

An Observation about News.YC - myoung8

In too many threads on news.yc someone points out a pattern only to have someone else refute it based on perosnal experiences. <p>I just want to point out that this is flawed logic!<p>It's not quite as simple as "don't make generalizations" (although many would do well to remember that). Danah boyd really crystallized this in one of her blog posts by pointing out that 
patterns are just that, patterns. There will always be exceptions (and maybe you are one of them), but exceptions and patterns are not mutually exclusive. Duh, right?<p>If it's so obvious, why do so many people craft their arguments this way? Just check out the comments in the post about how to find a co-founder for non-techies.<p>Maybe they just want to foster discussion, but it seems to me that we would get a lot more out of the forum if people qualified/quantified their comments.
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nostrademons
Not all threads here seek answers. Some seek _data_.

Counterexamples don't refute a pattern, but they often elaborate on it. After
all, the original pattern is often derived from a series of examples itself.
For people that are looking to draw their own conclusions (which is most of
us, right? I'd hate to think that my or anyone else's contributions here are
taken as gospel truth), this is invaluable. "Quit your day job" hides a lot of
complexity. "I had this crazy idea for a suborbital flight startup while I was
getting drunk with my chimney-sweeper, and we quit our day jobs, took on $100K
of debt, then failed miserably when nobody would buy our flying broomstick" is
a lot more useful, because then you can judge whether your situation is like
the unfortunate chimney-sweep and decide accordingly.

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nanijoe
Based on my personal experience, I have to say you are completely wrong :)

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jdavid
I think given personalities, different solution sets are viable. A charismatic
person might bet more heavily on their charisma and ability to sell something,
while a technical person might assume a "build it and they will come"
strategy.

Both are viable and both can be write just a bit; but what if a charismatic
person could also build something, or a hacker could actually sell something?

I love seeing all of the different opinions on YC.NEWS.

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Xichekolas
If each of us was aware of all the personal experiences of other people here
on the site, then maybe we could make more qualified statements. I for one,
don't know any of the rest of you in person, so all I can offer are my
experiences.

If enough people offer personal experiences, the reader should be able to
extract his own pattern from them (that is, after all, what we humans are good
at). Just because we are offering raw data (in the form of personal
experience) instead of analyzed data (in the form of qualified statements),
doesn't make the data any less true (but probably a bit less insightful).

I agree that one person's experience doesn't disprove another persons research
about the overall pattern, but nor is the experience completely useless.

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chaostheory
Typically when someone points out a "pattern" on yc, it's also just mainly
based on their own personal experience... instead of say research that spans
companies or even regions.

Ofcourse it's possible someone could prove me wrong with several examples...

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DanielBMarkham
I believe there are several problems with the premise of your question:

1) It assumes that the poster has described the entire problem. Due to the
nature of printed material, things like background, emotions, personality, etc
many times are not conveyed completely. Most questions are woefully under-
detailed. Most times you are answering what you _think_ the person really
asked.

2) It assumes that there is a generalization or rule that the question falls
under. Things like "Do I like ice cream?" don't have any kind of
generalization to have exceptions from. Not everything is quantitative.

3) It assumes that only one set of patterns can be determined from the same
initial data. Many times, multiple patterns apply to the same data.

4) It's not the way people communicate. People are not logicians.When you are
a kid and touch a hot stove, your mom didn't give you the formulae for
thermodynamics. She probably said something like "Don't do that!" As you got
older and our problems got more complicated, the stories got more elaborate.
But they were always stories. This is because people naturally communicate by
anecdote, something anthropologists have been observing for decades. An
anecdote is always true -- but more specific theories and generalizations
suffer from 1-3 above.

I admire your quest for certainty. I was that way myself back when I was
younger, that is, until I realized -- -yikes! I'm doing it! See what I mean?
It's everywhere.

