> Yet ... upvote them

"Interesting" does not imply any in the set of "correct; insightful; clever; informed; perfected ..."

A submission is a document. A post is part of a discussion. Hence Plato diminished the role of books, favoring those contributions which are still alive. They are two pretty different realms. A document can be highlighted because pointing to something interesting; a post is more normally a direct contribution (highlighted for such value).

There's an entire generation of Internet nerds that were raised on snark and sarcasm. That's how early Reddit felt, and you can still see it in action in this forum. I guess that's what happens when you discover the Internet in your "it's cool to hate" teenage phase.

It's like nerd catnip when you mix a deeply scientific expert, say in astrophysics, with sarcasm and cynicism. "They are so cocky it must be true. Also they're a physicist!"

peak History of reddit here:

"In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing. But because, I am enlightned by my intelligence" - Aalewis

Reminds me of the account on Reddit that used to get huge karma and tons of top comment claiming to be an expert on everything, but everything they commented on was a different subject and in every comment they claimed a phd or master from a different university and some years of experience studying X. It was actually very entertaining to look at their comment history of every comment having thousands of upvotes because they started it out with a completely phony “I got my PhD at ______ in _____ and spent ___ years working for the largest ______ researcher…” In order to build fake credibility and it totally worked. Hundreds of thousands of karma from that and insane amounts of bad information as top conments.

In one of recent videos she even hand waved at quantum biology, stating that in fact there is such a thing like quantum biology, but everything [all matter] is quantum after all. I got a strong impression that she did not dive into the topic at all and in fact she has no idea about quantum effects in biology.