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Comment by BSDobelix | Hacker News Reader

Why not research it yourself instead of asking others? Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?

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No, this kind of comment and the "I misread it as xyz" / "I thought this was about abc" comments are getting really annoying.

1. Search engines, LLMs and the homepages of these sites are right there

2. Why would you announce your first thoughts to the world instead of actually engage with what was posted in the right context?

In defence of parent, I clicked around through several pages and still couldn't work it out. The image on the linked page made me think it was a game.

> Am I the only one who thinks this is becoming increasingly common?

Yeah, and it’s an awful attitude.

Honest questions are hardly ever an issue.

>Yeah, and it’s an awful attitude.

I had a conversation with some 'educated' people about the war in Ukraine. After about ten minutes, I told them if we please can stop and if we could change the topic.

They were incredibly uneducated, I would even say disinterested in the history as we ~know it.

They saw everything in black and white, with no shades of grey.

Long story short, I told them to please educate themselves on what happened from 2013/14 until today and make their own observations (just so they can sprinkle a little grey to their world view, NOT change it just add some nuances to it).

Their answer? No time, also not that interested.

I was a little bit sad to say at least.

Maybe has something todo with that:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-dynamics/articles...

>>From searching to asking: knowledge and authority in the age of Generative AI

3. Cognitive consequences:

The difference lies in how the information is encountered. Search-based learning requires effort. Users must sift through multiple sources, evaluate relevance, and integrate partial information into a coherent whole. These activities promote deeper cognitive processing.

"We" don't research it ourselves because we are increasingly taught that we are either too stupid to conduct our own research or not qualified to understand the results, and we must rely on someone else who represents a position of authority. Preferably politicians/influencers/marketing departments/AI models/etc. which can then direct us to make purchasing decisions of benefit to our masters.

Society is hierarchical, and there are people who are closer to various fires, and thus do have more authoritative insight, than others.

I don't see merit to discounting this, even though cheap deflections to authority do bother me too.

The problem is not that society is hierarchical, the problem is that position in the hierarchy rarely maps to expertise or trustworthiness. Instead it usually maps to whoever is best at exploiting and then destroying others to raise their position in the hierarchy.

Edit for clarity: The biggest part of the "You're too stupid..." thing I mentioned is that we are being led to believe we can't even determine who is and isn't credible in any given field, so we must solicit claimed authority and then blindly obey whoever shows up first. Sometimes this solicitation is in the form of a post, but increasingly it's an AI-generated "web" search response where the index/training data has been torqued to direct people toward economic outcomes desired by the AI/search engine's owners.

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