The only reason I bother trawling through HN is for the occasional gem like this:
Hacker News is just a part of the larger web. It’s the same reason you see so many people arguing over lab leak, ketogenic diets, barefoot running.
Anything whatsoever that is vaguely heterodox and hints that you might have some knowledge that either the “establishment” doesn’t know or is lying about is a tremendous ego boost.
If your default position epistemically is you don’t really have the expertise or time to investigate everything out there, which is more or less true for everyone no matter how intelligent you are or how much expertise you have on one specific topic, then if you’re going to throw darts anyway, you may as well throw them at the target that, if correct, makes you look and feel just a little bit more special than the unwashed masses being spoonfed that food pyramid.
I can’t remember where at this point, but decades ago I heard this kind of thing called “insight porn” and have myself been guilty of it for much of my life.
It’s endemic to web communities composed of relatively smart people, at least if we take “smart” to mean something like intellectually curious and having right tail levels of raw cognitive ability, rather than meaning anything you believe is more likely to be true.
Original source here
Originally published at http://abacusnoir.com on July 5, 2024.
