Please don't post snark like this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the days when Sussman was a novice Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe."

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play"

Minsky shut his eyes,

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that momment, Sussman was enlightened.

That's not any less contemptuous and juvenile than your previous comment.

To whom am I showing contempt? Please explain.

(Remember: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.)

The entire comment was a quotation of something written by someone else, which made me wonder whether you felt that the person you were replying to did not deserve the effort it would have taken to express yourself in your own words.

Being something written for another context with no words added by you to explain how it fits into the current context puts more work on the reader, which implies that the reader needs to put in work to continue to hold up their end of the conversation (whereas you don't need to put in much work or at least don't need to indicate to us that you are putting in work) which in turn tends to put you in the position of a teacher assigning us something to read as homework.

Its being longer than the average HN comment tend to carry the same implication.

Although the comment only weakly implies contempt, your previous comment also implied contempt. If you want me to, I can explain that one, too.

I concede that it is impossible for me to tell whether you actually felt any contempt while writing your 2 comments, but many readers react negatively to even weak signs that contempt might be present.

More importantly, if people see you get away with comments like those 2, that acts as a sort of informal invitation for them to do likewise.

>The entire comment was a quotation of something written by someone else

Kinda the whole point of a koan. Doing my own would be cringe.

>did not deserve the effort it would have taken to express yourself in your own words

Not gonna argue with a mod myself. Nope.

>Although the comment only weakly implies contempt, your previous comment also implied contempt. If you want me to, I can explain that one, too.

Nah I definitely implied contempt to the guy who thought avocado oil is an unhealthy thing invented in the past 50 years.

>More importantly, if people see you get away with comments like those 2, that acts as a sort of informal invitation for them to do likewise.

Part of the point of my koan was to talk about what kind of things people might be invited to post here.

As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.

I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.

My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/c5y548258q9o

EDIT: grammatical cleanup

I‘m eating plant based meats regularly but I guess we all know how e.g. trans fats, high fructose corn sirup and probably more were once considered safe and are certainly not anymore

This is a hell of a straw man. The body is very well adapted to natural foods, and is efficient at using nutrients supplied in natural ways.

Engineered ingredients may or may not be equivalent, but they often remove nutrients that existed in whole foods, then attempt to add nutrients back in through industrial processing. But we still don’t know the full affects of that delivery method, but we do know that it can negatively impact the gut microbiome.

There’s enough evidence out there to be highly skeptical of ultra processed ingredients

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ultraprocessed-foods-bad-f...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41574-025-01218-5

I don’t think those links prove definitively that UPF is a direct cause of disease, but they show strong evidence that there are problems with UPF and we should probably eat more whole ingredients