Speaking solely for myself, your description of me, someone seeking smarter people than myself and mostly chiming in on political/business things, it is insightful and spot on. I don't contribute much, if any, to highly technical discussions, nor do I demonstrate my own expertise. I do have it (technical expertise), but I rarely see relevant times to bring it up, and when I do see those times it's usually better to stay silent or somebody else has already said what I wanted to better than I could.
So I contribute more (not much; I resisted creating an account for many years, and now try to limit myself) to the generalized topics we can all share interest in. If stories on those topics weren't there, I wouldn't say anything. In fact, I could get those exact same stories elsewhere with accompanying forum. The only reason I prefer it here is because of the smarter people.
Will that make HN more like reddit or <insert normie platform>? Yeah, probably, and maybe that's not great.
In other words I'm near the epitome of the strawman you created, and I agree with you. I'll consider if my own participation can be modified to alleviate our shared concerns.
I've been trying to correct that in myself as well, seeking out more technical conversations where my statements can be clearly evaluated to be true or false based on technical merits, and thus valuable to anyone reading it.
Unfortunately, a part of nurturing a certain type of community, is to make it slightly unapproachable to those you don't want in it. I think the very plain css of the site already does a great job of that, but I wonder if it's still not enough to curate the community long term.
To dismiss views of people with no strong tech background as not able to "filter their thoughts" or that they come here to "talk to smarter people" is rather ridiculous. You will find lawyers, linguists, public servants, medical professionals, tax advisors, HR people, ... here. Why would their analysis be less valid than yours just because you happen to have a CS or engineering degree? Who is the most rational and "smart" for you? Applied mathematics? Logicians? Philosophers specialized in philosophy of science?
Assuming other people are less smart than oneself and that one's own expertise implies superior knowledge/analysis in unrelated fields is by the way a key sign of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
> demonstrating expertise in a field where being wrong is easy to prove. I find expertise in a highly technical field trains one to filter their thoughts for demonstrable accuracy.
Your litany of past posts with a tone of incredulity at the people you reply to, as well as being a good example of having few posts on topics of technical complexity, make me not interested in engaging with you further, as it seems more like it struck a personal chord with you and that you're not discussing the merits of this observation in good faith.