> Possibly for what HN calls "middlebrow dismissal" - wandering in and dismissing the article with blindingly obvious issues ("probably caused by the sedatives, immobilization" etc) as if professional medical researchers wouldn't have thought of them. They plainly need a clear-eyed HN reader on staff to help them.

That term is very apt. I found this blog post about it, which I think really hits the nail on the head, too:

http://www.byrnehobart.com/blog/why-are-middlebrow-dismissal...

> Paul Graham, News.YC’s moderator emeritus, says that “The defining quality of the middlebrow dismissal is that it’s a cache dump of the writer’s prejudices…” This probably explains why they’re so common. It’s natural to see any news story as confirmation of your existing prejudices—but it’s easy to read confirmation where it’s not there. So it’s easy to see Groupon or Zynga as a “failure” for being worth merely a couple billion dollars when they were once worth ten billion plus apiece. (You could get pretty rich failing like that a few times.)

> But the real driver is not just that it’s easy to misread a story as confirming your beliefs. It’s that the alternative is to read a story and realize you were wrong. And since a middlebrow dismissal is a dismissal of something, it’s generally a dismissal of something that disagrees with the reader’s bias.

That last paragraph was oddly hard for me to parse this morning, possibly because I havn’t thought enough about this aspect of confirmation bias.

Be conciencious when dismissing something that’s inconsistent with your world view, seems like very good advice, at least if the source is credible.

Ahh, that's helpful, thanks! I think I unconsciously strip out a lot of that tone when I read, but I can see how it would be unhelpful

A bigger problem on HN these days is the highbrow lowbrow dismissal, wherein people come up with fancy-sounding reasons for rejecting comments, that are actually themselves lazy/incorrect arguments.

For example: when the paper itself says that the cognitive declines seen in people who don’t spend time hospitalized are a small fraction of the magnitude of the cognitive declines seen in hospitalized patients (Figures 2, 3; in some cases a cognitive benefit is seen in mild cases), yet a comment observing that the effects are confined to a small population is dismissed for the reason that “professional medical researchers would have thought of that”.

I was specifically referring to the claim the effects were probably due to sedation, etc. , not the observation that the study was of hospitalized cases.

So? The OP observed that the most severe effects were in a very small population of hospitalized patients. You fixated on a (plausible) hypothesis made that this could be due to sedation, and used it to reject the entire argument, even though the OP’s point is right, and your argument is a lowbrow dismissal that “experts would have thought of it”.

By the way: as far as I can tell, the paper doesn’t discuss this issue anywhere.

So, your only response is to make an insult based on my comment history.

What a compelling, “high brow” response.