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Personally, I gravitate towards grayed-out comments. I think that they tend to be likely to be on one or another extreme side of the intellectual bell curve. Ba
by axguscbklp 7y ago
Personally, I gravitate towards grayed-out comments. I think that they tend to be likely to be on one or another extreme side of the intellectual bell curve. Basically, they end up grayed out because either they are too dumb or too smart for the average Hacker News user. So if I manage to run an effective mental filter to discard grayed-out comments that are on the low side of the intellectual gray curve, then gravitating towards grayed-out comments makes it more likely that I am exposed to content that is in the highest intellectual range of Hacker News comments as a whole.
- dang 7y agoOr the ones you most agree with, which for most people are approximately the same as the 'highest intellectual range' ones. But since this is how like to you read HN, you really should know about the 'showdead' option in your profile. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
- axguscbklp 7y agoThanks for the tip about "showdead". I totally agree that there's a big danger, if one follows the strategy I described, of personal bias making one confuse "intelligent" with "what I want to be true" or with "what I enjoy because it is contrarian". However, I am aware of this danger and work to mitigate it in various ways. Also, I should mention that I don't think that grayed-out comments are 0.5 likely to be highly intelligent - I'd say it's more like about 0.1 or 0.2. Overall, I think that the benefit of prioritizing grayed-out comments, to me, has been worth it so far.