I'm ny particularly pleased to burst your bubble, but this spirit is alive and well even here on HN. I know it's more fun to think of this as a bastion of rationality and reason, but it's not. Mote importantly, holding rationality and "facts" above all else is another source of different but related problems.
Not involving elephants.
Remember, the more sure you are of
something, the more you are likely to be blinded to its flaws.
That assertion could use some quotes to back it up. My perception of the marketing talk here is completely different. I think you are suffering from confirmation bias.
Remember, the more sure you are of something, the more you are likely to be blinded to its flaws.
That's tautological. "You don't see any reason to believe in a secret conspiracy? That's because it's so secret that there's no evidence!". Being aware of possible flaws is orthogonal to being sure about something. Hell, most of the time 'being sure' means 'having a balanced opinion, because you are aware of the different sides of the story'. Of course, while being critical of the question whether you are aware of the different sides of the story, etc. It's caveats all the way down, even when you are 'sure'.
LIFO: It's not a tautology. Tautology is a restating of the same thing a slightly different way.
Regarding that statement, I read a great book called "I'm with the brand" (Euro title) or "Buying In" (American title). I don't have it with me, so I can't cite pages, but in it, the author described various studies that suggest that the more a person believes himself to be "immune" to advertising messages, the greater their impact.
It dovetails nicely with the post-hoc justification studies that show that you can trick people into doing things, and later they will come up with reasons why that are completely unrelated to the real reasons. (E.g., reading stories with lots of priming words like "elderly" and "infirm" and "creaky," people walk more slowly, then they make up reasons why when asked).
And, as for the attitude on HN, it's more subtle. Like I said before, my geek's "internal thoughts" in the article were hugely caricaturized for effect.
What you see here, instead, is a mixture of the two:
1. People talking about how if you just build something great, you don't need to promote it, and
2. People who focus on local maxima with things like split-testing copy text changes, and Adwords tweaking, etc., rather than promotion strategies
To me, those are both signs of "marketing anxiety" of one stripe or another.
#1 - It's true that having a great product helps a lot, but it doesn't do all the work for you.
#2 - People avoid uncomfortable things. People on HN are stereotypically comfortable with numbers and quantifiable, provable things. So they take something uncomfortable to them ("marketing") and turn it into something comfortable ("split-testing").
But there is a big difference between advertising and marketing, and optimization and marketing. There is a big difference also between conversion tactics and marketing.
Marketing is the big picture under which all those things fall -- and a lot more, too, which goes silent here on HN.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about a long-term promotional strategy that wasn't almost entirely about ads and conversion strategy.
Not involving elephants.
Remember, the more sure you are of something, the more you are likely to be blinded to its flaws.