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Comment by mrjangles | Hacker News Reader

I come to HN to learn new things in fields I know little about, like tech and computers, I always find the comments to be authoritative and interesting.

However, whenever I read the comments on any subject I happen to know something about, like physics, they are always completely nonsense from people who clearly have absolutely not even the smallest amount of experience in the area they are talking about. The worst part is, all these comments sound extremely authoritative, if I didn't know any better I would have believed they were experts.

This makes me very worried about the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect. I'm very worried that all the comments I've been reading on here about tech and computer topics are also just from larpers who are pretending to be experts but actually don't know anything.

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I think the discussion of computer stuff here is much better than the physics discussion. It is a website about startups after all.

I only know a tiny bit of modern physics, and in a sort of backdoor fashion through electrical engineering, and even I can spot the occasional "this guy learned quantum physics via Star Trek" post.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is real here. The difference is that, for many computer and computer-adjacent topics, the principals will often chime in. That gets you a level of authoritativeness that's hard to match. Even within computer topics, though, you see authoritative-sounding comments that are just wrong. That happens like clockwork in any thread having to do with undefined behavior, for example.

I also know a little about Covid (having a minor in molecular and cell biology, and obsessively consuming resources like TWiV for a while), and the median amateur virologist comment here is just a howler. Occasionally you'll have people who really know what they're talking about comment, but it usually gets drowned out.

The key, then, as always, is to read everything critically. Then there's some real insight to be gained here.

I feel the same when reading comments about medicine. I'm absolutely ignorant of that field, but I cringe at the authoritative sounding comments often found in HN.

From what I've seen on HN, things about tech implementations and software libraries are generally rock-solid. But if you venture into something else, such as QM, the humanities or god-forbid politics, that's when it becomes a nightmare mix of pseudo-intellectualism.

That isn't to say that there aren't voices from experts in those fields that contribute to the discussion, but they are usually drowned out with "The sample size it too small" with an n=20000 or "they aren't letting different ideas into [insert scientific field here]" as they've mentioned further up in this thread.

name and shame, so those of us non-experts can spot the bad comments.

Please correct wrong information without shaming others. We're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang, you read every comment on every thread?

And you stay polite and interactive?!

Are you sure you are human?

Nope–not even close. You're just seeing random data points and then the brain fills in the in-between spaces ;)

I wish I could do more actually - especially right now because the war is putting a lot of pressure on the container here.

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