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Re:Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian... by dang on Friday June 19, 2020 @02:21PM (#23577358)
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reflexive, generic comments are much more boring to read than they are to write, and they take threads in uninteresting directions. With a submission like this, if you don't find something to engage with in the article, there are lots of other things to read on HN's front page.

Re:Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian... by vikramkr on Friday June 19, 2020 @02:46PM (#23577622)
I didnt mean this as a shallow dismissal. I tried to write examples into the comment and discuss how the way the article was framed is counterproductive to it's own stated goals in its conclusion paragraph of generating change in how entrepreneurship is taught. I apologize if it came across as shallow, but I spent time trying to make it substantive by including counterexamples etc.
Re:Towards an Untrepreneurial Economy? Rise of the Veblenian... by dang on Friday June 19, 2020 @02:51PM (#23577680)
I hear you, and I know it stings to get a moderation reply like that, so I hope you won't take it personally or feel discouraged.

I'm not really seeing other examples in the comment. In any case, the main problem is that its core point is a misunderstanding. As other users have pointed out, the term "Veblenian entrepreneurship" means a lot: it instantly communicates the idea of entrepreneurship as a status signal, rather than for an economically productive purpose. In fact, if there's a problem with the term, it might be exactly the opposite: it already communicates so much that the mind could start to assume that it's a thing, and then find rationalizations for believing it.

That's the reason I called the comment a shallow dismissal: it dismissed an entire field based on a misreading. Also, there was snark at the beginning.

By the way, the problem with such comments is not that they're so bad in themselves—it's that threads are sensitive to initial conditions and they tend to choke out better, more specific discussion. This has something to do with the reflexive/reflective distinction: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...