It is, but I find all of Seth's posts are this way. He is good at formulating ideas which seems obvious after you read them. ;-) But I don't consider him being some deep thinker who could put forward some "radically new approach".
All his posts are "a bit hollow".
He tries to provoke thought, not offer solutions.
There is nothing wrong with that; just a new age philosopher?
OFF Topic: I wish he would have offered a link to the study he mentioned. That would be like someone blogging about him and not offering a link.
I personally get a lot out of Seth's perspective, but I can certainly understand that his posts are not what most HN readers are looking for.
FWIW, I think the point wasn't to suggest that there is some new hammer; just that you should be aware that there's a very high chance you're not seeing a bigger picture due to confirmation bias or whatever.
(Disclaimer: I advocate metaprogramming. Also humor.)
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.219431....
The massive burst in innovation that we've seen in the past several decades is caused by a bunch of people making a bunch of new hammers for a bunch of different problem types. In addition, there are certain hammers -- like statistical methods or X-rays or computer networking -- that can be applied to a ranging scope of problems that no one ever predicted before.
Seth is right, you have to find the right tool for the job. But your job is also to imagine and construct a new hammer.
At least in my own experience, engineers tend to solve problems by building things to solve the problems. Sometimes the answer is to remove parts until those problems don't exist.
The key skills is being able to tell when you're stuck using hammer because it's what you're familiar with, and he doesn't discuss that at all.
