He's making low value content/the culture of the company is horrible/he's a fraud/it's more luck than skill. The actual critiques are personalized to the content and, to one extent or another, valid, but the social purpose of the critiques is universal which is that I felt uncomfortable that reading this might mean I have to re-evaluate my worldview and I'm going to dive into the comment section and upvote all the people telling me actually, I don't have to do that.
I actually spent over an hour writing 750+ words of my takeaways reading this document and shared it privately with a few founder friends of mine and I briefly considered also posting to share with the community but I took a look at the comments and took a look at what I wrote and decided I didn't have the energy to face the endless onslaught of nitpicks and misunderstandings that are driven, at the end of the day, not by a genuine intellectual desire to reach an understanding, but by the need to prove emotionally that others are not taking this seriously so I don't have to either.
All I can do is be vague and say I think this was an enormously valuable piece of writing that is worth engaging seriously for what it is as it might change your worldview in several important ways.
But also my larger meta-point is that there's a now near ubiquitous "sour grapes" attitude that's pervaded HN that makes it an extremely unpleasant place to hold a conversation and people reading should be aware of this systematic bias when reading comments here.
One distressing trend I've noticed becoming ubiquitous on HN
is that any writing that is confronting to a consensus worldview
becomes flooded with highly upvoted comments that are, in essence,
excuses for why it's not necessary in this instance to re-examine
your priors.
I've seen something happening more and more on HN that bothers me.
When someone writes something that goes against what most people
think, the comments section gets filled with popular replies.
These replies are basically just reasons why you don't need to
think about changing your mind on this topic.
* He thinks most people dislike Mr. Beast, his company, and think he's popular only due to luck.
* He thinks this document makes good points, but that most people won't be able to see them due to what they believe about Mr. Beast prior to reading it.
For instance, much of the initial research into the harms of smoking was done in Germany in Nazi times. While the results were largely correct (and later confirmed elsewhere), it was much easier for tobacco proponents to contest or reject them on the grounds of the Nazi Germany origins.
[1]: https://davidsamson.substack.com/p/tribaltheory-002-tribalis...
Considering we used a monumental wealth of nazi research, and the existence of operation paper clip. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190723-the-ethics-of-us...
Even though you’re correct that Nazi rhetoric impacted creating permissive tobacco policies. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2736555/
To clarify, I think it’s because it’s an extreme example, that while technically perhaps accurate, misses that it’s a hard one for a reader to relate to effectively and misses a subtext of: shouldn’t any research from that source (of which what are the ethics of using it as well?) especially in a lens of 1940/1950, be subjected to extreme skepticism? Where additional replication may not be practical or possible.
Under a more rational angle, any promising results obtained by an enemy should be double- and triple-reproduced, because an enemy may be planting disinformation into it. But this is a bit more serious than somebody you don't like making a comment you would rather have made yourself, and you already agree with the point because you would make it yourself and are now in a bind. That's the kind of uncomfortable situation I initially referred to.