5 ms·

"Doesn’t seem like a great way to tell the age of a skull." The confidence of people far away at a different time without any relevant knowledge to dismiss an

"Doesn’t seem like a great way to tell the age of a skull." The confidence of people far away at a different time without any relevant knowledge to dismiss an experienced local on the ground based on flawed high-level logic never ceases to surprise.

intertextuality 8y ago
It's the epitome of hacker news. Reddit also has this "armchair quarterbacking" effect, but it's significantly worse on HN, in my opinion. A lot of the people here are knowledgeable—in specific domains. I think people forget that being an expert in one thing doesn't make you qualified to judge, understand, or discuss another domain in depth. Case in point, the recent "tech that reduces sound by 94%" post that got upvoted here.
- imjustsaying 8y ago
  One of the most common instances of generalized experts weighing in on topics they're not actually experts in happens in politically-related posts here, although it usually only comes in the form of downvotes. You can cite science and demographic facts while leaving out your own overt normative opinions, yet you will still get downvoted from both 'sides' who think they are being slighted if you don't give a clear opinion. Unfortunately this is the way scientific method-driven experts talk (and generally anyone who's into political science rather than political opinion) - but in this domain it really sets non-experts off for some reason. The thing is, most people are taught at a young age that their political opinion matters a lot, which probably has something to do with generalized experts walking into this domain thinking they're already experts and getting quickly frustrated when they realize they're not, lashing out at the source of that frustration via downvotes. Back in the day the responses to these kinds of topics used to be via comments, now it's almost always via drive-by downvotes. I used to bemoan the inane buzzword replies back in the forum days because they were typically boring and predictable, but they were still infinitely better than the downvote without comment that is the norm for this site (and even more common on reddit).
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    Try saying anything with a hard truth at its core that goes against what people want to believe. And instead of engaging with discussion and rebuttal, they do so with -1s and rate-limiting. 1. Cognitive impairment is likely already happening in office rooms 2. Rich people "donating" to semi-non-profit orgs and universities are doing so for non-altruistic reasons. 3. When you use a free service, you are paying primarily with your data. 4. FAANG has engaged in criminal conspiracies. 5. News agencies that bemoan Facebook also bend over to Facebook and Google's tracking. 6. Cell phones don't cause cancer. 7. "Sharing Economy" is just a scam to evict employees from workforce to something less than employees. 8. The USA is primarily at "One Dollar = One Vote". 9. There's something else going on with meditation and mind, that we can't adequately explain with science at this moment. This place used to be a lot better, with discussions and rebuttals and refutations with sources and links. Now it's "who can '1 more". And hiding the current score does little to no good, other than obfuscate the real problem. Edit: Why am I not surprised a mod collapsed this, and likely flag-killed the response to me? This is what happens with little to no transparency, and when a VC firm "controls" the narrative.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      >> 8. The USA is primarily at "One Dollar = One Vote". > Why Is There So Little Money In Politics > In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years – if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators’ votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question http://web.mit.edu/jdefig/www/papers/invest_or_consumpt.pdf http://web.mit.edu/jdefig/www/papers/invest_or_consumpt.pdf
abrookewood 8y ago
I don't actually read his comment as dismissive or confident, but more surprised and curious. There's nothing wrong with questioning other people's statements when they don't marry up with your own opinions.
- refurb 8y ago
  Indeed. It was more intellectual curiosity.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    You called the story bullshit in another comment, that’s not what most people say when they are intellectually curious.
refurb 8y ago
It’s because the story sounds like bullshit. I have no doubt that you can tell the age of a skull with a close inspection of the teeth. This story was an anthropologist looking at remains from several feet away and claiming that it’s aboriginal from the lack of dental decay. I proposed a few exceptions to that rule. Certainly not a quip about the expertise of the anthropologist, but rather the accuracy of the story.
- cyberferret 8y ago
  One of the benefits of being an expert in a particular field, is that you can take small parcels of evidence and formulate an accurate picture of a situation much faster than a layman with no prior experience in that field. I don't know the anthropologist in question, but I am sure she used a series of supporting evidence that was obvious to her trained eye as well as the teeth condition. Ask any doctor or midwife who can look at an ultrasound image and tell you the sex of the baby while you are still staring at a smudgy grey moving image. Ask any accident investigator who can estimate the speed and trajectory of the vehicles while you are still looking for the skid marks. I personally have spent over 25 years interacting on public message boards, and I am a domain expert enough that I can pick an armchair expert who has lots of perceived theoretical knowledge, but little or no real world knowledge, but still feels the need to espouse their opinion in order to get their dopamine hit of the day - all just from a quick glance at their post.
- therealdrag0 8y ago
  I agree it sounds like bullshit. However, I have listened to a talk by a lady (she consults on murdered cadavers) who can tell which season a body died in by analyzing the teeth! Apparently there is a lot there.
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    That I can believe, assuming a detailed analysis in a lab. But snap judging from a distance? Cavities are more common in modern populations than before, but hardly omnipresent. I do find it an amusing thought that apparently my skeleton would be assigned a more distant past simply because I am filling free. :D
WA 8y ago
Since when does an anecdote provide any proof? I thought exactly the same things as your parent poster. Carbs are sugar, especially if you chew long enough. This affects teeth. Combine this with a lack of toothbrushes and a lack of fluoride and it sounds like a recipe for tooth decay. Also, people didn’t live as long as they do now. So less chance to have your teeth rotten. Furthermore: the skeletons might have been of people in their twenties with arguably better teeth than old people. Lots of questions that this anecdote doesn’t answer and you dismiss critique as pretentious.

intertextuality 8y ago

It's the epitome of hacker news. Reddit also has this "armchair quarterbacking" effect, but it's significantly worse on HN, in my opinion. A lot of the people here are knowledgeable—in specific domains. I think people forget that being an expert in one thing doesn't make you qualified to judge, understand, or discuss another domain in depth. Case in point, the recent "tech that reduces sound by 94%" post that got upvoted here.

imjustsaying 8y ago
One of the most common instances of generalized experts weighing in on topics they're not actually experts in happens in politically-related posts here, although it usually only comes in the form of downvotes. You can cite science and demographic facts while leaving out your own overt normative opinions, yet you will still get downvoted from both 'sides' who think they are being slighted if you don't give a clear opinion. Unfortunately this is the way scientific method-driven experts talk (and generally anyone who's into political science rather than political opinion) - but in this domain it really sets non-experts off for some reason. The thing is, most people are taught at a young age that their political opinion matters a lot, which probably has something to do with generalized experts walking into this domain thinking they're already experts and getting quickly frustrated when they realize they're not, lashing out at the source of that frustration via downvotes. Back in the day the responses to these kinds of topics used to be via comments, now it's almost always via drive-by downvotes. I used to bemoan the inane buzzword replies back in the forum days because they were typically boring and predictable, but they were still infinitely better than the downvote without comment that is the norm for this site (and even more common on reddit).
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  Try saying anything with a hard truth at its core that goes against what people want to believe. And instead of engaging with discussion and rebuttal, they do so with -1s and rate-limiting. 1. Cognitive impairment is likely already happening in office rooms 2. Rich people "donating" to semi-non-profit orgs and universities are doing so for non-altruistic reasons. 3. When you use a free service, you are paying primarily with your data. 4. FAANG has engaged in criminal conspiracies. 5. News agencies that bemoan Facebook also bend over to Facebook and Google's tracking. 6. Cell phones don't cause cancer. 7. "Sharing Economy" is just a scam to evict employees from workforce to something less than employees. 8. The USA is primarily at "One Dollar = One Vote". 9. There's something else going on with meditation and mind, that we can't adequately explain with science at this moment. This place used to be a lot better, with discussions and rebuttals and refutations with sources and links. Now it's "who can '1 more". And hiding the current score does little to no good, other than obfuscate the real problem. Edit: Why am I not surprised a mod collapsed this, and likely flag-killed the response to me? This is what happens with little to no transparency, and when a VC firm "controls" the narrative.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    >> 8. The USA is primarily at "One Dollar = One Vote". > Why Is There So Little Money In Politics > In this paper, we argue that campaign contributions are not a form of policy-buying, but are rather a form of political participation and consumption. We summarize the data on campaign spending, and show through our descriptive statistics and our econometric analysis that individuals, not special interests, are the main source of campaign contributions. Moreover, we demonstrate that campaign giving is a normal good, dependent upon income, and campaign contributions as a percent of GDP have not risen appreciably in over 100 years – if anything, they have probably fallen. We then show that only one in four studies from the previous literature support the popular notion that contributions buy legislators’ votes. Finally, we illustrate that when one controls for unobserved constituent and legislator effects, there is little relationship between money and legislator votes. Thus, the question is not why there is so little money politics, but rather why organized interests give at all. We conclude by offering potential answers to this question http://web.mit.edu/jdefig/www/papers/invest_or_consumpt.pdf http://web.mit.edu/jdefig/www/papers/invest_or_consumpt.pdf

abrookewood 8y ago

I don't actually read his comment as dismissive or confident, but more surprised and curious. There's nothing wrong with questioning other people's statements when they don't marry up with your own opinions.

refurb 8y ago
Indeed. It was more intellectual curiosity.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  You called the story bullshit in another comment, that’s not what most people say when they are intellectually curious.

refurb 8y ago

It’s because the story sounds like bullshit. I have no doubt that you can tell the age of a skull with a close inspection of the teeth. This story was an anthropologist looking at remains from several feet away and claiming that it’s aboriginal from the lack of dental decay. I proposed a few exceptions to that rule. Certainly not a quip about the expertise of the anthropologist, but rather the accuracy of the story.

cyberferret 8y ago
One of the benefits of being an expert in a particular field, is that you can take small parcels of evidence and formulate an accurate picture of a situation much faster than a layman with no prior experience in that field. I don't know the anthropologist in question, but I am sure she used a series of supporting evidence that was obvious to her trained eye as well as the teeth condition. Ask any doctor or midwife who can look at an ultrasound image and tell you the sex of the baby while you are still staring at a smudgy grey moving image. Ask any accident investigator who can estimate the speed and trajectory of the vehicles while you are still looking for the skid marks. I personally have spent over 25 years interacting on public message boards, and I am a domain expert enough that I can pick an armchair expert who has lots of perceived theoretical knowledge, but little or no real world knowledge, but still feels the need to espouse their opinion in order to get their dopamine hit of the day - all just from a quick glance at their post.
therealdrag0 8y ago
I agree it sounds like bullshit. However, I have listened to a talk by a lady (she consults on murdered cadavers) who can tell which season a body died in by analyzing the teeth! Apparently there is a lot there.
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  That I can believe, assuming a detailed analysis in a lab. But snap judging from a distance? Cavities are more common in modern populations than before, but hardly omnipresent. I do find it an amusing thought that apparently my skeleton would be assigned a more distant past simply because I am filling free. :D

WA 8y ago

Since when does an anecdote provide any proof? I thought exactly the same things as your parent poster. Carbs are sugar, especially if you chew long enough. This affects teeth. Combine this with a lack of toothbrushes and a lack of fluoride and it sounds like a recipe for tooth decay. Also, people didn’t live as long as they do now. So less chance to have your teeth rotten. Furthermore: the skeletons might have been of people in their twenties with arguably better teeth than old people. Lots of questions that this anecdote doesn’t answer and you dismiss critique as pretentious.