Meanwhile, when you do this (I don't mean you personally), it's always to bash the other side of some $issue, which is just the sort of flamebait and provocation we're asking people to avoid here—regardless of how wrong other people are or you feel they are.
This approach is just teaching people to repeat memes after pundits and not use their brain - instead of teaching them to work on better reasoning skills, and applying these skills to the problems they face, while accounting for their lack of expertise.
Discussions should be about arguments, not people's authority. If you see someone being wrong and you know better because you've studied the field for longer, point out the flaws in their arguments, offer corrections, but embrace that they're at least trying for understanding, instead of condemning them.
Closely related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/
That's how every opinion anyone's ever had works. Everyone has a mental model, which they use to understand the world. If you have a problem with the specifics, address them. Otherwise, you are simply appealing to authority.
That said, Internet discussions are run on Cunningham's Law - you say what you think you know, and others will call your errors out, or challenge your assumptions. As long as people don't read any single comment as gospel, but consider the whole discussion in context of their own knowledge, applying basic critical thinking, everyone gets to train their reasoning skills and learn something. I'd expect this to be a baseline on HN.
I'm confident being the protagonist of that XKCD is a rite of passage in this industry :).
In general, this can't be a way to move forward as a society if people just make stuff up.
>>Alice said something along the lines of “I hate people who frivolously diagnose themselves with autism without knowing anything about the disorder. They should stop thinking they’re ‘so speshul’ and go see a competent doctor.”
>>Beth answered something along the lines of “I diagnosed myself with autism, but only after a lot of careful research. I don’t have the opportunity to go see a doctor. I think what you’re saying is overly strict and hurtful to many people with autism.”
>>Alice then proceeded to tell Beth she disagreed, in that special way only Tumblr users can. I believe the word “cunt” was used.
Alexander explains what's going on as:
>>Beth chose to stand up for the people who self- diagnosed autism without careful research. This wasn’t because she considered herself a member of that category. It was because she decided that self- diagnosed autistics were going to stand or fall as a group, and if Alice succeeded in pushing her “We should dislike careless self- diagnosees” angle, then the fact that she wasn’t careless wouldn’t save her.
>>Alice, for her part, didn’t bother bringing up that she never accused Beth of being careless, or that Beth had no stake in the matter. She saw no point in pretending that boxing in Beth and the other careful self- diagnosers in with the careless ones wasn’t her strategy all along.
https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Weak-Men-Are-Superwea...
(But to be serious, I think it’s easy to accidentally take forum comments personally because the physical act of reading HN comments, social media DMs, and text messages are all basically the same. So maybe it’s easy for our emotions to get mixed up.)
One really good example in that link is a user trying to claim that race & iq is the determining factor in economic outcome while dropping racial slurs as examples to justify racism against Asians and other groups that he thinks are ALL "wealthy" and "smart".
It's a great illustration of parent's comment. Taking an outdated model and then using it to justify his/her own skewed views. Sort of like how we use colour labels created by a Swedish pseudoscientist to reduce ethnicities to is being heralded as a great achievement.