3 ms·

Hypothesis: when it comes to "off-topic" (i.e. non-programming) subjects on HN, and especially science, articles are posted with essentially random levels of no

Hypothesis: when it comes to "off-topic" (i.e. non-programming) subjects on HN, and especially science, articles are posted with essentially random levels of novelty/importance/truth, and then a random set of individuals drawn from a population of 99.9% non-experts in that particular field upvotes, comments (or not) on each particular story. This implies amount of upvoting is mainly uncorrelated with importance of story. This could be tested by drawing a sample of N highly rated articles and N non-highly rated articles on both programming and on some other field (say cancer research), having an expert in each field score the articles in each group (highly and non-highly rated) in their field, and then compare the rating distributions for the two fields. According to the above hypothesis, on programming the distribution in the highly-rated group will be more peaked relative to the non-highly-rated articles, than in the other field. (There probably needs to be some manual de-duplication etc. in the initial selection of the four groups.)

abandonliberty 10y ago
Seems like a corollary to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

abandonliberty 10y ago

Seems like a corollary to the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”