I dunno dang, in the era of "fake news" I don't think the sentiment is inappropriate.

What else but a shallow dismissal for people who are ignorant but hold forth on some technical issue? The Internet is right there, they could just as easily do their own homework as post something uninformed.

I think "some" is very few (if any at all) in my experience. If you are generally looking for knowledge or not sure, you preface with "I may be wrong", "I am not an expert" or other such phrases, but most often people state wrong information as facts with no caveats. It's probably some combination of over confidence and ignorance.

Um, you just said

> Comments are pointers, not destinations.

And from site guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Maybe we are blathering about something we know nothing about to the point where we just sound ridiculous to someone who does know, eh? Rather than shaking his head in exasperation and moving on, OP takes a moment to try to let us know that we're wasting our time.

If we really care, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find and perhaps read some authoritative document describing best practices for radioactive waste management, eh?

I understand the sentiment, but I wish you would. Despite all the weeds that grow in the threads, many of us are here to learn. That's the purpose of this site. If users won't comment in their areas of expertise, that purpose is stymied.

It doesn't mean you have to get into tedious arguments with ignorant, indignant comments. (It's interesting how often those two go together.) It's enough to post a substantive top-level comment explaining what you know from the point of view of someone in the business. In the end, those tend to get upvoted; there's one at the top of this thread right now. And as moderator/gardeners we do what we can to give those more interesting plants a fighting chance vis-à-vis the weeds.

As a physicist I have a similar reaction to a bunch of topics. Sometimes people are very happy with the insider info I can bring to a thread (e.g. how does the EHT create it's picture), but sometimes you get so much opposition from people who obviously don't have a clue and simply assume that everything is simple to solve with machine learning and that all professional scientists are bumbling idiot who can be save by the comments of a silicon valley kid that it stops being fun.

I wonder if a "badge" system could help HN. Validate professional work experience with a moderation team ("astrophysicist" because I have published papers there, or "radiation control tech" or "worked in the movie industrie" or "work at google" or whatever). You could even have more than one badge (say "work at google" and "race sailboats for sport"). And when you post a comment there is a list of all your badges below the text field an you can select one to be displayed noticeable above your comment to indicate "I have professional knowledge of this". Of course you can still post a comment without selecting any of your badges because "radiation controll tech" says nothing when discussing cookie recipes, but is an important thing to not when discussing a radioactive spill.

It's also generally a problem especially of the entrepreneurial world. In the academic world, some of the most knowledgeable people get listened to, even if all they do is quietly churn out results and publish them. In the entrepreneurial world, it's often the people who speak loudly, confidently, and able to answer questions before you've even finished your question who get funded, even if they don't know what they're talking about.

Theranos and its ilk were all no surprise to me. The entire venture ecosystem is perfectly designed to catch charlatans, not experts.

It's not just commenters on this site; planet wide problem.

HN is a tremendous pool of groupthink.

Comments are pointers, not destinations.

If you make peace with this you will be much happier.