While I appreciate that Hacker News and Reddit have a historical relationship, they're still different sites. This really isn't an appropriate forum for this sort of thing.
I don't mind it being posted, but I am surprised there haven't been any other comments that try to tie it back to hackernews related topics.
Every professional field seems to have its share of delusions and resists data to the contrary - programming, academia, technology, entrepreneurship, etc. Some delusions cause more damage than others. Some are harder to refute with data. Baseball scouts had their own beliefs about evaluating players, and the sabermetrics stuff (along with the results of teams like the A's that used it) at least showed them how they could improve things with more data.
I'd give examples of delusions vs. data related to hackernews topics, but ah, no thanks, because hackernews is more like reddit and every other large scale public forum than you think.
