This selective skepticism creates an uneven playing field: critics must provide exhaustive evidence and perfect nuance, while business-friendly assertions are accepted as conventional wisdom.
Has anyone else observed this? Is there a cognitive bias at work when topics challenge the industry narratives many HN users are professionally invested in?
1. Making money. Specifically, making a rich person richer; earning you a margin less than the topmost in your risk class in their portfolio.
2. YCombinator, or startup philosophy. Doesn't rule out critiques of corporate philosophy, your approach just needs to tick more boxes.
3. There's this rule: business itself doesn't hold grudges. The smell of grudge means it's something else -- could be lots of other things: sports (Moneyball), politics (Marc Andreesen is articulate about how to remove ethics from politics), signalling network loyalties (Ivy League), but -- worthwhile or not -- those are costs. Be prepared for any business audience to form a consensus on rules; and in the non-business dimensions, individual humans to self-select.
It's interesting to look outside this, though. It's academically interesting when a project succeeds in defiance of these rules, or any academically-evaluated rules.
The other thing is perspective of what is well founded critique, such as that which you know to be so, and what others would think would be erroneous or at best flawed since the argument put forward might be deemed correct broadly but does not work with the particular instance due to various reasons like owing to context, morality, practicality ... etcetera.
I thought of a name for these people:
"Prostrating Putative Oligobros" (PPOs)
(...or "presumptive", "wannabe"?)