Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't really see it though. The article seems pretty clear on what kind of discussion they think is unproductive. One can argue whether text is data, but it still has structure and meaning. When they say " ill-advised citation" or "logic, applied narrowly , is used to justify " that is what they are arguing. You own argument seem much more a moral one though. For one it doesn't even say what you said it says. For e…
I saw parent commenter as making an epistemological argument rather than a moral one. There are two fundamentally different sources of truth: ethical consensus and physical data. They are ultimately incompatible, in that only a single option can be your ultimate source of truth. Albeit other(s) can be valued to some degree. The issue they took, and I would take too, with that portion of the New Yorker article is that…
But I doesn't say that. Throughout the paragraph the emphasis is on the recklessness.
"hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper _recklessness_"
"_Ill-advised_ citations"
"_thought_ experiments"
"logic, applied _narrowly_, is used to _justify_"
"data, but the _origins_, _veracity_, and _malleability_ of those data [...]"
And that is also in line with the conclusion that "message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own" and "can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots". The critique here is essentially that people don't have scientific literacy.
That people on hacker news think they can be rational, dispassionate and authoritative but that their recklessness with citations, logic and data (and their dismissal of other arguments) suggests they can't.
That is the argument.
All of this is questioning the substance of the arguments made, not the substance of such arguments made correctly. The entire point is that they aren't made correctly. You might even read the paragraph as acknowledging that it once worked, when it impressed observers.
> Consequently, the rhetorical paraphrasing of the passage into the comment dismissing nerds seems on point.
You can argue anything you want, but the argument here was made from a basis of facts. If the commentator wants to concede that their argument isn't based on the text itself, then they and you might have a point. But instead the rest of the argument isn't very believable. Which is the logic behind my argument in the first place.
> Objectively, the humanities has a poor track record of getting pissy and taking cheap shots at science as a viable supreme source of knowledge.
Again not relevant to the facts at hand. Especially since again they aren't making those statement. Otherwise we can bring anything into the discussion, from nationality to sat scores.