This happens on HN within our field too :) . I see stuff hit the front page all the time, only to be ripped to pieces a few hours later when someone that knows what they're doing appears.

Do you remember the "super fast hash algorithm" from a few weeks ago that turned out to be rubbish? What about the "high performance TCP proxy" on the front page right now that's not proxying correctly or with unusual speed?

People seem to upvote on title alone

>Do you remember the "super fast hash algorithm" from a few weeks ago that turned out to be rubbish? What about the "high performance TCP proxy" on the front page right now that's not proxying correctly or with unusual speed?

Seems like debunking Hacker News stories might make for a fun project.

I suspect your definition of "fun" may align with a very small percentage of the population.

I can confirm this to be the case.

Double points if it can be automated!

Haha! So true. And nutrition in particular seems to be something the tech-literate crowd seems to want to "hack". It's always fascinating to read threads in HN about dietary supplements or keto-this-or-that or paleo diets or how it's better if you only sleep 2 hours per day total and only drink special shakes made by some dodgy startup, all of this frequently debated with religious reverence.

Nutrition makes a lot of sense, when you consider just how much time the average person spends around food - you're generally reminded of nutrition three times a day.

It's a large aspect of health, money, and comfort (see: going to the toilet), and frankly there isn't very thorough consensus (it's been suggested that the food pyramid is biased by commercial interests of the time), and what's more, most people aren't cooking or paying for their own meals when they learn about it in school, so they don't remember it that well anyway.

Indeed, it makes sense to be interested in nutrition. What's funny is that most people commenting here on HN are out of their depths and talk about nutrition, supplements, bizarre shakes, fad diets, keto, calorie restriction or whatnot with the same pseudoscientific beliefs as other non-HN people discuss astrology ("but it really works!"). They "don't know that they don't know" and believe the most bizarre things. That's very relevant to the article and also to the OP's comment at the top of this subthread :)

PS: lest I sound too arrogant, nutrition is not my particular blind spot (I'm aware I don't know much about it), but I'm sure I have other blind spots I'm not aware of!

My wife is a dietitian with a PhD, and I can scarcely stand to read HN comments on nutrition articles. And I'm not the one with the degree!

For some reason, computer nerds think they know it all :-)

  Because they are autodidacts.  The main purpose of higher education
  and making all the smartest kids from one school come together with
  all the smartest kids from other schools, recursively, is to show every
  smart kid everywhere that they are not the smartest kid around, that
  no matter how smart they are, they are not equally smart at everything
  even though they were just that to begin with, and there will therefore
  always be smarter kids, if nothing else, than at something other than
  they are smart at.  If you take a smart kid out of this system, reward
  him with lots of money that he could never make otherwise, reward him
  with control over machines that journalists are morbidly afraid of and
  make the entire population fear second-hand, and prevent him from ever
  meeting smarter people than himself, he will have no recourse but to
  believe that he /is/ smarter than everybody else.  Educate him properly
  and force him to reach the point of intellectual exhaustion and failure
  where there is no other route to success than to ask for help, and he
  will gain a profound respect for other people.  Many programmers act
  like they are morbidly afraid of being discovered to be less smart than
  they think they are, and many of them respond with extreme hostility on
  Usenet precisely because they get a glimpse of their own limitations.
  To people whose entire life has been about being in control, loss of
  control is actually a very good reason to panic.

–– Erik Naggum, 2004

Good ones don't... just like any field...

"Intelligent" people know how much they don't know... "Stupid" or "ignorant" know everything and want you to know it.

Doctors, Mechanics, ... nerds... no one group is immune to this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."

I thought the most interesting aspect of these studies is that intelligent people are better at judging the intelligence of others. Those in the bottom quartile could not estimate the intelligence of peers much better than random chance. Those near the top could estimate the intelligence of others with high accuracy.

This has profound implications in hiring selection. Having exceptionally bright founders could cause a.... founder effect resulting in the entire company being much smarter than average.

Anecdotal, but I know of quite a few wildly successful companies where the founder/CEO still participates in all interviews despite having more than a thousand employees. This seems like a random company quirk but, taking this research to practice, could actually be a large part of why these companies are successful.

With warning of anecdote rather than evidence, Doctors are the worst [1] for this! So many of them seem to think they're scientists, when the majority of them are far from it.

[1] In the hyperbolic sense; I wouldn't like to suggest a literal truth here

Doctors are at a bad intersection of customer service and science.

On the one hand, doctors need to sound authoritative to 99.9% of all people since they are almost always delivering news the patient doesn't want to hear (exercise, eat less junk, take these pills 3 times equally spaced not 2 with lunch, etc.)

On the other hand, many doctors just aren't that smart. Being a doctor today isn't an automatic sign to me that you are in the top 1% of brainpower. Some of my doctors are, most aren't. In addition, many doctors don't continue to learn over time. If you do that, you eventually become dumb.

Well if you listen to doctors they'll say we apply scientifically proven methods, and some portion of them actually do science. My impression is that doctors like to sound smarter than they often are. Since medicine is more of an art form than anything - most physicians are like artists (albeit highly trained ones). And as with any art you have the whole spectrum of quality.

Well, in regards to the article I think experimentation should be cheered and not tossed away as stupidity. Wheeler isn't actually a good example of this effect.

Creating environments where people, especially people with the correct answers, are not afraid to voice their sincere opinions without the fear of being called or looked at as stupid is what is needed. Experts today, are now challenged, by persons who are incorrect and correct. An authority usually tries to shut up both as if the two were the same.

"something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain."

Casting aside the clear flaw there (which YT, FB chains?), I'd bet on HN against the general public because people here are more likely scientifically minded and therefore self-correcting.

"That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it. :)"

This effect should only really matter when it comes to an individual having authority (decisions or influence) over others.

Nutrition, science news and economics are the worst subjects for discussion in HN.

I'm cautiously optimistic because I see multiple levels ignorance that was me 5,10,15,20,25 years ago. I'm sure someone sees my comments the same way. Even if the the average quality of discussion stays at the same low level in HN as it was in Usenet long time ago, it's not the same people making the same stupid comments over and over again. There may be personal development.

I don't believe that one person keeps posting "correlation is not causality" comment to every science news discussion for 10 years without good reason. It's just a phase after learning statistics, I hope.

I think, in my ignorance, that this is a deeply human desire to understand the world or at least parts of it. If there is a simpler, less complex concept you can grasp it's always something that appeals to some.

And also there is a need for belonging and FOMO, so if you find a nice subculture that appeals to you and is graspable in it's complexity, it's way easier to stay informed and connected in that, than a more general topic.

Specialisation is indeed is the only way to understand something to the state of the art for more than two centuries or so now, since it's humanly impossible to have a working understanding of the whole of human knowledge.

Luckily most of the people here, if they wanted, could easily get an entry-level education in any field, because they know how to study from books, can get access to the material, etc.

Potential is not reality.

Potential is the requirement for democracy, though.

You can only have democracy if everyone has the chance to educate themselves on the topics that are relevant to them.

If, in your country, the majority never learnt how to do so, then democracy will inevitably fail. Many people in STEM or other sciences have an advantage due to that, but this should be standard for all.

Oh, yes, its so easy, thats why every programmer aquiring domain specific knowledge never makes any mistake and the software - once feature complete, always guarantees satisfied customers. We are instant experts, just add hot water and stire for five minutes.

No.

I am saying, the people here could actually make qualified comments, if they wanted to. They could learn about the topics they comment on.

But they choose not to.

Which is a different story from most of humanity, which doesn’t even have a choice, doesn’t have a chance to learn.

I don't see the need for this much snark in response to a relatively innocuous comment.

Yes, i was over-shooting, because i had that attitude myself - and this is not innocuous . This hybris ruins lifes. Better snarky here, then Snarky out there, at the end of project, when it really hurts.

Why would I? Surely the point is that I'm an expert on everything already.