Hacker News Reader

Comment by flipactual | Hacker News Reader

This seems much less about being casual or being a polymath and more about those who overestimate the value of their own input

I’m leaving this comment only because I most often do not overestimate the value of my input and therefor don’t leave comments, but this seems the perfect place to deviate

View on HN

Which may mean you underestimate the value of your input and, in some sense, leech off the contributions of others...leaving a vacuum that gets filled by shills and hacks. Why would you do that? A little preparation and basic work-study and critical thinking skills is all a post needs, along with something you really want to say and is actually worth saying, of course. Maybe once a day, maybe once a week or once a month. Internet posting practices and moderation have matured enough to make posting on sites like HN useful without an inevitable devolution into rantfests or infomercials. (Although it can still happen.)

Silence, digital or otherwise, is a fine spiritual practice. It’s not necessary for some...probably sorely needed by others...

You're both right.

> A little preparation and basic work-study and critical thinking skills is all a post needs, along with something you really want to say and is actually worth saying, of course.

Unless you have high confidence in your ability to grasp the subject, this can be considerably daunting to someone who isn’t blessed with high confidence generally. And one can at least infer that gaining that confidence may involve significant time and effort. Especially in a forum where existing contributions are:

- high volume - scored by peers - fast moving - particularly accepting of critical feedback along some lines but biased against other kinds of critical feedback

This can be very discouraging. I know from my own experience that even as someone who has a tendency to challenge, I find myself constrained by my lack of experience on many subjects, my estimation of the time involved to become conversant, and my general feeling of limited time and energy. And... yeah, then I find myself more inclined to read others’ opinions, more confident than my own, and defer to trusting them unless I have a strong instinct otherwise.

That seems like a pretty normal reaction for someone with limited attention and study resources? Am I missing something?

When low in confidence, you could just use phrases like "my understanding is that [...]", or "from what I gather [...], is that not the case?" If you stand corrected you stand corrected and you're wiser, likely together with some other readers, everyone wins!

People rarely bash others that express themselves modestly and sincerely.

On the other hand, I’ve been criticized for being too eager to hedge anything I say with something like “in my understanding, ... I could be wrong.”

Commenting is not zero sum. Lack of response from one does not create a vacuum for another to fill. Quality and quantity are orthogonal measurements.

So if someone is informed on a topic they have a kind of societal obligation to post? By not posting, it allows those who may be less experienced or outright trolls to steer the discussion towards irrelevance.

I like the idea, but not sure how folks know which group they fall into.

The warning should really be “beware listening to advice without doing your own research”.

I think the author is more saying "don't listen to experts when they are not talking about their field of expertise".

I don't actually think that's quite right. Doing your own research into subjects where you're not an expert, at least for most people I think, is just as likely to lead you astray as listening to non-experts. (Most conspiracy theorists do a great deal of research.) I think the real key skill is differentiating between trustworthy and untrustworthy sources of information (on any given subject), and learning to logically estimate probabilities when multiple trustworthy sources differ.

It's just not feasible to follow the proofs of everything back to first principles for yourself, so at some point you need to trust an authority, at least to form a prior. The key is doing that in a logical manner.

I work in an academic field and took a strong and useful interest in another field. I really don't think I overestimate my abilities, I say things like I a jack of all trades and 'x think I'm great at y and y think I'm great at x'. But still people think especially talented. I even see quiet disagreement from experts in x or y who are maybe not so keen to criticise me publicly. I feel the issue is that others over estimate my abilities. Maybe a case of conflating value (which is real) with ability?

It helps to think of your abilities on multiple axes -- sort of like a spider chart. Your expertise is actually the "area under the curve." You may very well be the foremost expert (comparatively) in certain regions of the spider chart. Ironically, building expertise in multiple domains actually helps you specialize relative to others.

>> I feel the issue is that others over estimate my abilities. Maybe a case of conflating value (which is real) with ability?

As much as people like to throw around the phrase "critical thinking", you're describing people being lazy and depending on their impression of you rather than evaluating the validity of what you have to say. It's a shortcut we all take because we dont have time (or ability) to be experts in everything so we listen to people we perceive to know what they're talking about.

Re-read the article until you hit the header: "Self-Reinforcing Churn"

Think about what you have recently read and dump it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com