[atdt]

Wonderful piece. Dennett knows how to write. And he captures the pleasure and privilege of Hacker News with this felicitous phrase:

> Distributed understanding is a real phenomenon, but you have to get yourself into a community of communicators that can effectively summon the relevant expertise.

[a_wild_dandan]

I agree. We have an eclectic community of thoughtful laypeople and experts. That's why I remain here. It's lazy to point out warts in any community (even peer-reviewed ones!), presume that good is the enemy of perfect, and thus dismiss said community. But I think the SNR here is wonderful presently, and I appreciate you all.

[wayeq]

are you sure that's us? :)

[Jensson]

Yes, you have a combination of people who learn and people who know here. That is what he described, and environment where you are allowed to be wrong and where people will correct you when you are. You don't get banned from HN for being wrong, so you are allowed to be wrong here, unlike many other forums like most of reddit.

[Capricorn2481]

What is being described is that people will know what they're talking about, which is debatable. You might be corrected on here, but I've seen more cases of people being loudly wrong but having enough general knowledge on a subject that they sound correct, and lucky enough that no one with specific knowledge stumbled on their posts to correct them.

Frankly, I don't think hackernews is all that different in terms of community from Reddit. People are just better at hiding it. Many are regurgitating rhetoric they've heard in other posts without having experience with a subject. Even in the realms of programming, it's not hard to see how little experience people have with the things they demonize or evangelize.

[calf]

Maybe he's talking about the string theorist community

[DiscourseFan]

Yeah I'm having serious doubts