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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

> If this happens on Hacker News, no wonder the rest of the world is even worse.

Is there any reason to assume HN should be better then anyone else?

Well yes. They most certainly have a higher rate of tertiary education (and thus exposure to scientific method) than the general population.

Higher education does not make you less prone to cognitive bias. And education in one field does not make you accurate in another field.

I don’t believe you. Can you back that up?

Daniel Khaneman has done extensive work in cognitive biases and still admits it doesn't improve his ability to avoid them in himself. If someone well-educated in that specific field can't improve much, I doubt there can be claims that education in general is much help.

Generally, HN people are more educated and better trained in logical thinking (most being engineers of some sort or in other professions that require a bit more thinking). Hence, the GP's expectation, I assume.

However, this is just my impression from reading comments here for a few years. I may as well be wrong. Smart people do have their own blindspots, too.

Edit: I noticed you were downvoted, and I disagree with that. Your question is reasonable.

Whether logical thinking gets you to correct result strongly depends on assumptions you make and model you apply the logical thinking on. And my impression is that HN is not really good at those. It also starts to fail when the assumptions are only sorta kinda true, with many asterixis, because logical implications then treat them as true.

Very very often, people start with very wild assumptions and then make wild implications on them, even the ones that are directly contradicted by article they comment on or simple search.

That's how you get conversations, and eventually progress. To me, that's the attraction of public forums like HN: people (including myself) make assumptions, and conversation often (or sometimes?) leads to corrections. If we'd all be working with perfectly correct assumptions, we would not need forums anymore. We'd just be fed information, process it in exactly the same way and reach the exact same conclusions. In my experience, this is not really possible with humans.

What it primary does instead is to disseminate feel good assumptions. Because the people don't state them as assumptions, they claim them to be facts. The conversation does not lead to corrections often enough in programming and business unrelated topics.

That is fairly normal, group of people talking about something they dont know much about is not supposed to randomly pivot to correct conclusions. But, HN is uniquely convinced HN is superior in this regard.

I take it you are also uniquely convinced that you are superior in this regard, then. :)

But here's an honest question: why are you on HN, then? Sure, it's a decent source of tech&related news. But there's no reason for you to spend time reading and writing comments, if you truly believe it's as bad as you say.

It is light tech adjacent news with a taste of drama and arguing, but not too much drama. Because I wait for tests to run and want to idle kill time. Cause I am procastinating.

I use it same way as reddit, basically. Except this don't sends notifications so it is less pushy.

> Generally, HN people are more educated and better trained in logical thinking

The main effect this has is that HN people have an overinflated sense of their own competence, and are more blind to their own ignorance.

I do not disagree, and I hoped it was already visible from my initial comment. But, on average, you probably still get better results from HN crowd than from other crowds, in matters that require knowledge and logical thinking. Do you disagree?

Absolutely disagree. I think HN is massively blind to its own biases, and makes the wrong calls very often as a result.

Ok, I can accept that as a possibility.

But here's a curiosity: why are you here, then? What do you derive from reading all the comments from people that are by default wrong? Isn't it a massive waste of your time to read large number of comments, just to occasionally find one that you agree with as being correct?

I am here to get thoughts on tech, tech news, and tech related things. I am outside of that world, and want to get an insider's perspective on my own views.

When it comes to education (my field), HN is generally very, very similar to any other large online group such as facebook or reddit - the biases and areas of ignorance are the same.

So, in other words, I come here to read and learn about the things this site should know about - technology and related fields. Whereas comment sections such as this one, I consume much the same as 'opinion articles'.

Not who you were originally replying to, but I find myself in a similar boat. I don't necessary add any more weight to a comment simply because its on HN.

But I do find HN useful in terms of randomly coming across topics that may be of tangential use in my work. Also, it tends to have more discussions that I'm interested in if I just want to blow off some steam on a forum and tends to have less vitriol than, say, a sub-Reddit

I am here for similar reasons, and I don't spend much time anywhere else, again for reasons similar to yours. On average, I found HN to be good, and that I believe is due to the people who contribute here. And I am rather surprised to see that some people have such a bad impression of the overall quality of the contributors.

Maybe it's due to my approach to HN comments: if I find something interesting, I read, upvote and dive further into the thread; sometimes I comment. Otherwise, I move on.

The problem is that “other crowds” is an amorphous and meaningless concept. In one context “other crowds” means the US/EU population as a whole, in which case sure, HN readers are on average probably more educated and better-informed. But in another context “other crowds” might mean “experts in the humanities and social sciences,” compared to which the average HN reader is hopelessly ignorant unless the question is specifically about programming. And indeed it is the humanities and social sciences where HN’s blindness and ignorance is most obvious, and its arrogance most undeserved.

For esoteric topics, HN can’t be beat. For specific topics, like medical issues, Reddit or Facebook are often amazing.

Have condition X. Doctors say Y, which doesn’t actually help.

Support groups will have a long list of things to try. Questions to ask doctors lifestyle changes. Up to date info on diagnosis/ treatment.

What tests should be run, how to interpret tests.

Medications side effects doctors don’t know about.

I always assumed a Facebook medical support group would be all nonsense. Instead it’s got tons of people who have spent years researching and experimenting, and have amazing advise to give.

Simple example. Was going to the bathroom 10+ times a night. Years of doctors were zero help.

Someone suggested aloe Vera freeze dried pills. 3 days later I was sleeping through the night.

Medical community is both amazing and full of major gaps.

I found http://n-gate.com/ helpful.

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