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That's a good point, and a thing to remember. However, wrt. to what I wrote, my experience is mostly based on hanging out in places and reading comments on topics I understand to some degree - somewhere between an informed amateur and a relative expert, depending on specific topics. There are also some factors that help compensate for Gell-Mann amnesia effect: - Comments are conversations -- in a quality community, low-value perspectives will get taken apart, and you can kind of get a feel from the conversation itself whether or not any of the participants actually know what they're talking about; - Communities transcend individual discussions -- hang out in a community long enough, and you start to recognize other participants; over time, you'll learn who's an expert in what, and then those people become your reference points. Say, e.g., I look at a subthread where some X, Y and Z talk deeply about cybersecurity, above my level of comfort. Normally I wouldn't be able to tell who, if anyone, is right, but over the years I've seen many comments of Y and learned that they're an actual domain expert on cybersec - so now the way Y responds to X and Z, and how the two react to Y's comments, give me a way to indirectly determine whether X and Z know what they're talking about. And so on. Lots of natural, fuzzy human reputation tracking stuff - but that works in communities (like HN), not in one-off interactions (like a random article submitted to HN). |