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I’ve realized after building a small amount of competency in 2-3 narrow fields over the years how wrong most people are about those same topics online. Since be
by ibn-python 6y ago
I’ve realized after building a small amount of competency in 2-3 narrow fields over the years how wrong most people are about those same topics online. Since becoming aware of this several years ago I’ve slowly limited my surfing to higher quality sites such as this one. I’ve always wondered how many completely incorrect beliefs I have about the world due to the compulsive surfing/reading of my younger years.
- RhodesianHunter 6y agoI don't feel like this really changes much with competency due to Dunning Krugerand competency being a near limitless spectrum. How many times have you come in to hacker news and read someone's complaint about x where "someone" is an expert with a decade of experience in the field only to have someone else chime in with the "well actually, I'm the creator of that project and..."
- whoisburbansky 6y agoUnrelated, but the missing space between Kruger and "and" had me go down the rabbit hole of trying to piece together what your comment had to do with Bitcoin. Dunning-Krugerrand is used in certain circles to refer to the crypto coin, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion.
- User23 6y agoThat plus GP’s username made me laugh
- dougmwne 6y agoSame. I was working on some personal projects that are not of a technical nature. There was a lot of information and discussions on the internet about it, but it was all incredibly wrong and written with great confidence by people who had zero authority on the topic. I ended up hiring professionals to help and I got my money's worth. My conclusion is the internet is mostly marketing and entertainment aside from a few very specific corners.
- kasey_junk 6y agoYou’ll read pretty wildly off comments on this site about certain topics. For instance, it’s gotten better over time but effectively anytime you see comments about how the markets work on HN it will be filled with inaccuracies.
- TylerE 6y agoMy personal favorite: Any topic involving airplanes will involve 99% of the people sounding very confidant and very very wrong.
- kasey_junk 6y agoI have no knowledge of nuclear sea vessels but the sheer number of comments and the certainty implied makes me suspicious on that topic.
- User23 6y agoI don’t know about that, but I’m absolutely certain the bicycle shed needs to be green.
- sentenza 6y agoBelieve me, there are worse topics. The best way to get yelled at or down-voted on HN is having a basic understanding of how EU regulations and the EU legislative process work.
- mongol 6y agoThat is actually a topic I hardly see discussed here. And one that would be interesting to see a factual discussion about. Seems to me that perceived conceptions about it are behind Brexit.
- claudiawerner 6y agoIf you think discussions on markets are bad, try philosophy, especially political philosophy, or sociology. I don't often comment on "very wrong" comments because they're unlikely to get anywhere. I've found that for all HN detests conformity, more often than not it tends to be a certain kind of perceived conformity, and more often, what is seen as conformity in startup culture. What is often missed in my (honestly) humble opinion, is that this counter-conformity rests squarely in the larger conformity!
- bitcharmer 6y agoI don't think HN is a higher quality site in the sense you are referring to here. At least not recently. You will see some well grounded, expert opinions here down-voted into oblivion simply because they clash with the mental picture of a number of HN users. As much as I love HN it is slowly sliding into reddit-ism.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI mean, people have been saying this basically since the site began: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057 (I didn't find these, they're linked in the site guidelines.)
- bitcharmer 6y agoI'm aware of that. It's just that it got much worse recently.
- Pfhreak 6y agoYou joined recently, not sure how you've got any ability to say it's gotten worse 'recently.' Unless you are referring to the past 10 months or so where there was one or two things that might have impacted the discourse a bit. HN still is the place it's always been. You have more data now, perhaps, but fundamentally it hasn't really changed. People continue to upvote and downvote in roughly the same ways, and they are used to agree and disagree just as they always have been.
- bitcharmer 6y agoWe might have different definitions of "recently", but I've been here 7 years in total: 3 years lurking, and 4 years as a user.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
- agumonkey 6y agoAlso how a majority of the world lives on the average wrong understanding of things. I guess society is not about precision efficiency.
- roenxi 6y ago> I’ve always wondered how many completely incorrect beliefs I have about the world due to the compulsive surfing/reading of my younger years. A good rule of thumb, if maybe excessively defensive, is the more strongly held a belief the more likely it is to be wrong. Reality has a nasty habit of being moderate, murky and uncertain. An extremist moderate might be on the right political track, I suppose. One of the fun parts of being an engineer is that they have to interact with the real world and the theoretical one and learn just how many stupid practical details blow apart theoretically pure ideas.
- drivebycomment 6y agoI wholeheartedly agree. I would add that it is very difficult to tell when to break away from that rule of thumb thus a good decision making is a never ending struggle with a self doubt and a leap of faith.
- austincheney 6y agoThat’s why I deleted my Reddit account.
- GuB-42 6y agoOne strange thing I noticed on HN is that some of my most upvoted posts are in area outside my field of expertise. I do everything I can to fact check myself, but I'm sure I have been wrong several times and there are people more qualified than me to answer. And some of my posts that are well within my field of expertise stay at zero. When I get downvoted it is usually when I post an unpopular opinion, but rarely as a result of being wrong. All this to say that while HN is, I think, one of the best communities, it doesn't mean you should leave your guard down. I'd say it is even more insidious here because you won't find easily debunked bullshit, no flat earthers here. Falsehoods here are to be subtle enough to go unnoticed by an educated mind, and you are not guaranteed to be corrected by a real expert.
- ehnto 6y agoMy least popular comments are also comments I have made with hard won experience in my field. My not-very-humble guess is that it is two fold: One, if you only have a shallow understanding of something, it is easy to dismiss things as wrong if they don't align with your understanding so far. Two, if you do have a deep understanding of a topic but different experiences in the field, you may have really strong opinions in a different direction. Disappointingly they are also usually the least discussed comments of mine and I rarely figure out why they were downvoted.
- croissants 6y agoCan you link to some of your "hard won experience" comments? Now I'm curious about them.
- randcraw 6y agoIn my case, I work for a large pharmaceutical. Many of the driving forces behind drug development or healthcare decisions arise in business priorities, practices, and regulations that are complex and unintuitive to outsiders. Unless I reinforce my POV with explanation of why and how these subterranean forces drive outcomes, I'm likely to find myself downvoted — presumably because readers discount my perspective as insufficiently plausible or wrong outright, perhaps because I haven't offered enough explanation. But since longwinded explication of arcane background minutiae is tiresome to write and for others to read, so I often demur to the detriment of my score.
- deathgrips 6y agoI think HN is lower quality than Reddit because it's harder to spot who doesn't know what they're talking about. On Reddit the clowns have bad grammar and don't even attempt to substantiate their beliefs. On HN the clowns have flowing prose, a Stanford degree and immaculate clown makeup.
- da02 6y agoWhat are those 2-3 fields? What are some of the things people say that are wrong about those topics?
- hinkley 6y agoI’m sure you’ve had the experience of being downvoted for being right but with unpleasant news.
- Bakary 6y agoThere's no guarantee that what you describe as higher quality sites offer much better views of the world.