7 ms·

As a former Rad worker who has even cleaned up a radioactive spill I'm just shacking my head at the all the "experts" in the comments.

heyoni 7y ago
Why? (Serious)
bilbo0s 7y ago
This is probably pretty typical. The more you know, the more you read and just shake your head. I made medical imaging software for treatment and diagnosis for a living. I suspect I have the same reaction to posts on oncology issues, or FDA issues that you are having to posts on this issue. It's important to realize though, that some of the people commenting with obvious gaps in their knowledge are making a sincere attempt at learning more. Especially if the subject is technical rather than political in nature. Just jump in and correct them. If any of your corrections are received poorly by the user, well, just let them alone. But the curious, 'seeker' types will probably thank you and ask for more information.
- lasdfas 7y ago
  I think "some" is very few (if any at all) in my experience. If you are generally looking for knowledge or not sure, you preface with "I may be wrong", "I am not an expert" or other such phrases, but most often people state wrong information as facts with no caveats. It's probably some combination of over confidence and ignorance.
  - ksec 7y ago
    That is one of the problem with online discussions. Would be great if there is a discussion on how to fix this.
  - fwip 7y ago
    HackerNews tech bros, chasing that upvote validation. When you've been rewarded all your life for being smart and right, you tend to think your guesses are right and announce them loudly.
    - qwsxyh 7y ago
      HN users, much similar to many places on the internet, fall into the trap of believing that because they hold an opinion on a topic, they are therefore right.
      - spacemanmatt 7y ago
        Everything I know about the Dunning-Kruger effect, I learned on HN.
    - bodi 7y ago
      And no site featuring up/down votes, usernames, and publicly displayed logins will ever pursue the truth as a first cause, only to enable the ego.
lasdfas 7y ago
It took me a while to realize this. It wasn't until there was a post about something I was an expert on. I finally realized people respond here often with little knowledge or even no knowledge at all. It made me question everything I read before on this site.
- edoceo 7y ago
  It's not just commenters on this site; planet wide problem.
  - lasdfas 7y ago
    Definitely, I was just very naive to think somehow this platform was immune from general human behavior
    - mordechai9000 7y ago
      I think there are a lot of comments that are just unfounded amateur speculation presented as fact, especially for topics outside IT/CS. On the other hand, I think it's common to see threads that have a high ratio of signal to noise. Like a link to a scientific paper will have one of the authors of the paper in the comments section answering questions.
  - krapp 7y ago
    This site (or at least the community around it) does claim a degree of highbrow intellectual merit and deep technical expertise that places it in a self-determined echelon above the rest of the web, which one can readily see in the disdain that commenters here have for Reddit, other social media sites, most non-technical fields and people in general. So it is ironic and kind of funny when you realize that, apart from a few outliers, Hacker News is just as infested with trolls, fools, posers and Dunning-Krueger as the rest of the web. It is just a more polite /g/ without the pictures and memes. That's not an insult, just an observation of how deeply the sets of users here, there, on Reddit and elsewhere overlap.
    - 7y ago
rootusrootus 7y ago
Reminds me of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect for news reporting. It's worth remembering when reading comments on anything.
gameswithgo 7y ago
Here is my "expert" thought, which I would be interested to hear corrected: "man that seems really dumb to have a removal process that involves a cutting tool being anywhere near the capsule!"
skosch 7y ago
I'm curious why they use capsules of fine powder, instead of glued/sintered pellets. Perhaps you can provide some insight?
DenisM 7y ago
Is your comment making things better? It doesn't point any particular misconceptions or even trends of misconceptions, and doesn't provide any "conceptions" of its own. Disdain towards unidentified posts based on your self-proclaimed credentials is all there is for us to read.
- carapace 7y ago
  Um, you just said > Comments are pointers, not destinations. And from site guidelines: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Maybe we are blathering about something we know nothing about to the point where we just sound ridiculous to someone who does know, eh? Rather than shaking his head in exasperation and moving on, OP takes a moment to try to let us know that we're wasting our time. If we really care, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find and perhaps read some authoritative document describing best practices for radioactive waste management, eh?
  - DenisM 7y ago
    Good pointers would point somewhere, somewhere more precise than "the truth is out there".
casefields 7y ago
Sure. As someone in show business I have to roll my eyes at the stupidity spouted here whenever Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros, HBO, Hulu or any other film/tv topic comes up. Some battles just aren't worth it.
- dang 7y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but I wish you would. Despite all the weeds that grow in the threads, many of us are here to learn. That's the purpose of this site. If users won't comment in their areas of expertise, that purpose is stymied. It doesn't mean you have to get into tedious arguments with ignorant, indignant comments. (It's interesting how often those two go together.) It's enough to post a substantive top-level comment explaining what you know from the point of view of someone in the business. In the end, those tend to get upvoted; there's one at the top of this thread right now. And as moderator/gardeners we do what we can to give those more interesting plants a fighting chance vis-à-vis the weeds.
- petschge 7y ago
  As a physicist I have a similar reaction to a bunch of topics. Sometimes people are very happy with the insider info I can bring to a thread (e.g. how does the EHT create it's picture), but sometimes you get so much opposition from people who obviously don't have a clue and simply assume that everything is simple to solve with machine learning and that all professional scientists are bumbling idiot who can be save by the comments of a silicon valley kid that it stops being fun. I wonder if a "badge" system could help HN. Validate professional work experience with a moderation team ("astrophysicist" because I have published papers there, or "radiation control tech" or "worked in the movie industrie" or "work at google" or whatever). You could even have more than one badge (say "work at google" and "race sailboats for sport"). And when you post a comment there is a list of all your badges below the text field an you can select one to be displayed noticeable above your comment to indicate "I have professional knowledge of this". Of course you can still post a comment without selecting any of your badges because "radiation controll tech" says nothing when discussing cookie recipes, but is an important thing to not when discussing a radioactive spill.
daenz 7y ago
With your expertise, could you at least provide insight into the situation instead of simply saying how much you know compared to everyone else in the comments?
dang 7y ago
If you know more, why not share some of what you know, so we all can learn something? If you only post like this, it's a shallow dismissal. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250627 is a fine example of how to do this, by someone who has expertise and is close to the current situation. If you post like that instead, you satisfy readers' curiosity, which is the purpose of this site. Admittedly it's more work, but it sounds like you have something a lot to offer here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- carapace 7y ago
  I dunno dang, in the era of "fake news" I don't think the sentiment is inappropriate. What else but a shallow dismissal for people who are ignorant but hold forth on some technical issue? The Internet is right there, they could just as easily do their own homework as post something uninformed.
  - dang 7y ago
    The guidelines ask HN users not to post shallow dismissals because of the effect they have on discussion: they make it even more shallow and dismissive. Look at what an offtopic subthread we got below. People always hold forth on things they're not expert in. That's humans being human. We can't change that. What is possible is for those who know more to share some of what they know with those who want to learn. Doing that leads to much better discussion.
    - carapace 7y ago
      I gotta agree. Respect.
droithomme 7y ago
> As a former Rad worker who has even cleaned up a radioactive spill I'm just shacking my head at the all the "experts" in the comments. Well do an AMA. I have questions for you. What do you think of the Safety Officer not having any idea what was going on when the Hazmat team showed up? His not having a plan of what to do. The crew not wearing safety equipment. The Hazmat guy having to be the one to suggest shutting down the HVAC. Do you think this company handled this well at any point in the removal operation or subsequent events? What should happen to them? Should they be liable for the clean up costs? Should they be decertified? What sort of training did anyone on their crew have to allow this all to go down this way? If even one person at the company knew what they were doing, wouldn't they have raised some objections or sent a memo at some point? If everyone at this company has no idea what they are doing, should the DoE be paying them millions to deal with radioactive waste removal and transport?

heyoni 7y ago

Why? (Serious)

bilbo0s 7y ago

This is probably pretty typical. The more you know, the more you read and just shake your head. I made medical imaging software for treatment and diagnosis for a living. I suspect I have the same reaction to posts on oncology issues, or FDA issues that you are having to posts on this issue. It's important to realize though, that some of the people commenting with obvious gaps in their knowledge are making a sincere attempt at learning more. Especially if the subject is technical rather than political in nature. Just jump in and correct them. If any of your corrections are received poorly by the user, well, just let them alone. But the curious, 'seeker' types will probably thank you and ask for more information.

lasdfas 7y ago
I think "some" is very few (if any at all) in my experience. If you are generally looking for knowledge or not sure, you preface with "I may be wrong", "I am not an expert" or other such phrases, but most often people state wrong information as facts with no caveats. It's probably some combination of over confidence and ignorance.
- ksec 7y ago
  That is one of the problem with online discussions. Would be great if there is a discussion on how to fix this.
- fwip 7y ago
  HackerNews tech bros, chasing that upvote validation. When you've been rewarded all your life for being smart and right, you tend to think your guesses are right and announce them loudly.
  - qwsxyh 7y ago
    HN users, much similar to many places on the internet, fall into the trap of believing that because they hold an opinion on a topic, they are therefore right.
    - spacemanmatt 7y ago
      Everything I know about the Dunning-Kruger effect, I learned on HN.
  - bodi 7y ago
    And no site featuring up/down votes, usernames, and publicly displayed logins will ever pursue the truth as a first cause, only to enable the ego.

lasdfas 7y ago

It took me a while to realize this. It wasn't until there was a post about something I was an expert on. I finally realized people respond here often with little knowledge or even no knowledge at all. It made me question everything I read before on this site.

edoceo 7y ago
It's not just commenters on this site; planet wide problem.
- lasdfas 7y ago
  Definitely, I was just very naive to think somehow this platform was immune from general human behavior
  - mordechai9000 7y ago
    I think there are a lot of comments that are just unfounded amateur speculation presented as fact, especially for topics outside IT/CS. On the other hand, I think it's common to see threads that have a high ratio of signal to noise. Like a link to a scientific paper will have one of the authors of the paper in the comments section answering questions.
- krapp 7y ago
  This site (or at least the community around it) does claim a degree of highbrow intellectual merit and deep technical expertise that places it in a self-determined echelon above the rest of the web, which one can readily see in the disdain that commenters here have for Reddit, other social media sites, most non-technical fields and people in general. So it is ironic and kind of funny when you realize that, apart from a few outliers, Hacker News is just as infested with trolls, fools, posers and Dunning-Krueger as the rest of the web. It is just a more polite /g/ without the pictures and memes. That's not an insult, just an observation of how deeply the sets of users here, there, on Reddit and elsewhere overlap.
  - 7y ago

rootusrootus 7y ago

Reminds me of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect for news reporting. It's worth remembering when reading comments on anything.

gameswithgo 7y ago

Here is my "expert" thought, which I would be interested to hear corrected: "man that seems really dumb to have a removal process that involves a cutting tool being anywhere near the capsule!"

skosch 7y ago

I'm curious why they use capsules of fine powder, instead of glued/sintered pellets. Perhaps you can provide some insight?

DenisM 7y ago

Is your comment making things better? It doesn't point any particular misconceptions or even trends of misconceptions, and doesn't provide any "conceptions" of its own. Disdain towards unidentified posts based on your self-proclaimed credentials is all there is for us to read.

carapace 7y ago
Um, you just said > Comments are pointers, not destinations. And from site guidelines: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. Maybe we are blathering about something we know nothing about to the point where we just sound ridiculous to someone who does know, eh? Rather than shaking his head in exasperation and moving on, OP takes a moment to try to let us know that we're wasting our time. If we really care, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find and perhaps read some authoritative document describing best practices for radioactive waste management, eh?
- DenisM 7y ago
  Good pointers would point somewhere, somewhere more precise than "the truth is out there".

casefields 7y ago

Sure. As someone in show business I have to roll my eyes at the stupidity spouted here whenever Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros, HBO, Hulu or any other film/tv topic comes up. Some battles just aren't worth it.

dang 7y ago
I understand the sentiment, but I wish you would. Despite all the weeds that grow in the threads, many of us are here to learn. That's the purpose of this site. If users won't comment in their areas of expertise, that purpose is stymied. It doesn't mean you have to get into tedious arguments with ignorant, indignant comments. (It's interesting how often those two go together.) It's enough to post a substantive top-level comment explaining what you know from the point of view of someone in the business. In the end, those tend to get upvoted; there's one at the top of this thread right now. And as moderator/gardeners we do what we can to give those more interesting plants a fighting chance vis-à-vis the weeds.
petschge 7y ago
As a physicist I have a similar reaction to a bunch of topics. Sometimes people are very happy with the insider info I can bring to a thread (e.g. how does the EHT create it's picture), but sometimes you get so much opposition from people who obviously don't have a clue and simply assume that everything is simple to solve with machine learning and that all professional scientists are bumbling idiot who can be save by the comments of a silicon valley kid that it stops being fun. I wonder if a "badge" system could help HN. Validate professional work experience with a moderation team ("astrophysicist" because I have published papers there, or "radiation control tech" or "worked in the movie industrie" or "work at google" or whatever). You could even have more than one badge (say "work at google" and "race sailboats for sport"). And when you post a comment there is a list of all your badges below the text field an you can select one to be displayed noticeable above your comment to indicate "I have professional knowledge of this". Of course you can still post a comment without selecting any of your badges because "radiation controll tech" says nothing when discussing cookie recipes, but is an important thing to not when discussing a radioactive spill.

daenz 7y ago

With your expertise, could you at least provide insight into the situation instead of simply saying how much you know compared to everyone else in the comments?

dang 7y ago

If you know more, why not share some of what you know, so we all can learn something? If you only post like this, it's a shallow dismissal. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20250627 is a fine example of how to do this, by someone who has expertise and is close to the current situation. If you post like that instead, you satisfy readers' curiosity, which is the purpose of this site. Admittedly it's more work, but it sounds like you have something a lot to offer here.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
carapace 7y ago
I dunno dang, in the era of "fake news" I don't think the sentiment is inappropriate. What else but a shallow dismissal for people who are ignorant but hold forth on some technical issue? The Internet is right there, they could just as easily do their own homework as post something uninformed.
- dang 7y ago
  The guidelines ask HN users not to post shallow dismissals because of the effect they have on discussion: they make it even more shallow and dismissive. Look at what an offtopic subthread we got below. People always hold forth on things they're not expert in. That's humans being human. We can't change that. What is possible is for those who know more to share some of what they know with those who want to learn. Doing that leads to much better discussion.
  - carapace 7y ago
    I gotta agree. Respect.

droithomme 7y ago

> As a former Rad worker who has even cleaned up a radioactive spill I'm just shacking my head at the all the "experts" in the comments. Well do an AMA. I have questions for you. What do you think of the Safety Officer not having any idea what was going on when the Hazmat team showed up? His not having a plan of what to do. The crew not wearing safety equipment. The Hazmat guy having to be the one to suggest shutting down the HVAC. Do you think this company handled this well at any point in the removal operation or subsequent events? What should happen to them? Should they be liable for the clean up costs? Should they be decertified? What sort of training did anyone on their crew have to allow this all to go down this way? If even one person at the company knew what they were doing, wouldn't they have raised some objections or sent a memo at some point? If everyone at this company has no idea what they are doing, should the DoE be paying them millions to deal with radioactive waste removal and transport?