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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

This is correct. It's because, basically definitionally, the amount of people who have deeply engaged with any topic is very low compared to the number of people who have shallowly engaged with it. This means that the amount of reference material written by people with deep understanding will be much much less than the amount of reference material written by people with shallow understanding.

"Back in the day", this problem was addressed by having significant hurdles in order to publish material on a topic. E.g., books used to be the primary way to learn about a topic, and in order to publish a book you must 1) deeply engage with the material for quite a while simply to write the book and 2) become fairly credentialed / convince a publisher you're worth their time, etc. Same thing with academic papers.

The internet has completely removed all barriers to publishing, meaning it's up to us to sort the wheat from the chaff.

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> the amount of people who have deeply engaged with any topic is very low compared to the number of people who have shallowly engaged with it

I've been feeling this more and more in relation to software. It feels like the more popular a piece of software is and the more people use it, the harder it is to find and talk to users of said software who have engaged with it past an extremely "shallow" level. I constantly encounter significant, easy to reproduce bugs and issues in very popular software used by millions of people, maybe even tens or hundreds of millions, but if I try to look for any sort of discussion about it online, I usually get nothing.

It feels much easier to discuss software with other real people who use it and think about how they use it when it's something really niche used by maybe a few thousand people at most.

Completely agree with this. Most recently I had this feeling with Unity; I deeply tried to learn and understand it for a few months, only to be stymied at every time by obvious, critical bugs that it didn't seem like anyone else was even encountering.

My suspicion is that most people who engage with Unity are amateur engineers. Nothing wrong with that, of course.

Is that really true about books? Wouldn't you just need to convince someone your going to sell enough and how accurate the information is wouldn't be important? Im sure you can find books or textbooks claiming evolution isn't real.

> meaning it's up to us to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I was thinking about this the other day. How do you sort out conflicting information when your not an expert your self. I don't know who to trust sometimes.

That used to be at least somewhat true about scientific and technical books. Major publishers protected their brands by hiring editors with some subject matter expertise. Of course, we understood that those books could be outdated, incomplete, or biased but for established publishers the quality was generally fairly good.

In general you talk to other known experts in the field and see what they say.

If you don't find an expert in the field and you publish a crappy book you tend to get a number of reviews (hopefully before you send it out to retail) that your book sucks.

When selling books about fake evolution you're not looking for an expert in the field, you're looking to see if you have an audience that would eat it up.

You as a buyer have publisher's reputation as a filter. There's still chaff but it's a bit easier to avoid.

This is what credentials used to signal, but I’m not sure they’re as reliable anymore…

Yeah, like here on HN the blogs are usually written by people who just learned about the topic and then you go to the comments to see what the people who know more says. People who know seems to not think it is worth it to write a blog about it, but they can comment on posts others write and correct them when they are wrong.

misaligned incentives. people get rewarded for simply publishing SOMETHING. look at companies, bootcamps, whatever the hell. most promotions are given bc you've written some low effort blog post that really add nothing to the broader intelligence of software building. hell, even bootcamps are like "go write/publish something!!" and most of these people have barely a clue as to how software operates. GL sifting through all of that useless content

i wouldn't be surprised if a very large percentage of the last decade of tech blog posts are just remnants of someone's promotion, and is now hyperlinked on some resume, or linkedin page

But how do you know the people in the comments actually know more and aren't just an equivalently low but slightly different common denominator? You don't. The same "shallow knowledge vs deep knowledge" problem still applies.

I often read topics where I am an expert, the comments has better information than the blog in most cases. Comments are written by multiple people since there are corrections from others below the comments etc, that makes them far better than most blogs. Single humans are wrong about a lot, multiple humans arguing are way more accurate.

> Single humans are wrong about a lot, multiple humans arguing are way more accurate.

I think this is only true if the commentors are SME's & operating in good faith. We've all seen whole threads hijacked by erroneous groupthink, while the 1 or 2 SME's were buried.

The case where the hordes of commentors with casual knowledge downvote the one guy who knows enough to have some nuance because his opinion doesn't fit with their simple but wrong understanding seems far more common.

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