Spending three paragraphs complaining about it is probably a little misguided, however.

His argument about children and their lack of genuine creativity seems a little misplaced - they are disparaged as 'tinkerers' rather than creators, but I can think of no better word than 'tinkerer' to describe Leonardo, or indeed many other great artists/scientists.

Aside from all that, I can think of plenty of reasons why anti-intellectualism would exist:

- not all forms of expert knowledge are equally valid. It was only around 100 years ago that medical expertise progressed to the point where it was more likely to cure than kill you.

- the value of expert knowledge/intellectual capital can be hard to determine. For example, once you move past the hard sciences, to sociology and literary theory and beyond, how much is contributed to human knowledge and wellbeing? How much power/status should be accorded to people in these intellectual disciplines?

- societies are composed of counterbalancing forces, between elements which are conservative/progressive, peaceful/aggressive, practical/visionary etc. No more than every business can be a startup, how can all people in a society consider intellectual investigation the main objective, as opposed to more mundane aspects of maintaining and running the society?

- science seems to have been stranded on one side of an ideological divide, where its support/derision is now a badge of political identity.

Permit me to disagree. The Erlang flood was not a favor to Erlang, from my perspective. Because if there is one thing I do not have it is the time to read an entire page full of in-depth links on a topic that I barely know the first thing about. Especially when at least half of those links aren't necessarily good: They were chosen mainly because their titles contained the word "Erlang". Yesterday was not about quality. It was about quantity.

All that yesterday accomplished for me was to create a subconscious association between Erlang and concepts like boring and spam and slushpile, an association which I must now work to overcome. Any good links in that pile were lost in the shuffle. And this is terrible, because the design of HN is such that a link cannot be submitted twice unless you find a way to hack its URL. (It's a perverse form of reverse SEO. I'm pretty sure that standard SEO advice is to give each piece of content a single, canonical link -- but text which is accessible by multiple URLs can be submitted multiple times to HN.)

If you want to promote excellent, deeper articles on a specific technical topic the correct plan is to release them gradually. Declare Wednesday to be Erlang Day and submit one Erlang link to HN each week. Or, if you want, declare Erlang Week and do one article per day. But don't waste our time. Don't overwhelm us with noise.

I think that argues even more for flooding the front page with ultra-geeky stories. Several people (including me) discovered that we found a page full of Erlang stories more interesting than a lot of the more general common interest stories often found on the front page. We should try to create more "Erlang...Wow!!!" moments by promoting more articles with deeper content.

I tried to start a thread about promoting lots of deeper articles on a specific technical topic as a "theme of the day" kind of thing. The thread was killed, not sure if it was because it was thought to be an attempt at humor or if it just runs counter to the spirit of Hacker News. But I still think more articles with deeper content on the front page makes for a better Hacker News.