[gjulianm]

> There are many smart people on HN who are perfectly capable of reading and understanding research literature in an area that is NOT their primary expertise

Most of those people know that reading papers is far from enough to understand the issues at hand and making such stark statements. I've seen this issue a lot in HN: people who have no experience at all in a field, who think they are very smart, reading something on a paper or Wikipedia and then making these broad statements, specially without any sources. Intellectualism implies being humble and recognizing when one is not an expert in the matter, in order to avoid spreading misinformation and doubt.

[allovernow]

>Most of those people know that reading papers is far from enough to understand the issues at hand and making such stark statements

Some of us people know that grad school literally consists of learning potentially exclusively from papers. These papers represent the cutting edge of human knowledge and for someone familiar with scientific literature they are not that hard to parse. Doctors and scientists are humans like you and me.

I'm not making policy here, I'm posting on a forum where unusually intelligent people from all disciplines gather and casually speculate on any number of topics. Though I guarantee at this point that I understand the problem at least as well as some 90% of our politicians...with or without sources.

[gjulianm]

> Some of us people know that grad school literally consists of learning potentially exclusively from papers. These papers represent the cutting edge of human knowledge and for someone familiar with scientific literature they are not that hard to parse. Doctors and scientists are humans like you and me.

Doctors and scientists are humans that, like you and me, spend years and years of study, practice and research on their own specific topic, with knowledgeable people by their side to guide, question them and answer their doubts. Parsing a paper is very different from actually understanding it, specially if you don't have the context they have.

> I'm not making policy here

You're right, but we have already enough disinformation as it is. We all have a certain responsibility towards not sharing unfounded statements in this situation.

> a forum where unusually intelligent people from all disciplines gather

HN is an echo chamber of programmers, mostly from the start-up world. A constant issue in this forum is programmers thinking that they can solve any problem (I still remember some discussions on sheet music that were extremely out of touch with actual music practice).

Also, "unusually intelligent"? Really?

> Though I guarantee at this point that I understand the problem at least as well as some 90% of our politicians...with or without sources.

The arrogance here is astounding.