> anti-curiosity and anti-learning

You nailed it. If I could go a bit deeper, I think the drive-by cynicism comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of people.

Statistically, you are probably not significantly smarter or dumber than most people you meet. In other words, someone who has spent months or years on a problem probably knows more about it than you do if you’re just now reading about it. So if someone with more experience is doing something you think is dumb, your first reaction should be to ask why rather than dismiss.

I couldn’t upvote this enough. A lot of drive-by cynicism I see these days is really just a lack of curiosity and bad faith assumptions (this guy must be an idiot, etc.).

I see it a lot in practice especially when discussing early-stage business ideas.

>It is possible that the YouTuber guy is a total idiot and decided to make a $1000 wheelchair instead of buying a $200 one, but that shouldn’t be a default assumption, haha.

Seems insane to assume that but we see it in tech all the time where someone unknowingly spends a ton of money on reinventing something that already exists.

Asking a question is "anti-curiosity"?

The piece raises at least a half-dozen possible answers, not all of which are compatible. The author pushes the "low cost" angle quite heavily at the start, so there being much cheaper options is reason enough, IMO, to ask the question what the point of the project is.

They say the chair won't make money, but it's a for profit company. They say they want it to be employee owned and to make their employees lots of money.

The author basically says 'it's a good second chair' (not a quote) that lacks in some features their own chair has. The piece also talks about cutting out expensive considerations like assessment by a physio and assessment of pressure points - that doesn't sound great, although if it's just a second chair, maybe those matter much less.

It seems more like the YouTubers decided to make a $2M wheelchair - real estate, machinery, employees, etc. Then see if they could spin it out to a short lead-time, online customer-specified production.

Good luck to them. Hopefully it will turn into a great example of a cooperative that's producing well-engineered affordable wheelchairs.

Indeed. If I google for 30 seconds, and see a stark contradiction with what somebody offers, I try not to conclude that that the guy in question is a fool. This is always possible, but rarely true.

Instead I conclude that likely my understanding is lacking, and maybe educating myself a little bit would be beneficial. Either I find out something new and potentially useful about the world, or finally see through a swindle and understand how it works, which is always a good skill to exercise.

Probably because of the title. A 1$k wheelchair doesn't sound like anything special. While their selling point is that it's a $1k wheelchair that is actually worth that money.

> anti-curiosity and anti-learning

It's the epitome of current state of the internet. We're on a social platform with coins to be gathered, which doesn't induce a deep, well though discussion, rather short snarky comments that gets clicked.

It’s like being outraged and asking “Trek and Cannondale exist, why do we need fifty other bike makers?” When some new manufacturers pop up.

I don’t get the negativity.

One of the more valid use cases for AI is scanning forums an auto-labeling/hiding low quality comments.

My cynical assumption is that most startups start out with a grand vision that they overpromise and underdeliver on. Especially if it's a content creator, where I assume that they started with a need to monetize their brand and then came up with a product idea.

This guy claims to be different in that he has enough money already and he's just trying to make the world a better place, but pretty much every startup makes claims about how they're different and therefore they're going to succeed. They can't all be right. I'd prefer to hear unbiased opinions about viability from intelligent people on HN/reddit/twitter rather than biased opinions from the guy who's trying to market his company.

I'm not saying that this wheelchair is going to flop, I'm just defaulting to skepticism of new ideas in general.

He's certainly not an idiot, and it's clear he wants to sell $1000 wheelchairs in order to earn money.