[HN Gopher] Most of what you read on the internet is written by ...
___________________________________________________________________
Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people
(2018)
Author : zuhayeer
Score : 453 points
Date : 2021-01-01 02:37 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reddit.com)
| INTPenis wrote:
| A lot of people are just chasing that notification-high. Like the
| top youtube commenter mentioned in the OP.
|
| It's scary how addicitive it can be to receive little
| notifications of confirmation that you exist.
| motohagiography wrote:
| One wonders, who is reading them, precisely?
| hindsightbias wrote:
| The other 99%
| Guthur wrote:
| The use of the word insane has a little too much negativity in my
| opinion but otherwise it shouldn't be surprising the Pareto
| principle is at play here, it's the case on nearly every other
| example of output to one degree or another.
| koolk3ychain wrote:
| I could not agree more. Findings like this in regards to first
| party content on the internet, in other words content written
| deliberately for consumption or gain of some kind - will always
| essentially trend toward a surface level and / or biased take. At
| least in terms of what you will find via most search engines.
|
| This line of thinking I believe is one of the best cases to seek
| a college education instead of being self taught. The fallacy of
| "you can learn everything you could in college online" is quickly
| becoming more and more wrong. I hated college, I was bad at it,
| but I still value the time I spent working on hard things and
| having smart people provide a curated palette of application
| based knowledge. I know people who are self taught engineers,
| however by their own admission they're likely more focused or
| motivated than the average and acknowledge they likely closed the
| doors on many future opportunities given their lack of a degree.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Most of things we use during our day invented by people who put
| insane hours and effort into creating those things. There is a
| layer of factory workers between them and us, the only thing with
| the Internet is that this layer is fully automated here.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| I've read some content produced by schizophrenic people. It's
| pretty obvious. I would say that those mega comment guys are as
| insane as writer or artist. 99.9% of people don't write books or
| pictures.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Agreed, clearly a selection effect going on, not just in long
| content-filled opinions/articles, but also comments, even here on
| HN.
|
| Use caution and don't take the average commenter to represent
| reasonable consensus opinion -- in either how you think you
| should feel about your own opinion, or what you think others
| think. You have to have your own external sense of what's
| reasonable or not, tested by multiple sources.
|
| People who are opinionated here are generally outliers on the
| spectrum. (particularly on non-technical opinions about public
| policies) Those who feel strongly enough to take the time to
| write may not represent the mainstream.
| ehnto wrote:
| The real world is usually more dynamic, maleable and workable
| than the internet has you believe too.
|
| If you believed the internet, you would believe you can only ever
| use the best parts in the perfect configuration for almost
| everything. Be it metalwork, mountain biking, computing, drones
| or any other hobby regularly discussed online.
|
| The reality is you can make do with in so many different ways
| that if you can't afford the best you can still have oodles of
| fun on cheaper equipment. Half the fun is learning all this
| "expertise" the internet has on your own.
|
| Can't afford a Bridgeport mill? Buy something cheaper and work
| around the edge cases. Can't afford a full suspension bike? Get a
| hardtail and have tonnes of fun.
|
| Someone is always quick to add in the caveats, but guess what, a
| new rider doesn't give a shit that he can't send 8ft drops on his
| hard tail. There are hours of fun on the bike ahead, none of it
| sending 8ft drops. The new hobby machinist isn't bothered that
| they can't mill titanium, they are just stoked to be getting
| started.
| city17 wrote:
| Agreed. Funny thing is that even if you're aware of this it can
| affect you. I noticed this recently when I spent a bit of time
| watching 3D printing videos to find a solution to a small
| problem. When I was done watching this video I felt like I
| absolutely had to buy this much more expensive printer to get
| any decent results, which was completely false.
| ebiester wrote:
| Expanding on the rule I've heard is when starting, buy the
| cheapest thing that won't kill/discourage you, and use it until
| you break it or you explicitly understand the limitations, so
| that you know what to buy and what qualities to look for.
|
| I rarely am disappointed by this. When I started learning
| piano, I got a 100 dollar midi controller and connected it to
| my ipad or computer. It let me know that I wanted a quality
| digital piano as my next step.
| ufmace wrote:
| Agree on this being a good strategy. It also does a good job
| of covering the case where you learn that you aren't actually
| that interested in X, or are only interested enough to get a
| particular task done.
| audiometry wrote:
| This is such an underrated comment. I find so much of this
| "right way" thing to just be cliquish gate keeping.
| leetcrew wrote:
| even if I can afford it, I usually find it more satisfying to
| work my way up through tiers of equipment for {insert hobby}.
| it's hard to appreciate what makes the high-end stuff nice if
| you haven't tried the low- and mid-range first.
| Bakary wrote:
| I made a rule-of-thumb checklist for this sort of thing:
|
| -Is the advice primarily based on every more finely delineated
| consumption? (e.g. the bikes or mills you mentioned) Then you
| can safely ignore it as the users responding are well past the
| diminishing returns curve in their obsession
|
| -Are there any bits of advice that seem to pop up across
| various sources? - investigate and think about their validity
|
| -What are the main "things I wish I knew before starting" that
| keep popping up? - investigate and think
| runawaybottle wrote:
| You know, I've watched movies my whole life and now literally
| have a phone that could probably record good quality video to
| make a documentary or a short film, with platforms to upload and
| get it distributed to people.
|
| I just won't do it, but I'm not arrogant enough to call the
| people that _do_ do it insane.
| zuhayeer wrote:
| I would be curious how many people on Twitter tweet vs retweet vs
| just heart
| biolurker1 wrote:
| If that argument were true Trump wouldn't be president
| dang wrote:
| A thread from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| As this is a throwaway, I will not disclose the field I am
| working in, but I can say that anything out there on the web is
| 99-100% wrong, and the things that are shared in dearly expensive
| seminars are truthful, albeit a bit outdated and they like to
| omit 50% of the story. You truly learn when you are out there
| working on projects in a somewhat transparent company. There is a
| reason why experts in a field exist. Once companies desperately
| pay you to share your skills, you are building up a track record.
| Anything less is nothing.
|
| A good and worrying example are the many nodeJS tutorials on the
| matter of authentication or log in/session protocols. Good forbid
| if you implement that stuff in your own product. The devs posting
| these articles should and do know better but it seems like they
| are more after subscribers and revenue than anything else.
| dorkwood wrote:
| When I was younger, I wasted a lot of time following the advice
| of online strangers who seemed to have a lot of conviction in
| their ideas -- much more conviction than I'd ever had about
| anything myself. To me, that was a sign that they must know what
| they're talking about. It turned out to be the opposite. These
| days, I try not to blindly follow the advice of anyone who can't
| demonstrate their knowledge to me in some way; if you're telling
| me how to paint a picture, you better be able to show me one of
| your paintings.
| da02 wrote:
| What was some of the wrong advice you received in the past from
| this over-confident strangers?
| varjag wrote:
| The author has a point perhaps, but this
|
| _Twitch streamer Tyler Blevins (Ninja) films himself playing
| video games for people to watch for 12 hours per day_
|
| sounds not unlike any other workaholic at work.
|
| Replace 'gaming' with 'coding' and you'd hardly get anyone
| surprized on HN.
| excalibur wrote:
| I think sane people are a myth. If someone believes strongly in
| their own sanity, they're most likely even crazier than we are.
| mrfusion wrote:
| The only twist I'd add to this is that the 1% contributing could
| be different people at different times. So maybe spread over time
| it's a little more even.
|
| That matches how I contribute. I'll passively read comments for
| weeks or months, then get interested in something that comes up
| enough to start commenting on it.
| forgingahead wrote:
| This implication is striking, not just for us individuals &
| communities to realise how _niche_ perhaps opinions online are
| compared to our own, but also for engaging with:
|
| - Media orgs, that often take offhand/random opinions online and
| blow it up beyond proportion. Overton Window shifts occur because
| of this, and political impacts often happen as a result.
|
| - AI models, like those trained off of publicly available text
| sources online (comments and otherwise).
| bretthopper wrote:
| Over the past year I've slowly started to realize this as well.
| What changed? Working for a company that is publicly known enough
| for people on HN (and Reddit) to comment about it. It has been
| hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work
| at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are
| facts.
|
| In this case, it's easy for me to recognize they are wrong. But
| what about other topics (or companies) I don't know much about? I
| have no easy way of recognizing inaccuracies so I default to
| mostly accepting them. Sadly, you need to be skeptical of almost
| everything you read even when the person sounds like they know
| the subject matter.
| blago wrote:
| Or you just trust people who qualify their statements, moderate
| they views, and have balanced and nuanced opinions.
| austincheney wrote:
| > It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people
| who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things
| like they are facts.
|
| Sounds more like stupidity than insanity. People do this to
| express an uninformed opinion with unearned authority because
| that opinion and any resulting agreement are more valuable than
| facts and boring predictable conclusions.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I used to think this too, but when I look at the COVID and
| lockdown opinions of my facebook friends, they greatly
| differ, but their intelligence doesn't differ that much.
|
| I know people as intelligent as me, to have complete opposite
| opinions. My first reaction was that they are stupid, but I
| actually know they are pretty smart.
|
| It's easy to dismiss someone elses opinion as stupid, but
| it's really hard when you know it's not actually the case.
|
| With the COVID situation, I concluded that there are more
| authoritative, "follow the rules" people, and more rebel, "we
| hate the rules" people. Thanks to covid I have a clear view
| who of my contacts belong to which group. Most of them are
| intelligent.
| austincheney wrote:
| That is not the same thing. I doubt your friends are
| claiming to be some sort of insider expert and then
| imposing that expertise upon others like a hammer, which is
| entirely different than just being disagreeable.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Well, the rebels claimed that the covid tests were crap,
| numbers were being exagerated, government took the
| opportunity for more control, lockdowns are not
| necesarry, experts were short sighted idiots, thanked the
| anti-vaxers for not making vaccinations obligatory, gave
| everyone shit for not taking the streets and fighting
| authority.
|
| Then the lawful people claimed extreme situations require
| extreme measures, experts know best, high numbers are
| because stupid people don't follow the rules, etc.
| austincheney wrote:
| That still doesn't sound like claims of expertise. Worse,
| it doesn't even sound original. I suspect they were
| parroting nonsense they heard from somewhere else. Sure,
| when called out that sounds stupid too, but it isn't
| quite the same thing.
| loopz wrote:
| Intelligence have often less to do with rationality and
| objectivity, which can be used as facade to hide the
| biases.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| "Intelligence" is a complex and multidimensional thing.
|
| Writing, math, human interactions, art, etc. These each
| require different sorts of intelligence. The dominant view
| on "intelligence" these days is something along these
| lines.
|
| https://www.simplypsychology.org/multiple-
| intelligences.html
|
| Those eight categories are perhaps a bit insufficient and
| arbitrary, but surely the overall notion rings true -- we
| have all known "smart" people who excelled in some of those
| areas while failing at others.
|
| Sifting through the available information (and
| disinformation) and reaching a rational conclusion on
| something like COVID involves multiple axes of
| intelligence.
|
| It requires a (somewhat rare? apparently?) combination of a
| base level of scientific literacy, _and_ perhaps some
| interpersonal skills because sifting through the
| misinformation requires an understanding of various parties
| ' motivations. As well as perhaps a few others.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| It's sobering, to put it mildly. It has been
| hilarious and scary to read comments from people who
| don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things
| like they are facts.
|
| In the early days of the Internet, there was this widespread
| naivete that the truth would win. People generally wanted the
| truth, right? And this "global information superhighway" would
| act as sort of a de facto peer review. We wouldn't always get
| things right, but overall it would surely be a win for "the
| truth" or at least, for reasoned opinions.
|
| Or so we thought. How naive we were.
| closeparen wrote:
| Older friends lament that you used to be able to have perfectly
| good conversations arguing about trivial questions of fact. Now
| there's always some asshole with a smartphone to look up the
| right answer and ruin the fun.
|
| It helps to look at HN the same way. It's not about the truth,
| it's about enjoying the conversation.
| watwut wrote:
| I hate when people confidently bluff and confidently spread
| untruths. He had fun, but world is slightly more unscientific
| sue to that.
| bawolff wrote:
| I never got this.
|
| If your question could be answered by googling, its not
| really an interesting question.
|
| Meaning of life -> interesting question
|
| What is the capital of Canada? -> who cares, and if you did
| care why would you want to debate it instead of looking it
| up? [Its just an example, i am Canadian and obviously know
| what the answer is]
| lazylizard wrote:
| "whats the capital of south africa?" is more interesting!
| Fnoord wrote:
| Using a search engine requires skill. Asking a good
| question does as well. The saying is, "the most stupid
| question is the one you haven't asked". However it omits
| one should put in effort to do their own research. That
| effort is somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't equal using Google
| (I generally don't even use Google search engine), nor does
| it require success in using Google. A good basis is the
| ability to do research; I believe the emphasis should lie
| there. And it needs to be taught before university (which
| is 18+ age).
| bawolff wrote:
| Being able to do proper research is all well and good,
| but is not needed to determine the "trivial questions of
| fact" that the parent was talking about.
| 0x10c0fe11ce wrote:
| Now everyone thinks they're geniuses too just because they
| can google random facts. You should talk faster than they can
| type just to keep having fun at their expense. Also, if you
| talk long enough chances are very good that you'll find
| something they're unable to easily google it. Most people are
| still lazy thinkers anyways.
| closeparen wrote:
| That's what HN is... bullshitting claims that are too
| expensive to disprove even with time to research.
| 0x10c0fe11ce wrote:
| You're certainly enjoying the conversation! /s
| lhorie wrote:
| It's much broader than just public perception of companies. A
| lot of stuff that passes off as information is actually
| entertainment.
|
| For example, news about some new nutrition study typically
| don't involve any of the hard scientific line of inquiry that
| actual science work entails (e.g. critically thinking about
| potential methology flaws, for example.)
|
| Reading about some politician slipping out a gaffe says nothing
| about what is happening in terms of law making (and nuances are
| often lost in translation when an article does talk about new
| laws). Etc.
|
| A lot of articles are filled with rethoric and/or "real life"
| stories that don't really have a direct impact on the reader
| other than to elicit some form of emotional response. Contrast
| to actual educational material that is denser and drier, and
| can make a real impact in the reader's future when studied
| properly.
| Aunche wrote:
| You see a bunch of blatantly wrong things about countries as
| well that would be obvious for anyone who lived there. As a
| uncontroversial example, Winnie the Pooh clearly isn't banned
| in China, given how much merchandise is manufactured there. The
| "ghost cities" that were reported in about in China a few years
| are largely populated. They were empty at the time because they
| were new.
| jcims wrote:
| I'm a middle-aged, white, cis male heterosexual married father
| that has started and run companies, hired and managed
| engineers, make ok money, lean a bit right of center
| politically, worked for the government, large banks, healthcare
| and retail and lives in a rural location in the midwest.
|
| What you've described is something I experience in almost every
| facet of my life. I'm so blandly stereotypical it hurts yet
| somehow the rampant generalizations that are used to describe
| me, my values and my motivations are so hilariously wrong the
| vast majority of time that I don't even bother to argue because
| there's nothing to even work with as a ground truth.
|
| The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I
| finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my
| industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity.
| Honestly think that 75% of the people in my feed in serious
| need of a wellness check. I can't imagine the damage being done
| to young folks observing the behavior of adults on that
| platform.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > cis male heterosexual married father
|
| How I long for the good old days when people used the word
| "man" to describe this.
| david-gpu wrote:
| I get what you are saying, but those "good old days" often
| ignored or downright humiliated men who were not cis, not
| heterosexual, not married, or childfree. There are all
| sorts of people under the sun.
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| to me it is more exciting that there is a whole population
| that can be more productive in our society just because the
| rest of us use a few adjective or pronouns. that's massive
| leverage with very low overhead, I like it.
| Udik wrote:
| I hope you're being sarcastic.
| vmception wrote:
| I was not being sarcastic. It is how I reconciled the
| otherwise jarring societal changes where its not clear
| who exactly has the consensus on a new concept and who to
| listen to.
|
| My conclusion is that what is asked is so low effort that
| it is inconsequential for cisgender people and improves
| the quality of life for people that felt marginalized and
| increases their productivity.
| cultus wrote:
| Why does that bother you so much? Language changes to fit
| needs. Always has, always will.
| pydry wrote:
| >The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I
| finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my
| industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity.
|
| They created a platform that optimizes for trolling, insanity
| and outrage porn because it's the cheapest way of inducing
| engagement. It's hardly a reality check.
|
| A reality check would be going to a conference and realizing
| that twitter isn't a representation of the general public.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > A reality check would be going to a conference and
| realizing that twitter isn't a representation of the
| general public.
|
| An interesting counter(? corollary? Neither?) to that is
| when you go to a conference and the SAME INSANE PEOPLE from
| Twitter are there, acting as one would consider "normal".
|
| I don't know what to think about the immense gulf between
| how we as a species behave behind a screen vs face to face.
| And how we also react to others doing it.
| krapp wrote:
| >I don't know what to think about the immense gulf
| between how we as a species behave behind a screen vs
| face to face.
|
| "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.
| Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth - Oscar
| Wilde."
| jlokier wrote:
| Perhaps it's more like give someone a mask and they will
| tell you their psychosis. Is the disinhibited mind
| properly functioning any more than a drunk person is
| their real self or a disinhibited muscle contributes the
| most to a person's presence?
| Bakary wrote:
| Looking at 4chan as an example, although in theory masked
| the discussions defaults to a specific and recognizable
| tone and specific ways of argumenting or joking.
|
| Giving a mask gives you a new contextual facet of a
| person, but hardly the truth. Few are those who can even
| know the truth about themselves. I don't know if I do.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I had this lesson 25 years ago. The nicest person I knew
| at my school was an immense asshole online. It wasn't
| even the anonymousness of it - it was to fellow
| classmates that knew who he was.
| rtx wrote:
| Speculation - You need to be asshole some times in real
| life, or you become passive aggressive and take it out
| somewhere else.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| Trump rallies are sort of like a real-life depiction of
| Twitter
| morsch wrote:
| _I 'm so blandly stereotypical it hurts yet somehow the
| rampant generalizations that are used to describe me, my
| values and my motivations are so hilariously wrong the vast
| majority of time_
|
| Maybe you are not so blandly stereotypical after all? Your
| mini bio doesn't sound bland at all. Maybe you fit the formal
| criteria for group membership (in the group you describe),
| but aren't an average exemplar? Maybe people in general tend
| to think of themselves as more typical than they are? Or
| maybe that's true especially for guys in the group you
| describe? That would certainly explain political rhetoric
| talking to regular Joes who aren't so regular anymore.
|
| Also probably true: the group you describe is so large that
| the variation within it is large, and stereotypes have little
| predictive predictive power for individual members.
| jimktrains2 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_dimensionality
|
| The likelyhood of being average in all dimensions plummets
| with an increase in dimensions.
| taneq wrote:
| Well yeah, as you add more ways to be different, you're
| more likely to be different.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >The most recent reality check I've had is this year when I
| finally started using Twitter. I loaded up on folks in my
| industry only to be blindsided with a barrage of insanity.
| Honestly think that 75% of the people in my feed in serious
| need of a wellness check. I can't imagine the damage being
| done to young folks observing the behavior of adults on that
| platform.
|
| Twitter/Reddit are always, Always, ALWAYS wrong about
| everything.[1]
|
| ... and thank God for that.
|
| As one whose political and cultural beliefs are, like yours,
| mostly opposite that of Twitter/Reddit's as a whole, the
| sites' existence (including subreddits like /r/politics,
| /r/news, and /r/worldnews) is gratifying and validating.
|
| __ _If the mass of Redditards /Twitter users agreed with my
| opinions I'd carefully reexamine every one of them._ __
|
| As bloodraven42 wrote in response to a pretty cringe-inducing
| example of a Redditard (who was agreeing with an even more
| cringe-inducing example (http://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/com
| ments/urodq/british_guy_...)):
|
| >Please note the fact that you've gotten this impression from
| "reading Reddit". I assure you, reading Reddit gives you
| about as accurate a portrayal of reality as reading North
| Korean "news". Did you know Kim Jong Il is literally a God?
|
| As Anal_Justice_League added:
|
| >So wait, your world view comes from reading _Reddit?_
|
| >Do I even have to explain how catastrophically stupid that
| is?
|
| And as 1foryes said in another thread (https://np.reddit.com/
| r/canada/comments/be2p5a/cbc_predicts_...): >But fortunately,
| reddit does not represent reality. If it did, the ice caps
| would have melted years ago and we'd all be fighting in WW6.
|
| [1] Except bacon
| [deleted]
| adwn wrote:
| I have no idea what you're saying or what your point is,
| because your post is a jumbled mess. I'm not saying this to
| attack you.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Same - and although I've been able to resist it so far, it's
| so tempting to retort, well fuck you too. I can see why
| people get pulled towards the extremes. The reasonable (in my
| case progressive stand point) is not good enough for the
| extremists.
| burade wrote:
| >the people in my feed in serious need of a wellness check.
|
| Like, uuh, the president of the United States?
| jcims wrote:
| Why would he be in my feed?
| hourislate wrote:
| _" Too many people have opinions on things they know nothing
| about. And the more ignorant they are, the more opinions they
| have"_
|
| - Dr. Hildern at Camp McCarran.
|
| Great quote from a fictional game (Fallout) character.
| koonsolo wrote:
| It's easy to see things black and white when you're not well
| informed.
|
| When you're the expert, it's all about tradeoffs, and every
| decision or opinion always needs to be balanced out.
| throwaway473229 wrote:
| I've worked for two companies now that are high-profile HN
| fodder. Discussions of both of them have been complete batshit
| --from the technical engineering to the business decisions, and
| everything in between.
|
| I will never understand why it's so hard for people to realize
| and admit when they don't know what they're talking about.
|
| One thing that helped me was when I was taught how to answer
| questions in a legal context. (Patent deposition.) Every answer
| has two parts: the answer to the question is the second part,
| to be preceded by your confidence in the answer. "I believe,"
| "I think," or just plain "I don't know," and so on. Ever since
| then I've just habitually asked myself, "do I actually _know_
| this, or do I just _think_ this, and on what basis?"
|
| Do this enough and you'll be surprised at how little you
| actually know.
|
| Especially about what goes on inside companies you've never
| worked for.
| prox wrote:
| Good point. A quote from Michael J Straczynski : "The truth
| is a three edged sword : your opinion, my opinion and the
| truth."
| throw0203 wrote:
| I had a similar experience at a bigco that had a minor
| controversy on HN/Reddit a while back. In this case I was
| literally able to look at relevant source code and internal
| documents. Many of the comments were wildly inaccurate and
| conspiratorial, although there were a couple voices of reason
| mixed in.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I've gone through that a few times and it's bittersweet. On
| one hand, it's gratifying to see that my colleagues aren't as
| immoral or incompetent as xxYoloSwag420xx on reddit claims
| they are. On the other hand it's frustrating not being able
| to debunk their blatant bullshit that's been upvoted by a
| thousand people (which means it's probably been _seen_ by
| 10,000 people who take it at face value).
| da02 wrote:
| What were some of the inaccurate things said by the HN/Reddit
| crowd?
| mtberatwork wrote:
| Look no further than this comment thread. HN (and Reddit) is
| filled with conspiratorial rants about journalism and the
| news media. This is not to dismiss valid media criticism but
| the vast majority of posts on HN make laughably inaccurate
| assumptions about the news business.
| da02 wrote:
| What's one inaccurate assumption (that stands out among
| others) about the news business the HN crowd has made in
| 2020?
| [deleted]
| tester756 wrote:
| I always wondered how do Google, MS, FB, {popular_game e.g Riot
| Games/CDPR} and so on employees feel when they read that
| bullshit
| pmiller2 wrote:
| As someone who worked for a company that's widely hated on
| the internet (I'm talking front page of HN-level hate), my
| reaction was always to sigh and let our PR people handle it.
| I deliberately stayed out of any discussions involving my
| former employer.
| programmertote wrote:
| We can translate that to pretty much anything that we
| hear/read/watch second-hand from any source (including the news
| media). I grew up in a South Asian country and came to the US
| in early 2000 for college. Before then, I listened to BBC, RFA
| and VOA religiously and thought what they report there about my
| country is the truth (we were ruled by the military regime back
| then and most of the population assume everything the
| government said is a lie. An example in which people were
| already desensitized to disregard the government--the military
| government broadcast a public health service announcements
| after 8pm news everyday and those includes things like not
| using too much oil in the food for fear of heart disease. The
| general public would assume the government cannot import
| sufficient amount of edible oil from abroad--because of
| economic sanctions--so they are discouraging everyone to use
| less oil in cooking!).
|
| But when I came to the US and started to learn who is feeding
| these news to the VOA, RFA, etc. and how these people and
| organizations (including the UN orgs) got funding, I realize
| not everything that I read is true. This became very apparent
| when I read news about my country (reported by NYT and other
| reputable media outlets) that are too simplistic and one-sided.
| Then I stopped reading news altogether since 2016 and quit FB.
|
| That was the best decision ever and nowadays I only use Reddit
| to follow very specific subreddits (just sports, aww and
| funny). People are very opinionated about things that they have
| not experienced, and with online anonymity, people can sprout
| baseless stuff and easily buy into believing things that are
| simply not true.
|
| Everything I said here applies to HN as well. There are a lot
| of very poorly-informed-but-opinionated users here just like
| everywhere on the internet.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I have experienced exactly this.
|
| I worked for a company who is highly covered in tech news. The
| most popular stories and themes knew almost nothing about the
| reality of we were doing. Maybe one in five voices was correct.
| It was totally disheartening to the point that I completely
| stopped reading any related topic. Way off base.
|
| To this day, I am frustrated by misinformation about the work
| we did. The internet (and general knowledge) is not
| intelligent.
| prox wrote:
| To counterpoint, what did you or the company do to set things
| straight?
| alsetmusic wrote:
| We spent months that were planned for developing new
| features ripping out features that didn't perform well
| enough.
|
| The intent was good: bring the new shiny to people with
| older hardware. The result was poor: people with older
| hardware thought we were deliberately slowing them down.
| prox wrote:
| I understand. Relationship management is a tough nut to
| crack. I know few companies who tick all the boxes.
| Discord is usually great with its splash screen what they
| are doing at the moment.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I have had the exact same experience with my most recent
| employer. They certainly didn't do everything right, but,
| generally, it seems they are quick to acknowledge and fix their
| mistakes, and, certainly they try to be as ethical as possible
| internally. This company is pretty universally hated across the
| internet, yet, in the 2 years I was there, I didn't see even a
| tenth as much unethical or otherwise bad behavior there as I
| did from Facebook, for instance. Surprisingly, relatively few
| people outside of a techie / HN-type bubble seem to hate
| Facebook.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people
| who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things
| like they are facts.
|
| That's true with everything. Everyone has their own way to feel
| superior to everyone else, and for a lot of people, that
| superiority comes from knowledge, real or imagined.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| "Media carries with it a credibility that is totally
| undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the
| Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I refer to it by this name
| because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by
| dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself,
| and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)
|
| Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You
| open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well.
| In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the
| article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding
| of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so
| wrong it actually presents the story backward--reversing cause
| and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories.
| Paper's full of them.
|
| In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the
| multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national
| or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the
| newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the
| baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you
| know.
|
| That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not
| operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody
| consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount
| everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of
| falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one
| part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we
| believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to
| read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost
| certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior
| is amnesia." - Michael Crichton
| stock_toaster wrote:
| > I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life.
| In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or
| lies to you, you soon discount everything they say.
|
| Alas, not so sure that part is still true.
|
| _[looks back at 2020]_
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It never was true for some people I know, for example my
| parents.
|
| My parents have such a bias towards their and their
| ancestor's culture/religion, that anything said in favor of
| it will be believed instantly, and anything critical of it
| will be met with hostility.
|
| I do not dare point out to them basic falsifiable truths
| about things such as medicine (e.g. this simple action will
| cure cancer or reverse male pattern baldness).
|
| My parents are very gullible people. Skeptical about
| exactly the wrong things, repeatedly wrong year after year,
| yet ever so trusting of the same bullshit sources and
| rhetoric, as long as it resonates with their prime belief
| about the superiority of their culture/religion.
|
| I see this in mainstream US too, with the antivaxxers who
| got a C in high school biological or 5G crazies who
| couldn't pass a physics class.
|
| Once someone has formed an identity around some core
| assumptions of the world, anything that challenges it will
| be seen as an attack on one's ego.
| Felony_Fred wrote:
| > Once someone has formed an identity around some core
| assumptions of the world, anything that challenges it
| will be seen as an attack on one's ego.
|
| That's hard to escape, and it might well be a quite
| useful mechanism in many cases, but multiply that by
| filter bubbles and echo chambers, and it can become
| difficult for otherwise reasonable people to have
| conversations about many topics. It happens here too but
| I would say less than in other parts of the worlds. Here
| = HN. Worlds = Parallel realities that get created that
| way ^
|
| Related ;
|
| Beware online "filter bubbles" ( 2011 )
|
| https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filte
| r_b...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all
| of the people some of the time..." - Abraham Lincoln
| throwaway9980 wrote:
| Fits my 2020 experience. At the start of 2020 this
| described perfectly my view of Trump. At the start of 2021
| it describes perfectly my view of everyone.
| cheschire wrote:
| I'm inferring from your brackets that you're referring to
| public figures.
|
| If this is what you intended then I would suggest that they
| are more media than "ordinary life". If anything, I feel
| like they further highlight the accuracy of the effect.
| aaron695 wrote:
| Sadly Wikipedia removed the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect wiki
| page.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| It looks like they merged it into it's author's main page.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
| realshadow wrote:
| I had similar thoughts and then quit reading news ever since.
|
| Opinion pieces are even worse they are never fact checked.
|
| its a crazy world that we live in
| rtx wrote:
| I have found interviews and podcast to be a better source
| now.
| freebuju wrote:
| While in a perfect world, we would have factual arguments
| laid out in opinion pieces. They are merely that, someone's
| opinions and are even more playground space for self-
| proclaimed pundits than actual journalism.
| Fnoord wrote:
| > I had similar thoughts and then quit reading news ever
| since.
|
| You didn't. You're commenting on a news article. What you
| mean is that you quit reading [that|these] specific
| source(s).
| [deleted]
| realshadow wrote:
| I did not read the article but the title and the top
| comment here before commenting.
|
| I follow scientists/engineers on youtube thats all to get
| all the knowledge i need.
|
| Through debunked videos i've come to know the state of
| current journalism.
| edrobap wrote:
| > its a crazy world that we live in
|
| It's a lazy world we live in. In times of fast journalism,
| there is not time waste of fact check. The news are bets to
| a large extent.
| [deleted]
| Fnoord wrote:
| 'Media' isn't the same as 'investigative journalism' (where a
| lot of fact-checking occurs).
| tsegratis wrote:
| Investigative journalism, I hope so. But general
| journalism...
|
| I'm afraid I've traveled enough to say petty wars are often
| reported night-day level of wrong (at least for all the
| ones I have experienced)
|
| It seems we want to believe we are good, and 'they' are
| bad, but frankly we don't care either way, so long as we
| make money
| input_sh wrote:
| > Investigative journalism, I hope so.
|
| I work for one (not involved in the actual stories) and I
| can guarantee that the process I've seen is pretty
| meticulous.
|
| > But general journalism...
|
| There's a separation that needs to be done here as well
| between news and columns / opinion pieces. News are
| supposed to answer what's known as Five Ws (Who, What,
| When, Where, Why), while columns/opinion pieces are
| rarely expected to be held to same standards, are often
| inaccurate, and subjective by their nature (they are
| _opinion_ pieces after all). Unfortunately they 're
| almost always published under the same brand, but usually
| when I see people complaining about journalism, they
| don't make that distinction.
|
| That isn't to say news in itself is not biased, because
| even picking what's newsworthy is a process that relies
| on bias.
| tsegratis wrote:
| Thanks. I'm sure you're doing clear work, and being
| precisely truthful about clear topics
|
| My problem is news like: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
| middle-east-55484436
|
| BBC saying 'restore the presidents rule' and 'unity
| cabinet', but this is the same president whose people
| said was a dictator and overthrew in the Arab spring
|
| Not following the situation closely, but those five Ws by
| the BBC look so very strongly in the pocket of arms money
| and having very little to do with democracy
|
| To the point I would say they are covered in blood, and
| calling it 'bringing peace.' I wish this was a lone
| example
| iso1210 wrote:
| I don't read that at all
|
| The paragraph referring to president:
|
| "Yemen has been devastated by a conflict that escalated
| in 2015, when a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states
| launched a military operation to defeat the Houthis and
| restore President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi's rule. "
|
| > Yemen has been devastated
|
| Objectively true
|
| > by a conflict
|
| There are many reasons but the conflict certainly hasn't
| helped
|
| > when a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states launched a
| military operation
|
| Is this wrong? There's a wikipedia page on it
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-
| led_intervention...
|
| > to defeat the Houthis
|
| "the intervention initially consisted of a bombing
| campaign on Houthi rebels"
|
| > and restore President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi's rule.
|
| Looks like he has declared President of Yemen in 2012.
| There are many ruthless rulers who are called
| "President". "President Putin", "President Mugabe", etc
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Yemen
|
| Was this not the aim of the Saudi led coalition?
|
| The next paragraph, which is under the "analysis" part
|
| > Yemen's newly formed "unity cabinet" was always going
| to have a rocky start. But it clearly did not anticipate
| this disaster when it announced its arrival would be
| livestreamed on television.
|
| Is the new government that has been created known as a
| unity government? Seems yes, the piece further explains
|
| "Mr Saeed's new cabinet was formed in an effort to heal a
| long-running rift between Saudi-backed government forces
| and militias loyal to the separatist Southern
| Transitional Council, supported by the United Arab
| Emirates.
|
| The two sides are supposed to be allies in the civil war
| against the Houthi movement, which controls the capital
| Sanaa and much of north-western Yemen."
|
| Explaining the name "unity cabinet", it seems to be an
| effort to unify the non-houti sides.
|
| You may not think it's a legitimate government, but it
| seems to be the one recognised by the international
| community, whether we like it or not. We recognise all
| sorts of nasty governments, from Venezuala to North
| Korea, from Russia to Turkey. I don't see any judgement
| on which side is "good" or "bad" (or "bad" and "worse" as
| it may be).
|
| To summarise
|
| Who -- Houti Rebels
|
| What -- attacked an airport
|
| When -- Yesterday
|
| Where -- Aden Airport
|
| Why -- because they are fighting against the
| internationally recognised government
|
| The BBC has covered the conflict in Yemen a fair amount,
| here's a story about the background of the rebels.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-31645145
| tsegratis wrote:
| > I don't read that at all
|
| I agree :) the article is factual and correctly. That is
| a problem. I would say you and it are completely correct,
| until the final 'why'
|
| At which point correctness inverses strongly
|
| How can locals be 'rebels' and the invading Saudi/UAE
| forces be legitimate??
|
| --
|
| The last BBC link you placed was impressive and accurate.
| It ends
|
| > The Gulf states and the US appear intent upon denying
| Ansar Allah international recognition and supporting Mr
| Hadi's claim to leadership
|
| Gulf states are Sunni, Ansar + Houthi's are Shia. The
| 'unity' government the BBC refers to is 'unity' because
| it unites two fractious Sunni governments... Definitely
| not unity because it unites or represents the people of
| Yemen!
|
| In first BBC link whys are completely avoided
|
| Why Gulf Sunni states reject fall of gov, and invade? --
| Islam
|
| The latest article completely misses that. The Houthi
| 'rebels' have held the capital for years. Why are they
| able to do that in the face of Saudi led bombing
| campaign? Because they have the support of the people in
| that area
|
| --
|
| Sorry. I don't support either side, I only call that BBC
| link evil
|
| And frankly our whole system allowing it
| loopz wrote:
| That we allow naysayers to be fired, is on US.
| jancsika wrote:
| As always, the Gell-Mann Amnesia Affectation is in full
| effect here at HN.
|
| You realize this isn't a piece of serious research, right?
|
| You realize Michael Crichton purposely used Gell-Mann's name
| knowing it'd lend more weight because he's a "scientist,"
| right?
|
| You do realize Gell-Mann's field has nothing to do with any
| of the fields that would study this phenonemon _if_ it were
| anything other than a cocktail party story, right?
|
| If you'd be uncomfortable casually mentioning trickle-down
| economics as serious national policy, you ought to be just as
| uncomfortable with your Gell-Mann Amnesia Affectation here.
| Bakary wrote:
| It's not that complicated a concept and the flavoring of it
| doesn't matter beyond being a nice story. It's a simple
| logical conclusion that needs no additional justification.
| In the end, all of us here have been a victim of that sort
| of thing and we all probably became aware of it at least
| once while also completely prepared to make the same
| mistake at some other time.
| jancsika wrote:
| > In the end, all of us here have been a victim of that
| sort of thing and we all probably became aware of it at
| least once while also completely prepared to make the
| same mistake at some other time.
|
| At least in the U.S., it's the _exact_ opposite problem
| that is eating away at democracy.
|
| There are literally tens of millions of people who refuse
| to believe _any_ story from _any_ news source because
| they wildly overestimate the corruption of journalism
| across the board.
|
| Where's the pretentious tag for that phenomenon?
| Bakary wrote:
| The two problems can coexist at the same time. I feel
| this is attributing arguments to a simple concept that it
| never made.
| EricE wrote:
| Great quote - wish I could upvote more than once!
| sebmellen wrote:
| I'm surprised Crichton thought Murray Gell-Mann was more
| famous than he was! I would think the reverse (and the
| Crichton Amnesia Effect is a great name).
| Talanes wrote:
| But dropping his own name can ascribe no more importance to
| himself. Dropping in another famous name, and one from a
| complete different field no less, ascribes greater
| credibility than Michael Crichton alone can manage.
| taneq wrote:
| Gell-Mann would be more famous if anyone could remember his
| name... :P
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| The problem I see personally is less parts where the media
| gets easily verifiable things wrong (Generally for any field
| where experts occur, there are better sources you can
| personally find.)
|
| The issue is where they report on things that I can't easily
| verify. A company I haven't worked at, how things are going
| internally in the white house, what X or Y nation-state was
| caught doing. These are areas where I have no choice but to
| trust the media, because none of these entities are open
| enough for me to personally look at them and fact check what
| is happening. If some entity wants to say the media is
| treating them unfairly, that's unfortunate, but unless
| they're willing to open up their inner workings to the public
| I have to default to believing what the media digs up.
|
| That the media otherwise does have a spotty record is
| troublesome to me. Generally, I think the right course is to
| find news sources that at least are right more often than not
| on the things you can verify. But on many things, the media
| is the only source we have on what they're doing besides
| themselves. And while the media is troublesome, trusting that
| an entity is doing nothing wrong off their own word is even
| worse.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| To combat this, I try to keep reading multiple, disparate
| sources until enough facts agree, and the coverage
| converges, to paint a relatively clear picture of the
| actual facts. What's been interesting to me, since starting
| to do this, is that some very, very popular stories -- upon
| which people will hang their entire political self-
| identification -- never actually converge, at least to my
| satisfaction.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _The issue is where they report on things that I can't
| easily verify. [...]. These are areas where I have no
| choice but to trust the media,_
|
| Why? What's wrong with just not really knowing?
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| When it comes to governments, how they act impacts my
| voting preferences. When it comes to companies, how they
| act impacts who I choose to purchase from and work for.
| There are certainly wide swaths of information that
| aren't relevant to my decision making process, but some
| things are hard to personally find out but worth knowing.
| ajuc wrote:
| Well if the issue is something you have to act on then
| you should know.
|
| Let's say there's talk about a new vaccine - should you
| take it or not. Or about candidates for some political
| office. Or about global warming.
|
| I guess you can ignore everything, but if everybody does
| it's not going to end well.
| ggm wrote:
| When he wrote "state of fear" he had dunning-kruger syndrome
| Felony_Fred wrote:
| I would argue some media outlets are more reliable than
| others, as can be established for oneself by looking at their
| track records and following the money. I think this ^ applies
| as is to mainstream media in general, pick your flavour, but
| some organisations are trying to do journalism right. You
| ought to be careful before defaulting to not believing
| anything you read. I think using your discretion in selecting
| trusted sources goes a long way in ensuring some level of
| information integrity. Add to that a layer of fact-checking
| resources, using your common sense and trying to read between
| the lines, and you might end up with a coherent world view
| that you can use to interface with other people. Getting your
| propaganda from multiple sides can also add scope to your
| experience of the world from what other people write about
| it. That being said, I reckon it's a complex mess ... my
| $0,02.
| itronitron wrote:
| People in general aren't particularly credible, for a variety
| of reasons.
|
| As I've gotten older I like to think that I've gotten better
| at questioning/doubting anything anyone (with the exception
| of several close and long term friends and relatives) tells
| me, _especially_ if it is second hand information.
|
| A lot of this was learned through various 'inconvenient'
| experiences over the years. Most people don't double check
| their sources and just parrot out things they've heard.
| Confidence is not correlated with accuracy.
| phs318u wrote:
| > Confidence is not correlated with accuracy.
|
| Indeed. Quite possibly the opposite is true i.e. that
| inaccuracy is correlated with confidence (for second hand
| reports).
| threatofrain wrote:
| Media's credibility comes not from what it gets wrong, but
| rather that it may have any uncanny ability to say what is
| right.
|
| The problem is that media is often right and wrong about
| things that are very far away from me, so I don't really see
| the win in "getting the scoop" on anything. For example, the
| NYT is really good at predicting when there's going to be a
| high-profile WH resignation or firing come up. It's not like
| I was going to get that information from original research or
| critical thinking. But again, unless you're a big player,
| what are you going to do with the inside scoop on world
| events?
|
| Arguably, if you did really care about these things, then the
| degree to which any source provides signal is the degree to
| which you will tolerate noise.
| loopz wrote:
| Media's role is not to provide the truth. Their primary
| role is to make governments and corporations trustworthy
| and hold them accountable to the world. Nobody holds "the
| truth", but bits, pieces, opinions may be reported.
|
| Also, authority routinely lie and exhaggerate. If not held
| accountable, they get away with it too!
|
| The only thing more powerful than speaking Truth, is love.
| friendlybus wrote:
| There are laws the media must follow. There is a truth
| they must tell, legally and also the stuff that gets
| clicks and views is true for it's audience in a salient
| way.
|
| Authority has the power to control, it's part of the job
| description and politics resolves the truth of that
| domain.
|
| Why do you want something 'more powerful' than truth? You
| just excised yourself from philosophy, religion, god,
| law, ect in dismissing truth.
|
| We all want 'true' love anyway so the distinction is
| poor.
| ajuc wrote:
| I've had exactly the same revelation about traditional media a
| few years back.
|
| I listen to talk-only radio a lot, they have some of the best
| experts in the country supposedly, a lot of famous names.
|
| And then they talk about some topic I am familiar with (like
| Polish army modernization or computer science) and they spew
| bullshit for 1 hour with 100% confidence and there's 10 people
| in the studio who I'm sure know it's bullshit but they say
| nothing.
|
| It's surreal. It means they don't even spend 5 minutes on the
| most basic research before a 1 hour debate.
| baby wrote:
| The same happened to me after I started at a company than HN
| hated and realized that it's much different inside that the
| picture painted here. I became really skeptical of any big
| claims about other big corps too.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| Having also worked for companies that HN hates, _of course_
| it 's much different on the inside. Nobody twiddles their
| mustache and cackles when they make decisions that screw
| people over. They find ways to make it sound benevolent and
| positive.
|
| Keep at it! Big/impactful companies are great places to
| learn, and I don't want to tell you what to think. But your
| views on topics like benign intents and unintended
| consequences might change after you see enough of them
| firsthand.
| closeparen wrote:
| >Nobody twiddles their mustache and cackles when they make
| decisions that screw people over
|
| Well. Oracle.
| boznz wrote:
| Yeah but Oracle generally only screws over companies who
| either can afford it easily or have used expensive
| external "consultants" to help make the decision, both
| have a low sympathy vote from me.
| toyg wrote:
| Nah, that's more like shrugging. "Mhh, this number here
| says that screwing X we'll make a few more dollars.
| <shrugs> Ah well, that's how the cookie crumbles." <goes
| ahead screwing X>
| koonsolo wrote:
| > Big/impactful companies are great places to learn
|
| Is it really? I always learned the most at tiny companies.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| Well, a company doesn't have to be big to be impactful.
| What's important in my experience is a productive
| environment which can foster the occasional side project.
|
| This is actually something that I've struggled a bit
| with, because it feels like the most interesting and
| educational jobs are the ones that involve more than
| 40hrs/week.
|
| Sometimes I wish that I could find a 20hr/week role with
| the potential to make big positive improvements in
| peoples' lives. But there are always other groups trying
| to do the same thing, and they're never happy to stop at
| part-time.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| the alternative is that the company or you found a way to
| rationalise or reframe the very same behaviour in a way that
| makes it appear positive, after all as the saying goes your
| paycheck literally depends on you believing that very fact.
|
| Genuinely awful organisations always have people on the
| inside who are very convinced everything said about them is
| an injustice, but that can very easily be tribalism. I mean
| Zuckerberg and many Facebook employees claimed that Facebook
| influencing elections is a ridiculous proposal. If that's the
| kind of thing that working at the place does to you I think
| we can safely discount the opinion of insiders.
|
| not to forget this gem:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELgAZH-Wb44
| doitLP wrote:
| Facebook? Riot? Microsoft? SoftBank?
| tomcam wrote:
| No one puts baby in a corner.
| bawolff wrote:
| Do hn hate those? Maybe facebook has a lot of haters these
| days. Last time i heard someone bash on microsoft, slashdot
| was still big. On the whole i think hacker news tends to be
| pretty positive to big tech.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > On the whole i think hacker news tends to be pretty
| positive to big tech.
|
| Perhaps to a fault, the same applies to the CCP Bots you
| see here posting anytime anyone questions China: you have
| people here with self-interest guiding their words and
| creating rationalizations like those above stating how
| erroneous 'the media' and 'outsiders' portray them in a
| bad light and that some how they are poorly informed and
| thus their views are nothing more than unsubstantiated
| conjecture.
|
| But one needs to only look at the recent behavior of
| Apple riots in India and Amazon exploiting warehouse
| workers and firing them during COVID due to reasonable
| concerns--like lack of PPE and
| distancing/hygiene/prevention methods.
|
| Its so commonplace and thus very easy to realize that if
| these massive monoliths, who benefit from very skewed
| tax, legal and labur laws, are not going to put Human
| Rights/Labor Laws before Profit or Market Share even
| during a Global pandemic, then they never will: and
| Governments on a whole are either/or both complicit as
| they ignorant on their business models making legislation
| solutions entirely moot. And I'm not even going to
| mentioned Google as this rebuttal would never end.
|
| But nothing changes those objective truths regardless of
| how much you may want to sugarcoat things, and the fact
| that so many here still think FAANG is the _end all and
| be all_ of Tech shows just how misguided if not entirely
| indoctrinated (from within or otherwise) they really are
| and how easily they are bought off with the illusion of
| prestige, a meaningless title and an often over bloated
| salary and by extension a sense of self worth for the
| things they 've actually bring to the World often, most
| notably: Social media that creates discord and division
| and devices that promote further dependence on self-
| infatuated naval gazing while our Environment and hapless
| languish in mines and suffer ever greater exploitation,
| and these businesses make them increasingly more within
| the closed source, planned obsolesce paradigm business
| model. Not to mention the depression and suicide these
| addictive things are meant to create in a sort of
| intention span casino addiction model.
|
| So, no, I don't think what you're saying is true, and
| what you are referring to is told with very obvious
| biases.
|
| People should be critical of these exploitative and
| frankly often unnecessary and cancerous business models,
| the problem is that they wield so much power and money
| they simply destroy any competition they may have had in
| the past, assuming they didn't acquire them and we get
| less choices due to these monopolistic practices.
|
| I think it was Chamath that said it best when he
| describes what banks and big tech excel at that most the
| Industries can't as the 'intellectual lobotomization' of
| a generation(s) best minds as they spend(t) their talents
| and drive to often pointless (facebook) and often
| nefarious ends (credit default swaps, naked short
| selling/high frequency trading algorithms etc...).
| bawolff wrote:
| So you spend several paragraphs talking about how big
| tech is evil, and hn is full of sheeple who trade their
| morals for $$$ and status, etc. Then you say:
|
| > So, no, I don't think what you're saying is true, and
| what you are referring to is told with very obvious
| biases.
|
| So i am confused, do you agree with me that HN goes easy
| on big tech, or not? Because your argument seems to be
| the opposite of your conclusion.
| Melting_Harps wrote:
| > So i am confused, do you agree with me that HN goes
| easy on big tech, or not? Because your argument seems to
| be the opposite of your conclusion.
|
| Ok, let me make it clear: I agree with your quoted
| response, but I disagree with the substance and the
| narrative of your view from which it is told. It's very
| obviously a skewed perception from someone who frankly
| takes a very poor view of the overall health of what Big
| Tech has created to the detriment of us all. If you
| really think Microsoft is any less despised now, than it
| was back then now you are out of touch entirely as they
| are the epitome of the panopticon business model that
| colludes with Military and Intelligence agencies for
| contracts [0].
|
| And just so it clear, a lot of people on HN do not work
| for FAANG, YC funds many startups that challenge those
| business models after all; so many here have no desire to
| work there, myself included.
|
| What I take issue with is with the over-glorification of
| the 'intellectual lobotimization' and what are clearly
| very intelligent and talented people and the
| motivation(s) and consequences behind them and the
| acceptance of it as a casual dismissal of it with
| statements like 'well, I didn't see any of that when I
| was there.'
|
| Of course you didn't, and that's the point about FAANG:
| things are purposely compartmentalized, isolated, and
| people there are kept content with infantile based
| distractions and financial incentives so much that they
| lose touch with reality entirely while within it.
|
| You see this within Military and Intelligence agencies as
| well but that differs in that it is undertaken with some
| sort of perverse cult-like fraternal _code of conduct_
| and unquestionable loyalty to the State instead. The guy
| maintaining the bomber 's engines is in a different
| department as the guy working on the engineering of the
| weapons and guidance systems on those 'smart weapons,'
| who is also in a different department than the guy
| piloting the plane that ultimately drops said weapons
| that kills everyone in a remote village, but that system
| doesn't warrant the rampant diffusion of responsibility
| for the death of countless innocent people who are deemed
| 'collateral damage' in the end, are they? They're all
| responsible.
|
| And as seen in the military (Snowden, Manning), as well
| as in FAANG, should someone decide to even mention some
| obvious truths about these places in an attempt to make
| progress no less, they instantly get crucified: James
| Damore. And other activist Googlers [1] who dare to speak
| up and instantly become persona non-grata in a way to
| contain the PR backlash and distract from the nefarious
| acts of said perpetrator.
|
| 0: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/thousands-
| contracts-h...
|
| 1: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/17/fifth-
| google...
| chinabot wrote:
| What you say! CCP very good Government.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Uber or AirBnB maybe?
|
| Also, commonly, Google, but many Googlers on HN aren't
| afraid to reveal their affiliation.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I'd guess that it's Amazon
| legerdemain wrote:
| Case in point: Palantir. People would rather spread bizarre FUD
| they hear in the media than face the fact that they just don't
| know how much good Palantir does.
| Veen wrote:
| What good does Palantir do? I'd be quite interested to hear
| about it.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Certainly more good than news media taking an occasional
| drive-by shit on them will admit. It behooves people who
| still read the news to develop a healthy skepticism about
| motivated negative coverage.
| zeofig wrote:
| Don't know much about them, but they do appear to
| support/do the development of pyls (python language server)
| varjag wrote:
| Do they build Autobahns too
| Aunche wrote:
| They have a surprising number of humanitarian projects. For
| example, they're partnering with the World Food Programme
| to optimize food distribution.
| chillacy wrote:
| I got nothing against Palantir (disclosure: I'm a
| shareholder) but you do have to acknowledge that people have
| very different definitions of "good" that factor into their
| opinions.
|
| Some people find that bringing technology into the government
| is of course good, others are vehemently against agencies
| like ICE or the military industrial complex.
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| I used to read editorials on Slate.com, the articles seemed
| interesting and discussed topics I didn't know much about. I
| did that until I read an article about something I did know
| something about, and I realized they were getting everything
| wrong. And I realized that they were just taking a devil's
| advocate position about everything and writing things that were
| contrary to how things are, presumably to get clicks.
| m463 wrote:
| On the other hand, I've worked for companies that are in the
| press and sometimes the external viewpoint helps counteract the
| kool-aid.
|
| I've also worked at companies where wikipedia has more accurate
| and detailed information than the internal wikis.
|
| So maybe _some_ of those insane people have - expertise and
| perspective.
|
| Now not all. A lot of press is fawning. And nowadays, maybe due
| to algorithmic feedback, a lot of stuff is sort of fake
| controversial.
| bcwarner wrote:
| That's interesting how an internal wiki could be less
| accurate than Wikipedia, how big were these discrepancies?
| bawolff wrote:
| It kind of makes sense - wikipedia has rules about
| sourcing, and lots of eyes on it. Your company's internal
| wiki is internal documentation that is probably nobody's
| job to update and has pages in it last edited 10 years ago
| by people who have long since quit.
| konjin wrote:
| >On the other hand, I've worked for companies that are in the
| press and sometimes the external viewpoint helps counteract
| the kool-aid.
|
| The idea that the drones in a company know more about the
| company than the public is laughable. Unless you have your
| own office you do not know what the company's goals actually
| are.
| bretthopper wrote:
| You make a good point and I do agree. Also at any bigger
| company, no one person's experience is completely
| representative. It depends on the person, manager, team, org,
| etc. There's no way any one person could know everything
| about a company.
|
| But my comment wasn't really about cultural or org issues
| (which can be much more subjective); it was more about
| specific facts that are binary. I'll read people say
| something like "x company is rewriting everything in Go
| because Rails is slow" when it's not true at all.
| loopz wrote:
| One person is enough to change or make new facts about the
| company too.
| tdumitrescu wrote:
| I've noticed this regarding companies I've worked at too. When
| it involves any knowledge that wouldn't be available to the
| public, people on HN spout plausible-sounding theories as
| though they're fact, but they actually have no basis in
| reality. "Turned out Company X was having trouble monetizing
| Feature Y so they've decided to pivot and adopt a new marketing
| strategy which is why customer support now takes so long to
| respond if you're not on an enterprise tier." And for other
| random companies that stuff sounds perfectly plausible, but
| every time I've been in a position to fact-check against deep
| personal knowledge of the company in question, it's been total
| BS. Just wild speculation presented with an air of authority.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Every color science and/or accessibility thread trends
| towards quoting and reinforcing the same gentleman who has
| blotted out the sun by writing extremely long (and
| informative!) explanations of color theory on several sites,
| in service of an extremely flawed conclusion that is fixed by
| an hour of Mathematica and experience with actual color
| science.
| dxdm wrote:
| Now after reading all of the above, I'm painfully aware
| that I have no idea whether what you just said is true or
| random BS. :(
| refulgentis wrote:
| Hah, very good ;)
| watwut wrote:
| I am betting BS
| itronitron wrote:
| Can you post links to either the HN threads or color theory
| sites that you feel are reinforcing the flawed conclusions?
| jononor wrote:
| Or even better, some explanations that are more correct,
| or a reveal of the common flaws?
| refulgentis wrote:
| Read Color Appearance Models 3rd Edition by Fairchild, it
| covers __everything__.
|
| I think someday soon I'll be communicating about this
| more widely, we'll see though
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| One reason I strongly dislike forums with voting mechanisms
| is that they tend to reward and reinforce speculation
| presented with an air of authority.
| 7952 wrote:
| Do you think it is just speculation presented as fact? Or do
| people really believe what they are saying?
|
| Even within a company I am very sceptical of narrative. The
| root cause of something can be quite different to what is
| presented, which can be different to what people believe
| privately. We are all biased after all.
| tdumitrescu wrote:
| I don't think people are purposely trying to mislead, I
| think they're just connecting the dots with whatever low-
| quality sources are available to them: old Tech Crunch
| articles, press releases, company blog posts, remarks from
| coworkers/friends who've gotten sales outreach, etc. And
| making some kind of narrative out of them which feels
| believable. Often logical inferences to draw, but
| ultimately just wrong/irrelevant.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I treat nearly every comment online like they are a user who is
| actively trying to deceive me and it's sad.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I do something like this when a comment provokes an emotional
| reaction the fits with current societal trends.
|
| I literally ask myself "What if this comment is an echo of a
| troll?"
|
| I don't impute bad faith to the individual, but that they too
| may have been seduced by the power of easy emotions.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Same here especially after watching the CGP Grey video on
| anger.
| anonunivgrad wrote:
| People aren't psychologically equipped to handle this kind of
| dishonesty. We evolved to deal with small groups. People would
| either be forced into honesty by socialization or reputational
| fears, or they'd be exiled or executed.
|
| Now, you just go on Twitter and virtue signal about some
| nonsense idpol stuff while robbing everyone blind, and the
| people will love you.
| moralsupply wrote:
| It's not really different here in HN.
|
| Most comments on anything that isn't about pure technology have a
| strong political leaning (leftist for the most part, therefore
| authoritarian) and generally angry about the idea of people and
| businesses taking care of themselves without government
| intervention.
| krapp wrote:
| >Most comments on anything that isn't about pure technology
| topics have a strong political leaning (leftist for the most
| part, therefore authoritarian) and generally angry about the
| idea of people and businesses taking care of themselves without
| government intervention.
|
| This is a good example of something else very common on HN -
| the attempt at a sly anti-leftist non-sequitur.
| hughw wrote:
| Are we commenters on HN only 1%?
| dang wrote:
| I just checked. 25% of all HN accounts have posted at least one
| comment. That's higher than I thought I remembered.
|
| 6% of accounts have posted 10 or more comments, accounting for
| 96% of all comments.
|
| 2% of accounts have posted 100 or more comments, accounting for
| 83% of all comments.
| criddell wrote:
| What's the motivation for creating an account if you aren't
| going to comment?
| L2hhdGNoZXQv wrote:
| Upvoting, maybe.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I used to mess around on here with this account I consider to
| be a throwaway one. Turns out I signed up in 2018 and I have
| ~1041 karma! Time sure does fly.
| forgingahead wrote:
| Happy New Year @dang! Thanks for all your hard work as
| always.
|
| Thanks for sharing these stats -- seems like HN is similar to
| other internet communities. 2% covering 83% of all comments
| is certainly pretty skewed. I do notice a tussle over
| upvotes/downvotes when making comments that might be against
| the HN vocal orthodoxy, so maybe that's where the silent
| majority make themselves heard? Via upvotes/downvotes?
|
| What percentage of uniques have accounts here? Would be
| interesting to know if commenters are also a minority of
| total lurkers.
| dang wrote:
| I commented about this sometime in the last year. Let me
| see if my search fu can dig up the post...
|
| Edit: I was about to plead too much beer, but https://hn.al
| golia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| delivered. This is the post I was thinking of:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983.
| twicetwice wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, that's super interesting! If it's easy to
| dig up these stats, I'd be interested to know--how does that
| compare to unique viewers? What percent of page views are
| logged in? I suspect these numbers would be even more
| striking in that context.
| underdeserver wrote:
| What does this say about commenters on HN?
| 7373737373 wrote:
| "You Wouldn't Get It"
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| Important point to note here is that the Internet is not same as
| social media much less one specific website.
| galkk wrote:
| It could be is that the "ultra-productive" folks (except Ninja,
| who is real person), may be actually collectives, like
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
| anonunivgrad wrote:
| Not just insane people, but also people who in real life you
| would immediately dismiss as losers.
| thisisusername wrote:
| It reminds of just a few days ago when I checked out a Catholic
| forum with hundreds of comments and literally one third were by
| the same person who still hasn't been confirmed. One dude who
| hasn't gone through an essential Catholic ritual is one third of
| the comments on a Catholic site. That's just nuts. It's like
| claiming to be an expert on Mexican culture because you eat
| tacos.
| NilsIRL wrote:
| How different is this from "real life"?
|
| Books and other non-internet media are written by a subset of the
| population as well.
| taneq wrote:
| Everyone here's mad except me and thee, and I have my doubts
| about thee...
| kjgkjhfkjf wrote:
| The world would be a better place if people unqualified to do so
| stopped labeling people with whom they disagreed as "insane",
| "narcissists", "psychopaths", etc.
|
| When you do this, you dehumanize the person, and minimize the
| positive aspects of their contributions.
|
| If you are not a qualified doctor, please make a new year's
| resolution to stop doing this.
| Bakary wrote:
| Mental disorders are by definition relative to the broader
| society and to other individuals, so they're not that off the
| mark.
|
| That said, I would indeed rather describe people who spend
| their lives in specific minutiae as performance artists or zen
| monks rather than just calling them insane.
|
| It's not like anything we do is particularly sane in any
| cultural context.
| [deleted]
| nwah1 wrote:
| This was true even before the internet. The Oxford English
| Dictionary owes its existence to the paranoid schizophrenic Dr.
| William Minor, who did his work from an insane asylum after
| murdering a man.
| voiper1 wrote:
| Wikipedia says he was a major contributor, but there's a large
| team other than him. I don't see any suggestion that Oxford
| English Dictionary "owes its existence" to him.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Earl...
| nwah1 wrote:
| Wikipedia? Are you going to take the word of a bunch of
| internet lunatics?
|
| To be serious, the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne describes
| it as if their decades-long work was going at a snail's pace
| and Dr. Minor was crucial to making sufficient progress and
| avoiding the project being cancelled.
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Well, yes, I agree.
| Cloudef wrote:
| http://n-gate.com/
| ibn-python wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Unrelated, 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 wrote:
| That plus GP's username made me laugh
| austincheney wrote:
| That's why I deleted my Reddit account.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Same. 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.
| deathgrips wrote:
| I 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.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| You'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 wrote:
| My personal favorite: Any topic involving airplanes will
| involve 99% of the people sounding very confidant and very
| very wrong.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| I have no knowledge of nuclear sea vessels but the sheer
| number of comments and the certainty implied makes me
| suspicious on that topic.
| User23 wrote:
| I don't know about that, but I'm absolutely certain the
| bicycle shed needs to be green.
| sentenza wrote:
| Believe 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 wrote:
| That 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.
| splonk wrote:
| Poker is another topic where people wildly overestimate their
| knowledge but can sometimes present their incorrect ideas in
| a reasonably coherent way that allows them to be upvoted by
| other people who also aren't experts. At the bottom of every
| HN thread about poker you'll find a couple people who
| actually know what they're talking about shouting into the
| void, "wait, that's not actually how that works..." before
| they give up and wander off.
| nubbins wrote:
| Across all my HN comments I've found there is an optimum
| level of detail where it sounds like you know what you're
| talking about, beyond which is too complicated to get many
| upvotes. The exception is occasionally on HN you get an
| undisputed expert on something to come in and set the
| record straight.
| claudiawerner wrote:
| If 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!
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I definitely agree. Whenever you try to have a discussion
| that goes against some sacred assumptions, which happens
| very often when talking about sociology or (political)
| philosophy, or non-liberal politics in general, no matter
| how respectfully or qualifiedly you make your point it's
| almost certain your interlocutors will not engage
| productively.
|
| And indeed, because these assumptions are not even known to
| be assumptions, it's not even visible to the reader that
| this is a case of conformity.
|
| Interestingly, I've noticed that these modes of conformity
| often come in temporal waves, in that at different times of
| the day you get downvoted - or receive less constructive
| discussion - for differing subjects. I should try to make a
| more involved analysis eventually.
| paganel wrote:
| To be fair I'm not sure the economists know either, and some
| of them have even admitted to that.
|
| I'm in bed and on my phone and too lazy to search for an
| exact link, but for a quick example I can give you the
| international government-bond market which the theory said
| that its price should have not ever fallen below zero. At
| some point in 2019 I think bonds worth $17 trillion (40% of
| the market if I'm not mistaken) were priced below that zero
| threshold.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I 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.
| knighthack wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I don't agree. I read HN constantly.
|
| As far as I see, the areas where downvotes tend to occur are
| where they skew to opinion, or have some tidings to politics.
| In other areas, HN comments are generally high quality, and
| have a high signal-to-noise ratio.
|
| I wouldn't also correlate expert opinions being downvoted as
| just because it would "clash with the mental picture of a
| number of HN users". That's a false correlation.
| watwut wrote:
| Sociology, demographic and history are all pretty bad when
| they appear here.
|
| ANnything that requires empathy for different demographics
| too. (Like old people.)
| johnisgood wrote:
| Well, if I were to talk about addiction and the "opioid
| crisis", I would most likely be down-voted (happened
| before) even though what I would say would be supported by
| tons of evidence. When I bother, I just recommend a
| credible book instead that talks about it and supports it
| with lots of evidence.
|
| Actually, I am going to suggest it here just now because it
| is a great book and I would like more people to have a more
| accurate view on addiction:
| https://global.oup.com/academic/product/addiction-and-
| choice... (Addiction and Choice: Rethinking the
| relationship by Nick Heather and Gabriel Segal). It is from
| 2016, but most people's views on addiction is more than a
| few decades old, and all things considered, it is still
| fairly recent and all recent studies support these views.
| Please, if you are interested in addiction, have a read. :)
| It will get you up to date with it, and dispel lots of
| misconceptions that are still in the head of laymen.
| [deleted]
| daniellarusso wrote:
| As long as they are still readable, and not hidden, it can be
| reconciled.
|
| When things start 'disappearing', that makes it much more
| difficult to contrast.
|
| I have been on HN long enough to know that points != facts.
|
| But, yeah, I have noticed lots of downvotes for people
| stating facts or their own personal observations.
| kstenerud wrote:
| Sites with "high quality" content are only high quality in
| very specific areas, and are not devoid of noise. HN is good
| for getting quality information from insiders and experts in
| various elite fields (particularly technology related).
| Reddit is good for DIY stuff and special interest groups for
| personal things (finance, healthy living, repairs, building
| things, etc).
|
| But of course the content of each site tends to go far
| outside its areas of competence, which is where moderation is
| needed (otherwise they turn into 4chan or youtube). You get a
| feel for the bullshit after being on the site awhile, and
| once you're well tuned to it you see it everywhere (the "this
| site has gone downhill" effect).
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > Reddit is good for DIY stuff and special interest groups
| for personal things
|
| If you say so. I used to Reddit heavily, but all the topics
| I followed definitely started trending into the "crazy
| people" territory. For instance, personal audio and
| mechanical keyboards. At one point, the "average" person
| could get on there and find a good price-per-peformance
| recommendation.
|
| Now, those subs are taken over by the elites for whom money
| doesn't matter. I mean, it's neat that someone spent $2,000
| building a custom-PCB'd, custom-switched, custom-capped
| keyboard -- and boy, those pics sure are sexy -- but there
| are only so many of those posts I can take until I realized
| that no one was talking about the range I can afford any
| more.
|
| Reddit exists now as the worlds largest porn hub, with a
| very, very thin veneer over the top for respectability. If
| I google something specific -- like a question about a
| video game -- I specifically add "-site:reddit.com" because
| 1) 9 times out of 10, there's actually no answer, and 2) it
| takes a few clicks and many seconds to get TO the answer,
| because of their horrendous web site.
|
| And, yes, I'm bitter, and bag on Reddit whenever I can.
| friendlybus wrote:
| The culture changed, reddit just follows. I still miss
| the thoughtful discussion of difficult ontological
| questions in the popular culture around 2017-2018. Soon
| we will be discussing rhe expectional mechanical
| keyboards, and then some time after that the tasteful
| keyboards, and then some time after that the sexy
| keyboards. It goes on, consistency is not rewarded as the
| wave of cultural interest moves on.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I mean, people have been saying this basically since the site
| began:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057
|
| (I didn't find these, they're linked in the site guidelines.)
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I'm aware of that. It's just that it got much worse
| recently.
| Pfhreak wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| We 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 wrote:
| You should not assume people keep their original
| account(s).
|
| I have been active since 2009 here.
| eloisius wrote:
| Reddit has always been a few steps ahead of HN in its slide
| toward redditism, but I agree with GP that it feels like
| there is more disagreement-downvoting and replies that add
| nothing to the conversation. Not to the same degree as
| Reddit, but I think on both sites we're just witnessing the
| eternal September as they become less self-selective niche
| sites and more like mainstream social media.
| lmm wrote:
| Because Reddit is a moving target. At any given time HN is
| of a similar quality to Reddit-as-of-three-years-ago and
| declining towards Reddit-as-of-now.
| Joeri wrote:
| I've been on HN for many years and don't notice this
| decline. Could it be that those who observe a decline in
| quality simply have gotten more sensitive to low quality
| posts with age?
| haram_masala wrote:
| Is it, though? Maybe there's been some regression to the mean
| as the readership has grown, but Reddit is pretty much
| intolerable drivel these days. There's no comparison. dang
| and his team have done some heroic work to keep a high
| quality of content here.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| The Reddit experience depends, to an extreme and absolute
| degree, upon the moderators and culture of the specific
| subreddit. Each subreddit is almost literally its own
| independent kingdom.
|
| Saying anything about the quality of "Reddit" as a whole is
| very much like saying something about the quality of bars,
| or messageboards, or knitting clubs as a whole.
| [deleted]
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I agree dang and co are doing awesome work trying to
| maintain some minimal expected level of discourse here,
| however they are unable to do anything against mass down-
| voting of perfectly valid comments from people who actually
| know what they are talking about.
| [deleted]
| xenihn wrote:
| Supplement your HN with Blind.
| vecinu wrote:
| I personally find Blind to be a low quality, young
| demographic driven community with egotistical folks
| obsessed with money.
|
| Was your experience different?
| fctorial wrote:
| What is 'blind'? Can't google it.
| grzm wrote:
| https://www.teamblind.com
| ALittleLight wrote:
| The blind that fits the given description is a social
| network / app where you can register with a company email
| but are otherwise anonymous, so that you can post
| anonymously with people from your company.
|
| A lot of people (at least where I work) are disgruntled
| there. I get the feeling they joined because they were
| unhappy and want to vent about the company anonymously,
| but with people who know what they're talking about.
| Maybe I'm just projecting though.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > register with a company email
|
| > you can post anonymously
|
| These two don't square. Your anonymity clearly depends on
| the site not being hacked.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| There are possible implementations where it could be
| done, e.g. they don't store your email address after
| registry or they only store the hash - which I hope
| they've done. There are also possible mitigations from
| the user's side, e.g. when registering send the
| verification email to an alias that is a list of people
| so that you are not uniquely identified by it.
| csomar wrote:
| Quality in HN has always been in a pendulum. It swings
| between Reddit and comes back to old HN or better. I think it
| goes in waves, maybe new users, or maybe it's the weather
| affecting people mentally.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| You will also see entire threads of people confidently
| stating utter speculation as if it's fact. HN is well-
| moderated and has high information density compared to most
| subreddits, but that doesn't mean the information is
| _correct._ What you see on HN is that both correct and
| incorrect comments tend to adopt the same academic affect in
| their writing. If you 're not fairly familiar with the
| subject at hand, it's hard to tell who knows what they're
| talking about because it all sounds coherent and reasonable.
|
| If you really want a lark, read the typical HN subthread on a
| topic involving trading, finance or economics. It's like
| watching the YouTube-educated spar with the Wikipedia-
| educated. Commenters with real world experience are downvoted
| just as often as they're upvoted when they try to earnestly
| correct mundane misconceptions.
|
| Likewise you can't have a bug bounty story on HN without
| someone repeating the farce that web app vulns have some sort
| of shadowy black market. There is invariably a comment near
| the top claiming the security researcher could have received
| so much more money by selling it to criminals. It is amazing
| that something so wrong gets repeatedly so carelessly and
| easily.
|
| These are a substantial number of people here who think they
| can confidently talk about anything if they just deconstruct
| it to first principles and treat it like something else they
| know about.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Also how a majority of the world lives on the average wrong
| understanding of things. I guess society is not about precision
| efficiency.
| da02 wrote:
| What are those 2-3 fields? What are some of the things people
| say that are wrong about those topics?
| hinkley wrote:
| I'm sure you've had the experience of being downvoted for being
| right but with unpleasant news.
| roenxi wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| Can you link to some of your "hard won experience"
| comments? Now I'm curious about them.
| randcraw wrote:
| In 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.
| Bakary wrote:
| There's no guarantee that what you describe as higher quality
| sites offer much better views of the world.
| notjtrig wrote:
| The author notes by the use of insane he means different, but is
| it really that unique for a person to post online or are we just
| seeing a pattern where there is none.
|
| Books are written by insane people, on average person does not
| write a book.
|
| Rock climbers are insane people, very few people rock climb so
| why listen to safety tips the 0.2% of the population who do. They
| are not normal people from a statical standpoint.
|
| On average a person does not do any one spicific thing.
|
| Everyone online has contributed to the internet, everyone has
| written something and everyone has excersised.
|
| I've seen this brought up before that only 2-3% of redditors
| contribute, like it's a bad thing or a unique thing. That number
| it's way higher than books, tv, radio any form of convenientional
| media.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Thanks, came here to underline the very same, with quote FTA:
|
| > Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem
| to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that
| as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them
| literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of
| respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like
| nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how
| unusual their behavior is.
|
| The post is about 'how unusual their behavior is' not about
| 'their (in)sanity'. In hindsight a questionable use of terms,
| given the author's profession, but I appreciate the edit.
| pontifier wrote:
| I remember reading about a study to try to find the
| statistically average soldier.
|
| I seem to recall that after doing hundreds of measurements on
| thousands of soldiers they found that there was too much
| variation. None of the soldiers was average in all
| measurements.
|
| Edit: here's a link
|
| https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
| jl6 wrote:
| I think these examples still support the broader hypothesis
| that creators are outliers and not representative of everybody
| else. Normal people don't write books. Reading only books and
| not talking to normal people will give you a skewed impression
| of reality.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Even that statement "creators are outliers" doesn't really
| seem supported by the evidence from the article. Seems just
| as plausible that most people _create_ in a singular or small
| set of domains, but _consume_ from a much broader set.
|
| I mean, sure, only .2% of visitors contribute to Wikipedia,
| but that's because Wikipedia has huge general applicability.
| I bet the 99.8% of non-contributors also includes the guy
| that streams on Twitch 12 hours a day, or folks who moderate
| Reddit forums, or lots of book authors.
|
| Far from being "outliers", could be that most people just
| focus their creative pursuits on one thing.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| It's also perspective. People usually underestimate what doing
| a little bit of something daily actually accumulates to in a
| given year. Before you know it, you hit certain thresholds. It
| can appear overwhelming at first glance to most of us, but it's
| really just a total sum of daily progress.
|
| The perspective on this can be the shallow assessment that
| something is insane, or the wisdom to know it was discipline.
| Take your pick.
| chaganated wrote:
| From the comments:
|
| " _Creation has always been the province of outliers. Has every
| creator--from Grady Harp all the way back to God--been insane?_
| "
| yurielt wrote:
| And this is quite honestly a good things. Wait before you
| downvote. Hear me out the current system is horrible and what it
| determines as insane people is a product of such system. Back in
| the Middle Ages when we had a different approach to mental health
| non neurotypical people were regarded as different, yes but not
| as garbage or plainly wrong just because of being odd. Instead in
| some cases they were even regarded as wise as a result of this.
| Think about alchemy for example something like that could only
| have been tried by very very mentally ill people and if they
| weren't so at the beginning their handling of mercury sure made
| them crazy after a while. Modern society easily ditched the
| mentally ill. However they can give a lot and if that makes a
| couple companies in the internet mad so be it. I recommend you
| watch the following video on Foucault
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLwtCVTcEu-8-3urANmn5Tm6coT...
| it is an over simplification but it will help you understand. I
| also recommend reading the anti edipous from Delouse and Guatari
| to get an insight in how the current system hides and destroys
| the mentally ill in spite of how much they have given to history
| and humanity. The truth is without mentally ill a people society
| would be different and thus anti mentally ill sentiment of
| modernity is but a depravity as non neurotypical variations are
| for memes(social culture and the academia for example) what
| mutation is for genes
| didibus wrote:
| Based on the other comments here, and the actual content of the
| posted link, I can also say that most of the comments I read on
| the internet have not actually consumed the content they are
| commenting on.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| Customs are contingent truths and can only be learnt from others:
| which side of the road to drive on, language, laws, etiquette.
| Neither pure reason nor empirical fact fully determine them. When
| you hear them in your social context, you adopt them
| unconsciously and uncritically.
|
| Therefore people from a disjoint graph of social interaction have
| different customs, which aren't supported by fact or reason.
|
| They are insane.
| raunakdag wrote:
| I've been searching for this post for what seems like years, but
| I'm sure is just a couple of months! I remember reading this oh
| so long ago, thank you for submitting it here.
| k__ wrote:
| There are around 45k authors/writers in the US, which means not
| even 0,001% of the US writes books.
|
| Are these people insane? Well, you have to be bold to assume you
| could make a living of writing, I guess. But insane is probably a
| bit far fetched.
| karaterobot wrote:
| The majority of content isn't made by the Grady Harps and Justin
| Knapps of the world. Those are the individuals with the most
| contributions in their respective areas, but their total input
| still amounts to a rounding error. Given that's the case, the
| fact that we even recognize people like that as outliers means
| that the majority of what you read on the internet isn't written
| by insane people (for any meaningful definition of the word).
| lapcatsoftware wrote:
| The definition of insanity is submitting the same link to HN over
| and over again and expecting different comments.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| FWIW, I'm a pretty dedicated HN reader and this is the first
| time I've seen it.
| cm2012 wrote:
| I live my life refreshing HN and haven't seen it before, so I
| appreciate it.
| netizen-9748 wrote:
| How do you know that different comments are what is expected
| geoah wrote:
| Hehe, it's an interesting post so once every half a year i
| guess is fine :p
| Glyptodon wrote:
| I think there's room for it to be a little misleading without
| knowing set intersections. Like say someone subscribes to 50
| subreddits, submits 2 posts a month, and averages 4 comments a
| day. On average they're lurking, but I wouldn't call them a
| lurker.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Reddit/Twitter/etc. are always, _Always_ , _ALWAYS_ wrong about
| everything.[1]
|
| ... and thank God for that.
|
| As one whose political and cultural beliefs are mostly opposite
| that of Twitter/Reddit's as a whole, the sites' existence
| (including subreddits like /r/politics, /r/news, and
| /r/worldnews) is gratifying and validating.
|
| __ _If the mass of Redditards /Twitter users agreed with my
| opinions I'd carefully reexamine every one of them._ __
|
| As bloodraven42 wrote in response to a pretty cringe-inducing
| example of a Redditard (who was agreeing with an even more
| cringe-inducing example (http://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comment
| s/urodq/british_guy_...)):
|
| >Please note the fact that you've gotten this impression from
| "reading Reddit". I assure you, reading Reddit gives you about as
| accurate a portrayal of reality as reading North Korean "news".
| Did you know Kim Jong Il is literally a God?
|
| As Anal_Justice_League added:
|
| >So wait, your world view comes from reading _Reddit?_
|
| >Do I even have to explain how catastrophically stupid that is?
|
| And as 1foryes said in another thread (https://np.reddit.com/r/ca
| nada/comments/be2p5a/cbc_predicts_...): >But fortunately, reddit
| does not represent reality. If it did, the ice caps would have
| melted years ago and we'd all be fighting in WW6.
|
| [1] Except bacon
| cafard wrote:
| What do they say about bacon?
| habosa wrote:
| Is there a good estimate for what fraction of people have a
| mental illness (diagnosed or undiagnosed)? I bet higher than 1%
| thrower123 wrote:
| Blocking bluechecks is the greatest thing you can do for your own
| mental health.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I can't actually read this because I've blocked reddit at the
| router.
| throw999666 wrote:
| it's not just comments online it's most of the world is created
| by insane people. And most of those are men because men are more
| insane than women and in different ways.
|
| Jordan Peterson has a similar theory and the reason that men are
| more overrepresented in creators of the world around us is
| because there's more insane men than there are insane women or
| they're insane in different ways.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| I read a study many years ago that men and women have the same
| average for many things but the standard deviation is higher
| for men. The theory was men have to prove themselves more to
| successfully breed so genetics throws the dice a bit more with
| men, whereas women had to raise the children, and in groups,
| and so a bit of deviation is probably less helpful. I've tried
| to find it a few times but haven't been able to, maybe its
| debunked by now, maybe someone here knows it.
| watwut wrote:
| Men worked in groups too. Group cooperation was crucial in
| low tech hunting and aggriculture and house building and
| anything. Or simply, to keep it usa, try to hunt for bison
| alone without horse. So if your theory puts emphasis on
| female cooperation and ignores male cooperation it is already
| suspect.
|
| Low tech and behind-time rural villages are big on gender
| roles. But child rasing is only one of things women do and
| did. They used to spend awful lot of time by producing things
| - making threads out of flax (flower) or wool, then material
| then sewing. They tended animals too, made candles and so on
| and so forth. Kids contributed from early age.
|
| Theory that limits female contribution to childcare is likely
| projecting 1950 middle class roles onto past. Just mere
| ability to sustain adult and teenage humans who are not
| contributing to actual essentials production assumes
| basically wealth. It was not even affordable for most
| population.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Spinning yarn was a stereotypical female activity from the
| Stone Age until the 18th century. It took a long time and a
| lot of patience to produce reasonable amount of yarn, and
| there was literally no other way to do it. The total hour
| count spent on spinning was probably higher than the total
| hour count spent on childrearing, at least for women who
| lived to their middle age.
|
| But the 18th century is far enough for us that we already
| forgot this.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| yeah, like I said I read it somewhere and haven't been able
| to find it again - as you say probably nonsense and a
| reflection of social mores at the time - it was probably in
| the 80's I read it.
|
| Edit: found it - its called the variability hypothesis
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis
| tylerhou wrote:
| IIRC this was a theoretical model of two populations with
| different characteristics re. offspring production. Real life
| is more complicated than theoretical models, so it's unclear
| whether the results of such a model are applicable or useful.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| Have you ever thought that _you_ might be insane?
| kelvin0 wrote:
| There is a reason why so many people who have made their mark in
| history are deemed to be crazy kooks (at first anyways). When you
| start following your intuition and powers of observation
| (yourself, and others), you tend to diverge from mainstream
| views.
|
| Not to be confused with delusions and other fantasy based models.
| tayo42 wrote:
| It's an interesting spin on the 1% of people actually post thing.
| How many people actually create, and create and share in general
| though. Since I got into art and sharing it people tell me they
| also create but don't share it online anywhere. People might want
| to participate but don't for whatever reason.
|
| The internet does also give a equal megaphone to everyone. Actual
| crazy things can sound reasonable. The act if down and upvoting
| on reddit is also similar. 4 or 5 downvotes, which in reality is
| only 4 or 5 people can bury a thought, essentially censoring it
| and makes it seem more unpopular then it is. It was only
| unpopular to those 4 or 5 readers.
| legulere wrote:
| The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
| one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
| all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard
| Shaw
|
| In the end I think we underestimate the insanity of "normal"
| people. What is considered normal is a pretty subjective question
| and prone to change.
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Everyone in the world is crazy except for me and thee, and I'm
| not to sure about thee - one of my Dad's favourite sayings.
| pgustafs wrote:
| The problem is that the sites don't have feedback loops to the
| real world, just imaginary internet points. People who optimize
| for imaginary internet points are either ahead of the curve or
| insane, depending on how you look at it.
| hyperpallium2 wrote:
| TFA is about power laws, and how the few contribute much for the
| many. These extremely prolific contribitors are outside the norm,
| and obsessive - or "insane", according TFA.
|
| All contribution to society follows such power laws: classical
| music, scientists, authors, leaders etc. Einstein, Newton,
| Mozart, Tolstoy.
|
| The surprise here is that social media internet contribution
| _appears_ grass-roots, egalitarian and norm-representative.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Well not always, some of it is written by very sophisticated
| people. Like Q is probably a disinformation campaign. Mixes truth
| with fact, with the sole purpose to put people off the right
| track.
| rapind wrote:
| I always assumed Q was just a troll, screwing with people and
| laughing his / her ass off. I figured the name "Q" came from
| Star Trek NG.
|
| I honestly don't know much about it though (I don't pay
| attention to most social or mainstream media crap). Is the
| current thinking that it's a serious and well-funded
| disinformation campaign?
| monopoledance wrote:
| I think the tragedy of the internet is that it could be all
| at the same time: started by a troll, adapted by trolls...
| but also lunatics and those who make a living exploiting
| lunatics ("content creators", "influencers", ad biz,...), and
| destabilization campaigns by state players. I think by now
| "Q" is a complex creature, with its own incentives, beyond
| the control of any particular fraction.
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