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Comment by parfe | Hacker News Reader

I think science articles should be banned from HN. The userbase is clearly not educated well enough to deal with the issues. It only produces comments from armchair scientists conjuring up whatever pet theory they can explain away the results with. Comments like the classic freshman stats quote "correlation does not equal causation", or the standard response starting with "Judging from the abstract", or the always informative "I didn't read the paper, but what if they forgot to control for X?"

The only topic that gets worse comments than science on HN is gender issues.

Edit: and killed by mods. From +25 at the top to the bottom

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Absolutely not!! This would be a blatant act of censorship--and to what end? You'll see the same junk science on Reddit anyway.

The feedback from the HN community on science articles is some of the best on the web. It honestly comprises about a third of the reason I visit. I wouldn't know where else to get that.

Granted, I may have a different perspective given that I did a biochem undergrad and can read primary literature. Some of my experience and frustration with the popular media coverage and editorial behavior has given me a lens with which to evaluate coverage of other disciplines. But shouldn't we expect everyone here to have or develop a similar critical thinking patten? Why do we need to treat our community with baby gloves?

Obviously we can't ban science articles, but the point you're raising is important. Reductionist dismissal of new work based on partial understanding of the marginally related is a tell-tale sign of the middlebrow. It is epidemic in communities like this. I don't think there's anything more vital to intellectual maturity than learning to recognize those dismissive reflexes in oneself and inhibit them. That is the essence of an open mind.

There's an analogy to startup investing here. The habit of dismissing the easily dismissable—the obviously lame, the obviously bad idea—guarantees failure even though it's almost always right. This is what the masters of the art keep trying to tell us.

I marked this subthread as off-topic because it's off topic; it doesn't mean we don't agree.

The post has been hammered by both the flamewar detector and a ton of user flags. We turned the former off, but not the latter. Doing more would probably make things worse.

A healthy dose of skepticism is the reason I DO read Hacker News. There's no limit to the studies trumpeted in the news with inaccurate titles/conclusions. HN calls them out. Notwithstanding posts from folks with fashionably cynical attitudes.

I think so too. I'm not as smart as you guys,community college. I usually lurk and look forward to spin deconstruction here. its one of the reasons I love reading comments here

The only topic that gets worse comments than science on HN is gender issues.

I think you're unfair there. If you want to see a diversity of opinions, that's exactly what we have--the fact that you disagree with one side or the other is quite your own problem.

User smacktoward summed it up, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7314434:

> For all the intellectual firepower of people in the tech community, there is a curious strain of anti-intellectualism that comes forth in projects like this; an eagerness to discount the expertise of people who have studied a subject for their entire lives, just because they weren't CS majors. It's like trying to send a man to the moon without working with any aerospace engineers. I honestly do not understand it.

Speaking personally, I think on average it takes me about 30 to 80 articles from a divergent field to get a grasp of what's going on.

At the same time, when I go into forums like these, I'm aware of what kind of crowd I'm going to get: while most people give their off-handed dismissal "Omg, that n size. 120 is way too small for something so important."

What we might need is a general and informal rule that science-based posts should have at least several studies in good standing.

Some members of the userbase even commit sins like generalizing from a few cases to the entire population or even make assumptions about unattested facts like, say, the educational qualifications of hypothetical people who haven't even commented yet. If only there were some sort of mechanism which would allow us to vote on which comments we felt were insightful and showed expertise with the subject matter...

While I enjoy reading them :), I would tend to agree with you. As well as international politics, for example Ukraine and similar.

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