[neuronerdgirl]

HN has a lot of people who are quite smart but have not been through graduate school or academia, so they don't realize just how niche the type of training and topic-specific knowledge you get in that world is relative to a classic university-to-industry track. I think that is true for the general populace too - it takes doing the depth of learning and research you have to do for a PhD to realize just how much there is to be known about even the narrowest slice of a topic even relative to the most intense casual enthusiasts. I suspect this is a major reason for the high levels of impostor syndrome seen in academia, but that is a tangent.

Neuroscience is also a field that mostly happens within academia, unlike something like computer science where a ton of work legitimately is being done at the types of companies many HN users work at, so where you can indeed get something approaching expert-level knowledge on the job in some cases in the latter, almost no one on the forum has enough exposure to be an expert in the former. Couple that with the previous thesis and you end up with a bunch of people who don't know what they don't know (I will not be engaging on Dunning Kruger in this thread). That plus, perhaps, a bit of hubris and you're gonna get a wonky comment section.