Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

There's been a trend lately of low-quality academic-lite blogposts being upvoted on HN. This, unfortunately, continues the pattern. I blame Wikipedia (and reddit-style intellectual superficiality); it's a double-edged sword that makes everyone think they're an expert. The Tragedy of the Commons is extensively studied in Game Theory (we spent half a semester on these types of problems) and has been at the heart of many social experiments over the past century (Ostrom was already cited a few times in the thread). Anyone that's done more than skim the Wikpedia article knows that group size is a primary element, but it's not the whole story.

To say that the blog post brings nothing new to the table is an understatement. I really wish OP just gave a newbie-friendly introduction to the problem (which would seem more appropriate given their exposure), as opposed to proposing a "solution" -- the hubris is palpable.

I mean, take a look at this quote: "Interestingly enough, the optimum solution is always present when N=1" -- it's wrong on just about every level. First, that's not a solution (and saying optimum is incredibly telling; the term of art is equilibrium, anyway), and second, common property (even if you're the only actor) is still not your property (think about a park in a city of population 1; there's a difference between that park and your back-yard). That's the whole point of the thought experiment.

>There's been a trend lately of low-quality academic-lite blogposts being upvoted on HN. This, unfortunately, continues the pattern.

First, what's "lately"? HN has had since forever upvoted blogposts on all kinds of things, and they more often than not had simple or simplistic content. It was never about academic standards or some such.

Second, who said academic-proper (as opposed to "academic-lite") material is necessarily "high quality" or of more interest? Most papers are drab affairs, to get someone a degree, or to pad someone's publishing numbers. That they might be full of the proper references, doesn't make them necessarily insightful (or appropriate for a general audience).

And in any case, HN is not a journal, nor is the HN crowd comprised mainly of scholars...

Is "Worse is Better" (a seminal post) academic? Are PG posts (the closest to holy scriptures for early HN) academic?

I think your characterization is unfair.

> it's a double-edged sword that makes everyone think they're an expert

I did not get the impression that the author thought he was an expert. By reading, I think it’s clear the author is aware that he’s not an expert.

More generally, I don’t mind articles written by people who aren’t subject matter experts. Mainly because I think most new ideas come from outsiders.

I guess I'll have to disagree. In my book, proposing a solution to X implies being an expert on X.

Why gatekeep on who can brainstorm about solutions? If a non-expert stumbles on a great solution, you would throw it out? I don't like ANY of the author's solutions. The article still got me thinking about negative externalities in a new way.

Let me put it this way: I can't take someone "solving" the Tragedy of the Commons without mentioning Nash equilibria, Pareto efficiency, or Ostrom's empirical studies seriously any more than I can take someone "solving" the Riemann hypothesis without mentioning prime numbers seriously.

So, if someone does formulate a working solution in a novel way, but they doesn't mention Nash equilibria, Pareto efficiency, or Ostrom's empirical studies (either because they're not a necessary part of a solution, or because they've came at it on their own, without having prior knowledge of these, and thus formulated was was needed of them on their own terms), you'd don't want to hear about it, because dogma.

Does it surprise you that a place named "Hacker News" is usually welcoming to non-experts who try to find ways to hack all variety of "systems" that experts claimed wasn't possible?

In my book, outside of hard sciences and engineering, "being an expert on X" is just a BS title, almost unrelated with competency, actual experience, and a history of good outcomes working on X, and worst of all without skin in the game.

The biggest blunders and worst outcomes, have historically come from "expert solutions"...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-experts-are-al...

On the other hand, tons of creative solutions and amazing inventions came from non-experts -- people like Mendel, for example (and in fact any new domain must by necessity be founded by a non-expert, since there's no domain to be an expert of beforehand).

I'm the author. I don't claim to be an expert in this field and I explicitly mentioned this multiple times in the post.

Third sentence I had a disclaimer and my solutions at the end had a disclaimer.

Discussion is INCREDIBLY valuable for learning about new topics. Further, many major contributions have been from people with different and unusual backgrounds.

Dude... I literally in the 3rd line said this:

"I might be wrong but would love some feedback. It’s an exceedingly complicated topic which has been researched for hundreds of years so it might be that this observation has been made before."

... so there's to be NO discussion on the Internet of complicated topics. Got it!

> ... so there's to be NO discussion on the Internet of complicated topics. Got it!

I think you're attacking a straw-man here. That's not what I said at all. I also write blog posts on complicated topics, but they are thoroughly researched and generally, though not always, within my purview of expertise. You literally only read the Wikipedia page.

> You literally only read the Wikipedia page.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have NO idea of my background. You don't know what I've read.

Do you speak to people like this in person? Common decency goes a long way to further academic discussion.

I dunno, the post's some real n-gate bait.

> Being that my background is in CompSci I tend to think about thinks in terms of probabilities, statistics, game theory, and distributed systems.

Well. OK.

But then a bunch of:

> This would need to be validated experimentally but I suspect that the probability of cooperation (the opposite of defection) would be inversely proportional to the size of the group.

:-|

And the whole post is of about that quality. Fine as a "dear diary" I guess but it's very low-value even as an amateur effort.

This is my point, but I’m getting downvoted and buried by the mods so I’m ejecting out of this conversation.

You've crossed into personal attack, as well as breaking the site guideline that asks: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Can you please not do that? We all have a bias to dismiss others as idiots on the internet, and it's necessary to consciously discount that in order to have any chance of being fair. Otherwise you end up posting a shallow dismissal while criticizing someone else for being shallow, which improves nothing.

If you know more, that's awesome, and in that case you could write a much better comment by teaching the rest of us some of what you know, so we can learn something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>I think you're attacking a straw-man here. That's not what I said at all. I also write blog posts on complicated topics, but they are thoroughly researched and generally, though not always, within my purview of expertise.

Doesn't seem like he attacked a straw-man. You literally doubled down saying (to sum it up): "There's to be NO discussion on the Internet of complicated topics [unless you're an expert of them, like I'm on the topics I write on the internet about]".

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