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Comment by throwaway64643 | Hacker News Reader

Regarding the meta of physics posts on here. I'd just like to tell my feeling. Reading science related or physics related opinions of people on Reddit, I feel like most of them are lay people. They express their admiration of science, their surprise for new knowledge, etc. What they wrote indicates them being lay. Reading physics or science related opinions here on HN, I feel like I've fallen into a rabbit hole of personal crackpot ideas of pseudo-experts that are ubiquitous on the net. If this is cutting-edge science, why wouldn't we non-experts just be a bit more conservative with our words? (Alsolutely no offense to any real expert out there).

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In Starcraft, you get a curious phenomena with regards to how good people think they are based on the league they're in:

Bronze league players (lowest) know they're bad and that they don't understand the game.

Silver and Gold league players (2nd and 3rd lowest) think they're better and are really starting to get a grasp on how Starcraft operates

Platinum league players think they basically know everything and just need to work on a few minor issues

Diamond league players begins to realize there is so much more depth than they imagined, and those 'minor issues' are actually oceans of complexity and depth

Master league players fully comprehend the depths of their own ignorance and lack of skill, as they are now finally able to look at the professionals and grasp the massive gulf between themselves and the pros.

Reddit has bronze league understanding of physics, HN has platinum level understanding.

I've never been clear why they come out on weekends to say the astroohysics establishment is wrong, though.

See also ; Four Stages of Competence

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

So the old saying "a little bit of knowledge is dangerous" applies here.

Also throwaway. You hit the nail on the head. Reddit keeps being looked down upon but it has a much higher concentration of people who know what they are talking about. HN hasn’t really been about tech/startups in quite some time. It seems that way on the surface but the commentary on every subject is so emotionally charged and looking for an axe to grind, it’s hard to take this website seriously anymore.

I wouldn’t really call it crackpot, however. It’s just incredibly misguided and ignorant. I’m sad to say even the rare technical threads are filled with people who should know better than to post rubbish they do, because it transfers onto those who know even less. I think a predominant reason for this is that if you call people out on their bullshit, you’re likely going to be downvoted so people tend not to bother with it anymore. HN has gone through a few cycles of actually useful commentators leaving the site (and writing up about it). The remains are less than stellar.

HN while good on technology seems to think that this also transfers to biology/nutrition/health.

So much nonsense on here, same as any other forum!

And don't get started on comments about the stock market, or quantitative trading. I'm not an expert on physics so I'm unable to judge, but I am a quant and work at a quant firm and it's absolutely clear most comments discussing stock markets, HFT, automated trading and the like are coming from people with only a superficial understanding of the subject.

And what's worse is like you say... the comments are made with such certainty that unless you knew better, you'd think it was experts making authoritative claims on the subject.

There's a principle that says take a subject you're an expert in and see how poorly journalists explain it, then consider that they're likely just as poor at explaining subjects you're not an expert on.

Same principle likely applies to HN.

Gell-man amnesia is the principle you're thinking of.

In fact working as a quant does not automatically confer the sort of broad understanding most valuable in high-level discussion. (I was a quant then an academic.)

Same for Machine Learning.

Dunning-Kruger at its finest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

BTW, why use a throwaway just to make a mildly controversial remark? The internet points aren't real. What's the point of anyone using consistent names at all if we use throwaways whenever we say something interesting?

I use throwaway account for a few purposes:

* People cannot trace which dumb things I talked about in the past to use ad hominem on me. I felt disgusted when attacked by ad hominem. Without chilling effect of being dug from the past, I get more freedom in expressing opinion.

* To stay anonymous in a reasonable way, in the sense of preventing people from profiling username. Reading someone posting as 'anon314' or 'throwaway2021' would feel different from someone as 'hiimelonmusk'. It would leave no remark in the back of one's mind.

The second point is strange. It's an argument for not putting personally identifying information in the username. It's not an argument for throwaway accounts.

The first argument... well I just don't get it. Why do you care so much if some internet weirdos are looking through your history in order to win internet battles? Care about what you want, but it doesn't seem very healthy.

If we shouldn't care about any of this then why are we even here?

To have conversations and learn stuff. You can do that without being preoccupied by internet points.

Faraday was a book binder. Einstein a patent clerk. Susskind background helped advance theory. Professionals have their problems. Citation gaming. It's possible to get a degree relying on a jargon and learning by wrote without a true comprehension.

It makes you not just rely on particle or gravity field. People starting from scratch have to really explain themselves.

Dark matter, you have gravity forces with far less visible mass. If you want a dark matter particle, it has to absorb from the surroundings without changing its surroundings, while not radiating light.

Gravity, heat transfer through the changing of relative clocks works well enough.

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