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by matsemann 1544 days ago
But also, it's not necessarily the same people being knowledgeable of everything. Reading HN it's easy to think everyone else is intimately familiar with the fine details of a microchip, is the CTO of a big business, is at the frontier of machine learning applications, contributes to the Linux kernel, has run medical trials, etc.

Because for every topic here, there will be someone knowledgeable commenting. But it's different people for different subjects. So don't get impostor syndrome thinking everyone is so good at everything.

That's one of the nice things about HN, though, that subject matter experts show up and discuss things.

1 comments

I'm glad you mentioned this, because I'm looking for a related term.

Sometimes in discussions (often political ones), I see this pattern:

1. Person A and person B are both members of group G.

2. Person A advocates view P.

3. Person B advocates view Q, which is logically incompatible with P.

4. An outsider concludes that some persons in G are logically inconsistent, because "G has members who believe both P and Q".

Is there a name for the fallacy in step 4? It reminds me a little of kettle logic[0], or the association fallacy [1], but it's clearly different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettle_logic

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy