throwaway982357

Filtering out new accounts would set a tremendously dangerous precedent. There are many rather prolific, insightful, and level-headed users here that prefer creating new accounts for each thread they engage with in order to reset karma and enforce privacy. Rather than fuel animosity behind the veil of anonymity, these users are trying to preserve the instinctive behavior of out-group participants and even under-represented experts to engage with intellectually honest criticism when the signals of authority such as identity and karma are missing.

The problem you're seeing here isn't due to anonymity, but rather self-selecting hostile interactions by participating with front page news as soon as posted. This is typical of HN and really any technically-bent social media, where the first to interact are typically the most outspoken and inflammatory regardless of identity visibility, with the rational high-quality debate trickling in once the topic starts significantly eroding in popularity.

Conservatism could potentially be a red herring here, with the underlying colluding factor here being age. The older generations of Americans have seen amazing feats of scientific analysis and engineering since WWII and the proceeding decades of booming innovation, typically unparalleled by other nations that eventually came to assimilate technologies born out of US-led wartime R&D. Iron-clad theories of physics and chemistry were refined during these times and tested for durability with rigorous predictive precision and straightforward practical applications.

The older American worldview of science is nostalgic for an era of unprecedented modeling accuracy that gave a compact summary of how the near-atomic world worked, consequently fueling a backlash against the rise of disciplines that intend to study far more complex systems albeit with the inability to perform experiments in the fashion of the basic sciences.

Nutrition, psychology, economics, and climate research all tout the banner of at least using some parts of the scientific method, which to those Americans who have been spoiled by the awesome forecasting of more reductive studies, are left to question the legitimacy of fields that fundamentally cannot perform experiments with the same exacting repeatability and direct hypothesis testability that was so blazing branded into the public zeitgeist for what American STEM should be capable of accomplishing.

In addition, given that at least the first three of those disciples mentioned above are notoriously abused in the US by governments and corporations as retroactive justifications for legal, social, and economic policies by paying for expert testimony and directly funding questionable studies on condition of flattering results, it is extremely hard for the American public to trust any hard-to-swallow policy-advocating scientific communities without (ir)rational skepticism.

Americans dealing with science are like romantically-oblivious nerds dealing with a heart-wrenching series of rejections and betrayals. If as a scientist you want to court these delicate creatures, please proceed with gentle and loving care building trust and helping them heal from the toxic relationships that soured their faith in domain experts. Denigrading them that they should just get over the past already and put their faith in the absolute consensus of the world is truly not helpful.