. I think just about everyone is going to have an opinion about something that I think is monstrously, provably, stupidly wrong.
I think the best you can do as far as reputation goes is assign it to (person, topic) tuples.
But I still think that's a heuristic at best. Perhaps a necessary one, but I think it's better still to reserve judgement for evaluation of the evidence. Listen to what someone says. Listen to the arguments he makes. Listen to the arguments other people make. Trust your own experience and reason, and go with what makes sense.
What I am saying is that if you ignore people who you think believe stupid things, you'll be ignoring a lot of people who really do know a lot of things worth listening to. And I think more than that, I'm saying that if you classify information, not by empirical value, but by the tribe of who it comes from, you're evaluating the world more like a cultist than like a scientist.
Do we have to quote cult leaders on Hacker News?
Steve Pavlina is the guy who writes blog posts about winning blackjack through ESP. His wife is a professional psychic. He sells magic CDs for hundreds of dollars that will give you psychic powers when you listen to them in bed.
There's no credibility to be found here.