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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

People love to think they’re really smart and post a Wikipedia link to DK, Occam’s razor, submarine PR, etc. whenever they think it’s vaguely related because they think it makes them look clever. They’re not.

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Instagram Intellectuals. Some folks want to show off their hot bods, expensive cars, and exotic trips. Others want to show off just how smart they are with a superficial recognition of a pattern, a concept, a thing they know, but not an actual discussion.

I'm as guilty as any. How does one learn to "shut up" other than through sheer force of will?

Practice silence if you are not creating valuable conversation. Pointing out intellectual fallacies ends such discourse, and doesn't accomplish anything but that.

Is it actually preferable to shut up though? They say that one of the easiest ways to get a better answer is to be wrong on the internet. Thus if you share what you know, but end up being wrong, then somebody's going to correct you.

Very rarely do people correct you in a way that's instructive. It's usually just mocking after they get you on one tidbit. A large part of that is because those who argue on the internet are usually children or people who know nothing about anything.

It takes wisdom and humility to be a student if your instructor is a fool or sociopath.

Especially since one has an excuse to get indignant and closed minded when that happens.

Hmmm. It takes wisdom and humility to gain an advantage from the networked human culture. And in other cases it makes one dumber or less wise? So plugging in a few reasonable initial values it appears the median wisdom will drop to zero unless a coterie of wise folks are able to partition themselves off in ycombinator or kuro5hin Or Slashdot or reddit.

This was possibly true ~20 tears ago on comp.lang.perl.misc or lkml, but it is certainly not true "on the internet" today, except perhaps in the most marginal of edge cases in places that the eternal september has not destroyed...

Yes. Personally at least, I've found my mistakes aren't particularly unique. But if I'm not the one making a mistaken assertion, I'm less defensive about correcting my understanding.

IMO, submarine PR should always be called out. I often times read something, and don't realize its a submarine.

That is the exact thing I like to use HN/reddit for.

What's "submarine PR"?

My searches runneth dry.

The really funny bit is that DK predicts that the people best at a subject will tend to underestimate their own skill compared to the average. That implies they'll overestimate how good other people will be at the subject. Which is the exact opposite behavior of those people trying to look smart.

Confirmation bias is another classic.

Affects everyone but me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_blind_spot

Now I look smart, right?

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