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Comment by nizze | Hacker News Reader

The comment section is pure gold for discovering contrasting opinions - which will feed critical thinking. Reading what ever article while remembering different opinions from comment section gives a really nice insight.

Totally agree about the top comments. Not that valuable and some times even misleading/manipulated/bought/nasty.

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His whole point is that reading comments first is the mistake. It primes you with thoughts and opinions with little to no cognition required (recognizing they still may be valuable, but those comments will be there after your analysis...)

What we really need is to develop our own critical reading skills, how to connect dots on our own etc. I agree that seeing others comments first before starting that process might be a negative for many reasons.

Most just don't have the luxury of critically analyzing things these days at their work -- the goal is to produce as fast and as much as possible. I find reading the comment sections first helps me gauge what exactly is important in the article and what the takeaways are -- from both angles. Then I can go back to work.

The problem with that is often it gives equal credence to unequal opinions. And not everyone has the critical thinking skills and freedom from bias that they think they do. I'd argue that really nobody is able to fully remove from themselves any biases that may make them more likely to believe some comment over another.

Voting does nothing for this either, as people may upvote a popular lie or misconception, or downvote an uncomfortable truth - I used to see this happen often in the science-based subreddits when I bothered with them on reddit.

We should bump this up to the top.

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