Hacker News Disease

Sounds like things "smart people" are generally guilty of. I am guilty of those things too from time to time, I just hope I notice when I am.

TFA quotes Lao Tzu:

   "The wise man knows he doesn’t know. The fool 
   doesn’t know he doesn’t know."

I'd add the wisdom of Bokonon[0] to that sentiment:

   "Beware of the man who works hard to learn 
   something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser 
   than before. He is full of murderous resentment 
   of people who are ignorant without having come 
   by their ignorance the hard way. "

I'd point out that "Hacker News Disease" as defined by the author is most certainly not limited to, nor did it begin with, tech discussion sites like HN.

It's becoming more widespread and the author wants to paint this as essentially the arrogance of the tech elites.

But that doesn't comport with all non-tech, non-elites who also engage in this sort of thing.

In fact, it's pretty much the same thing discussed by Tom Nichols in his 2017 book[1], The Death of Expertise. I recommend it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat's_Cradle

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise

Edit: Removed extraneous article.

> the author wants to paint this as essentially the arrogance of the tech elites.

Clearly you didn't read the second paragraph of the article:

> In fairness, this particular problem isn’t by any means endemic to Hacker News. It occurs at the crossroads where a bunch of smart people meet general tech industry discussion. I’m sure there are plenty of places that suffer from Hacker News Disease (and they probably had it first, have a terminal case of it, and are much less civil about it too) but HN is just the only one I’ve participated in, so they have the misfortune of being the community I’ve named it after.

Such a smart person who can "see it all" does not know that lawyers are paid by the hour so they have a pervasive incentive to take any case (even incluing lost ones) and milk those cases for as many hours as possible, since this earns them more money?

Rest is "old man angry at the clouds" material.

I don't think this is limited to people in tech. See this xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/