zlacker

This comment is truly on point and very meta — it takes a nuanced twitter thread and distills it down via the force of an authoritative source in a way that people immediately get the point.

>>viksit+(OP)
> authoritative source

2000+ year old source, calling that _authoritative_ is a wild stretch

>>grafpo+id
2000 years old and still speaking truth to our own lived experience makes it all the more authoritative.

>>dpeck+Ze
Survivor bias | Authoritative

>>grafpo+id
Cicero lived 2000 years ago and is still widely considered one of the greatest orators and writers of all time. For the art of rhetoric, it really doesn't get much more authoritative than that.

I know the HN crowd is dismissive of old stuff, because fields like math and science advance fast enough that nobody calls (say) Pythagoras or Archimedes "authoritative", but the art of convincing other humans remains essentially the same.

>>adolph+1h
Is that “survivor bias UNION Authoritative” or “Survivor bias PIPE Authoritative”? Even on HN, hard to know which way this comment intends to lean.

>>themat+qj
I don't think it's HN; I think it's a few folks who never learned the value of history. Kind of like that kid in middle school who would say "all people in world history are dead, what do they matter?", "they didn't have iphones, so how smart could they be?", or "this wikipedia about logical fallacies disproves Plato".

>>viksit+(OP)
Yes, and it is amusing to see the word "forum" in the quote.