Reddit and hn are both full of pseudo-intellectuals masticating on something some (frequently illegitimate) authority says. Meanwhile, skepticism or different perspective is frequently washed out by a bunch of tools who have effectively been trained to propagate a facile "consensus" as dictated by popular media.
So I'll go ahead and do my simple maintenance routine that can be communicated in a 5 x 4 table while redditors read high school tier essays about how calorie io is a flawed paradigm and long-term weight loss isn't possible.
I think it’s a problem when it turns to - being skeptical for the sake of it.
Not been too long on HN but the top comments on most threads are a contrarian one (and one which I truly appreciate because it provides a different POv) but sadly because it is encouraged through the high upvotes, the crowd tendency is to regress towards this approach, even if sometimes the rigour of the critique is lacking
Every once in a while I'll come across threads like this on HN where most posters make enormous assumptions, are confidently incorrect, or refuse to be even slightly open-minded, and it makes me lose faith in this place. It comes off as a red flag, indicative of the rest of the site.
There's a relevant Reddit quote that I don't have access to at the moment, but it goes something like this:
"I'm an expert on X topic. I've seen people talking about my subject of expertise with extreme inaccuracy many times before and its irritating... Immediately afterwards I'll move into another thread and will forget everything I just witnessed and will take reasonably convincing posts as factual (Even though they're of the exact same nature as the post that was entirely wrong but was reasonable and convincing enough that it got hundreds of upvotes)."
To add: this is also why many other discussions suck: politics, economics, religion, etc.
Everyone's a fucking expert, can disregard science because [someone on tv] disagrees with peer-reviewed studies, and there's no obvious correct answer.
At least on HN it's moderately fact-based, even in disagreement. If you dare to read discussions--dare I call them that--on somewhere like Facebook or Reddit...well, godspeed.
This perfectly captures my frustration with Reddit. I can't stand it these days. It's been eye opening to read about technical subjects on Reddit that I personally know a lot about only to see heaps of confidently spewed misinformation in the comments. Makes me question the validity of everything I read where I'm not very knowledgeable. I'm very grateful HN is a lot more thoughtful and open to questioning.
I personally notice this most frequently on the topic of human nutrition. Most days I don't bother to read the comments on ANY nutrition article because they're too depressingly wrong.
The point isn't really to discover the opinions of redditors, it is to ingest the 'common sense' things that you would never find out from reading scientific papers or even books.
You are right about HN folks. I asked this question prompted by a topic discussed here during the past week, in which many people were commenting and sounding like experts. But because I knew deeply about it (having written my Master’s thesis on it), I noticed how mistaken they were — despite making their opinions sound like facts.
It makes me wonder: should this make us disregard many more discussions? Because what if the comments on those are as “untrustworthy” as the comments shown in that thread I know about?
I often feel the same way when discussions pop up here or on other forums, about topics I'm familiar with. Like randos declaring that researchers in deep learning are "obviously doing it wrong" and they should instead do X, where X is like an entire subfield existing for years with a lot of activity, etc.
So I get where you're coming from. But I'd suggest that a place like HN is in fact a place for random people to inject their half-baked takes. It is a just discussion board where lots of the comments will be uninformed or wrong. Take it or leave it. If you want something else, you need to find more niche communities that are - by the nature of it - more difficult to find and less public, including IRL discussion, clubs, conferences etc. But it has its use: we, you and me can jump in any thread and type out what we think after 2 minutes and get some response. But of course someone even more novice might think that we know more than just that 2 minutes consideration, and they learn our junk opinion as if it was the result of long experience. It's unavoidable, since nobody knows who the rest of the commenters are.
Online discussions are incredibly noisy, and often even the people who seem to use the jargon and seem knowledgeable to the outsider can be totally off-base and essentially just imitate how the particular science or field "sounds like". Unfortunately, you only learn this gradually and over a long time. If you learn stuff through forums, Reddit, HN, blogs, substacks etc. it can be very misleading from the first-person experience because you will soak up lots of nonsense as well. Reading actual books and taking real courses is still very much relevant.
HN and co. are more like the cacophony of what the guy on the street thinks. Very noisy, and only supposed to be a small treat over rigorous study. You shouldn't expect to see someone truly breaking new ground in this comment thread. If it disturbs you, you can skip the comments. But trying to "forbid" it, or gatekeep is futile. It's like trying to tell people in a bar not to discuss how bad the soccer team coach is, because they don't really have the relevant expertise. Yeah, sure, but people just wanna chat and throw ideas around. It's on the reader to know not to take it too seriously.
These days, it looks like everyone on HN comes with a preconceived notion about the company, topic, product, technology a given submission is and write their views as if they are expert on everything before reading the post and giving it a thought. e.g. in this post, Waymo, a company who has spent billions of dollars and years of work and research and being where they are right now, is posting about their plans. It's obvious they must have thought about the traffic, the jaywalkers, the complex intersections, the weather before making this decision. But let's ignore that and post how this is a bad idea. Being a skeptic is fine. It just feels like the skepticism is dialed to 11 here.
There is nothing technical about the replies, nothing hacker about them. Just, "I am very smart" comments.
Why do I have to? Why does everything have to be spoon fed?
Some of the most valuable learning I have done has been through researching topics out of my own interest, sometimes spurred by and idea or a couple of words I came across somewhere. You learn very little by being spoon fed. I am not here to spoon feed anyone.
If someone wants to refute what I said, take the time to go ascertain whether or not my point is valid. Googling is pretty easy. Until you (plural you) have done that, don't spew off a bunch of irrelevant nonsense that makes you (plural) look like a fool.
The punch line here is very simple: If you ready my original comment, there's NOTHING whatsoever on there that is false. Yet it was attacked mercilessly and down-voted to hell and back. And so was nearly every single comment I had to make after that to defend myself and my position.
Shooting the messenger is a sport around here.
And then someone really smart came along and he/she decided to take a few moments to actually and see if I was full of shit or not. And a link was posted. And, guess what, it corroborated absolutely everything I said about the transition from 55 to 65.
Yet nobody apologizes and the barrage of down-votes and attacks continues because, well, the kids just don't want to be wrong. Well, fuck you all. Grow up and go learn something.
HN sucks at this.
It is ruled by what I perceive to be a petulant mob of post-adolescents who just got free from Mommy and Daddy and now have to be right all the time in the face of reality. And don't get me started about the manure-filled ideas they soaked-up in college and took to be true without any thought, consideration or validation with reality at all.
Important? Not really. HN is mostly a waste of time as a participant exactly because of this mob of post-diaper members who make discussing anything just about impossible. The sport is to find holes in your comments and savagely attack them with comments, down votes or both. It's a true mob of bully's.
I've been pretty busy lately and have mostly ignored HN for probably months (don't really have a clue how long). I've picked up reading an article here and there from a quick browse of the first page but no discussions of any substance in a while. Frankly, not sure why I got into this thread. I'm on vacation, that must be why. And I actually regret it. I hate dealing with ignorant, entitled, petulant 20-somethings. And that's what HN is full of.
I'll phase myself back into read-only mode. I'll let the morons own the castle.
Of course this comment will be met with the usual dosage of savage come-backs and down votes. Have fun kids, whatever floats your boat.
Yes, absolutely! I actually had the same thought yesterday and I walked away from HN for a break, grumbling to myself about how true the old joke is about computer programmers having so much hubris that they think they are smart enough to solve every problem in the world ;-). See also Soylent.
Yesterday it was just an overload because we must have had a half dozen 737MAX threads in the previous 24 hours. And the quality of the commentary was going down, not up, as time went on.
Totally agree with your advice to keep in mind that this applies to all topics. A little part of me keeps whispering that I should avoid looking at the comments altogether. I rationalize that on HN I am getting good quality commentary and the first few contrary arguments will help me see the article/news/whatever in an objective light, but then I totally get sucked in.
Oh I agree wholeheartedly! I usually don't comment much anymore, but this one was egregious enough to make me login and post a warning.
The unfortunate thing is I've seen an increasing amount of this garbage on HN that purports to be "scientific" or "logical" but is clearly just pop pysch or just the ruminations of someone who sounds intelligent.
Of course everyone dismisses that as "Oh, it was at least interesting and thought provoking"... to which I say that there's no point in wasting time eating garbage in the kitchen when there's a dinner table full of steak in the next room...
Not sure if this is too far down in your inbox, but I will write nonetheless...
> This is one of those cases where it's helpful, in fact indispensable, to remember that there is exactly one thing we're optimizing for on HN, namely intellectual curiosity...
Dang, respectfully, is it not true that "we are optimizing for" is a function of not only moderation, but the inherent (lack of) capabilities of rather feature sparse threaded internet discussions with upvotes/downvotes/flagging?
There's no doubt, "it is what it is", but perspectives upon reality that are limited to only how reality currently is overlooks how reality could be, such as if moderation here was not so good (a portion you seem to see clearly, as ample evidence exists elsewhere) or if the features of a forum were strategically expanded (a portion you may not see so clearly, since afaik there's not really anything much more sophisticated out there).
As you say in another comments:
> To repeat, lest anyone misunderstand: my remarks are limited to HN, which is the space I've observed enough to speak about. I'm not saying HN is an exception, and I'm not saying it isn't an exception; I don't know.
> Edit: two more points. First, I think there's a perspective bias here. We all assume that we're the smart one capable of making judgments about what the dumber ones might think, but literally everyone sees themselves that way. That shows not only that we can't all be right about that, but—more interestingly—that this entire line of thinking is invalid. It's a hard-wired unreliable narrator.
As you clearly know, human judgment (even that of intelligent people) is highly unreliable, and this unreliability is typically invisible to the individual. I believe that features could be added to forum software that could improve upon this situation, over and above the manual moderator moderation and downvote mechanisms that are currently our only defences.
> Second and last, if HN readers aren't smart enough to make up their own minds, then this place is fucked, so we might as well make a Pascal's wager.
Or, we could transform the fabric of reality, which is to some arguably significant degree composed of the forum software that facilitates communication between nodes (human minds) within this system.
Of course, I am not insisting that you do this, I am only offering it as an idea for your consideration.
It's only when HN discuss a topic in which you are an expert in that you realise 90% of the comments are absolute nonsense. It happens every time there is a biology topic as well.
I very quickly gave up reading the comments on the guardian web site. Many, even a majority, are insulting and regurgitated opinions by people unopen to changing their mind, they simply want to shout their (often unappetising) opinion at you.
HN on the contrary is populated by people (like myself, I hope) who wish to learn. They engage in discussion in order to improve themselves, not to win arguments.
4 hours is far too long BTW. I'm sure there must be better things you can do.
It's this. Normal people might quickly read some comments on Reddit and then go on with their lives without digging into them, building a false consensus in their minds. They never really think to challenge what they read, not because they're dumb or anything like that, but because people only have so much time and energy to put towards critically analyzing what they see online.
If there was a similar forum for doctors, lawyers or other professionals you'd probably see the same level of discourse.
As others have pointed out, the voting system means you only see the best of the comments. And even then when HN strays "off topic" (i.e. away from science and tech) the commentary is far less on point.
And don't get me started on the "middle-brow dismissal"...
> HN comments (laypeople in general) tend to make very confident and very wrong comments on {X}
Yes, it's annoying. From conspiracy theorists to supposedly smart people with PhD's, I'll catch them in a fiction. "You just made all of that up," I'll say, to which they reply with handwaving and equivocation. Why are we so reticent to be comfortable with our own ignorance and hold our tongue?
So I'll go ahead and do my simple maintenance routine that can be communicated in a 5 x 4 table while redditors read high school tier essays about how calorie io is a flawed paradigm and long-term weight loss isn't possible.
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