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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Nope - HN is one of the worst 'smart' places on the internet for Covid discussion. Every single thread immediately devolves into completely ascientific conspiracy ranting.

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This is also not limited to just COVID discussion either. Most things that aren't somehow related to day-to-day software development devolve into unsubstantiated, or ill-informed, "ranting."

It's a source of constant disappointment.

> Most things that aren't somehow related to day-to-day software development

And especially the things that are. That's what makes HN special.

These are at least often informed by (overly specific) personal anecdotes.

Personally if I were constantly disappointed by a website I would take the extraordinary step of simply... not using that website anymore, rather than coming on that website and telling everybody how ill-informed they were. I always have been a bit odd though.

It's far from the biggest source of disappointment I'm subjected to on a daily basis.

I also frequently choose not to engage with ill-informed comment threads; I'm regretting my lapse in judgement today.

IMHO, you can tell from the comments who actually read the linked paper, and who read only supposed debunkings of the paper on Substack/etc by Covid conspiracy theorists.

Labeling something as 'conspiracy ranting' is convenient low-brow tactic to dismiss a supported point of view without consideration. This is also a pattern on HN.

Ah yes, 'supported points of view' like half the comments in this thread talking about lab employees selling infected animals in the market? Or how we're "pretending" that Covid is a leading cause of death during a pandemic? Or how somehow Pfizer is implicated in the origin of Covid?

Another lazy rhetorical tactic, Association Fallacy. Not everyone is making all those claims, in fact I only made one: The lab leak is still a better explanation for the origin of COVID.

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

There’s a story on the front page currently about a lazy rhetorical tactic, wherein one calls out fallacies as if they were spells. You might find that interesting.

What has been asserted without evidence may be dismissed without evidence.

It's the same for a lot of other topics, including ones HN should be more knowledgeable about.

OTOH, complete submission to scientific sources without checking the details seems exactly opposite of how science should work.

HN is probably overly scientific in this sense.

Nobody is "checking the details" in this thread - they're just wildly speculating based on their feelings and asserting that the absence of evidence about the virus originating at the WIV is very clearly suspicious...

Speaking generally, every single time a new study is discussed on HN, the first comment talks about how it doesn't do what it is supposed to. For e.g., a topic about "X cures cancer" has a comment that's at the very top that claims "No, X doesn't cure cancer, except in these narrow cases" and then sources the details in the paper.

That seems to me the right thing to do. HN does that very well.

If you read closer, you'll notice that it's not at all what is happening here. Maybe 1/10th of the comments are about the actual paper? Fewer? It's just mindless evidence-free conspiracy mongering including fun little subthreads about how you can't rule out that the US actually created the pandemic to punish China;

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252553

We are talking past each other. I’m speaking more generally since you’re talking about this entire community. But you have just this thread to point for an example.

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