Ask HN: I'm trying to understand flagging a submission | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm trying to understand flagging a submission

1 pointSpod_Gaju13 comments

So I submitted an A Substack article that I wrote and I understand this could be misconstrued as promotion, but it was not promotion. Just an idea I wanted to share with people. It seemed like it was getting some traction when suddenly it was flagged.

I don’t know who to reach out to or ask why this would happen and I don’t know if this was done by, hacker news done by people who saw the article.

Thanks for any info.

View on HN

I think people flagged it because it is considered extremely poor-taste to share medical research not furnished by a doctor. It's fine to open a topic for discussion, but this is not a site staffed by trained medics or anything; most of us are nerds, we'll just be arguing over something inconsequential anyways.

So, I think your submission was good-faith but people were right to flag it. It's not really the sort of discussion that ever ends well online, especially when it's not a medical forum staffed by professionals that can mediate the discussion.

OK, I can understand this, but I think it’s short sighted.

I mean, shouldn’t information stand on its own despite where it comes from? Because this argument is kind of a logical fallacy, attacking the messenger. I mean, I get it. There’s a lot of people saying some really stupid stuff and it frustrates me as much as it frustrates most people.

But one comment there said they wouldn’t even read the article because I wasn’t a doctor. But they don’t know the work I put in or what I understand or the amount of researchers and doctors I talk to you. For instance, I helped a Stanford researcher design, a clinical trial looking at manganese deficiency for people with chronic fatigue syndrome.

And besides, look at the research papers that are coming out now they’re all being retracted and we’re supposed to trust them?

I don’t know I guess this is just kind of frustrating because breaking through dogma needs an open mind and I’m afraid because all of the bullshit noise that people with good ideas who are thinking outside of a dogmatic Ideology just het shut down.

Anyway, thanks for letting me know.

> But they don’t know the work I put in or what I understand or the amount of researchers and doctors I talk to you.

I mean, that's really the root of the problem. When someone has a doctorate in a topic, you can generally trust the quality of their research since they had to pass a rigorous routine. Not always of course, but that's why peer-review exists. With your Medium article, we're taking everything you say with the hope that it's correct and if you're not... who's going to retract your article for you?

The medical journals aren't all perfect, but the reason why journals exist at all is to avoid situations like this. I admire your commitment to researching interesting things, but speculating on medicine feels best left to the qualified people.

so let’s take this article that was posted today, it was on the front page for a while that did not get flagged

https://iandanielstewart.com/2024/06/09/engage-your-audience...

Who is this guy? I can’t find a thing about his background on his blog and why I should believe anything he says in that article. I even looked for him online and nothing comes up. Maybe other people know who he is but I can’t figure it out.

So it’s not really about The source it’s about the content. And if it’s about the content, I find that disappointing that there’s no discussing about it. If I had a bad idea, it can be easily disputed In a discussion.

And I’m not talking about practicing medicine, that’s why I said I’m not a doctor. I didn’t say I’m not a doctor, not because I wanted to say I wasn’t smart, I was saying I’m not a doctor because people shouldn’t, use what I talk about as treatment.

I’m sorry because I’m really just writing this out because I have Asperger‘s and it helps me understand these things. I mean, the people flagging it might not understand science, but there’s may be a lot of people here that do understand the science and we would talk about it more. And maybe even show me something that’s wrong. we learn not Through agreement but Through disagreement.

And the thing is, I’m not just saying things I’ve cited everything. I’ve said all I did was link together the previewed articles to come to a new hypothesis That even setting, the article needs to be tested.

Anyway, I’ll Leave it there, because at least I know how to read the room. Thanks again for your patience.

As others said; flagging is a user-based process. This site has a fickle audience, and stuff like medicine and health science is tough to disseminate.

> If I had a bad idea, it can be easily disputed In a discussion.

By engineers? The focus of this site is two things; finance and technology. Health is important to all of us, but nearly none of us are qualified to comment on your findings, even if you were a doctor. I wish we all had doctorates; we'd probably get paid better, for one. But the best any of us can do is guess, unless you get lucky and find someone directly qualified to respond to it.

You're all good here, though. Nobody is mad at you for trying something, and most people will probably greatly respect your dedication to research. It's just a tough topic here, and really anywhere online. I recommend talking this over with your doctor friends, and if it goes anywhere, your name should get first-billing on the acknowledgement page. Good luck =)

“By engineers?”

First, why not? I was an engineer. There’s not much difference between the engineering I used to do and engineering as a way to understand human metabolism.

I submitted two other articles one with 127 up votes and they were not about engineering. They were about nutrition, and one of them was about magnesium and addiction.

So basically everyone that made comments underneath those post should be flagging each other or all the engineers should come out and flag all those people. So I really know what this is about and it’s about people having a hard time with creative intelligence.

And you keep mentioning about talking about over my doctors friends. I don’t talk to Drs about this because they are some of the worst people to talk to. I talk About it with researchers. There are plenty of journalist that write books about health, you could look at me as a journalist. This guy wrote a whole book about depression and why Prozac doesn’t work and he wasn’t close to a psychiatrist or doctor or even a medical researcher.

Hacker news is not just about engineering. But as I said, I can read the room.

> shouldn’t information stand on its own despite where it comes from?

In an ideal world, sure. But the reality is that nobody can know that information is any good without confirming it, and nobody has the time to do the research necessary to confirm all of the information we get.

So it's necessary to take shortcuts, and one of the most common shortcuts is to rely on a trusted expert to have done that research for us.

But then, how do you know someone is a trusted expert if you don't personally know or have researched them?

So it's necessary to take a shortcut for that, as well, and one of the most common of those shortcuts is to rely on credentials and professional reputation.

When someone who I don't know is giving me (for example) medical information, and they have no appropriate credentials in the field, I will tend to ignore them. To do otherwise can be a ticket to kookytown.

(I doubt I would have flagged that article, personally, though. When I flag an article is it almost always because it's just a transparent ad with no additional redeeming value.)

FWIW I was following your thread the other day and through it was interesting. I look forward to hearing about whatever ADHD stuff you alluded to in the comments.

> I don’t know who to reach out to

If the other answers here don't answer your question, there's a contact email address on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Thanks!

I can’t see the contact Email on that page. Is it because I’m on a Smart phone?

No, it’s because you need to read closer :-) Find for “hn@“

That said, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650590 answered your question as thoroughly as anyone can.

> why this would happen and I don’t know if this was done by, hacker news done by people who saw the article.

Flagging is done by regular users. So it would have been regular users who saw your submission and then flagged it.

Why? -- well answering that requires a mind-reading skill we don't have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com