> Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them.
That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too:
> Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.)
> But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.
That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too:
http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal...
> Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.)
> But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.