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I'm not sure I like this. In practice it means people who don't know what they're talking about (but can bullshit) get promoted more than people who earn $500k/

I'm not sure I like this. In practice it means people who don't know what they're talking about (but can bullshit) get promoted more than people who earn $500k/year understanding the subject, who can't be bothered to dress their point up or engage in arguments because their time is valuable. Case in point: I'll give you good odds the person saying $3.7 million "isn't a lot" is not on the ludicrous salary they're citing. It's a dumb sentiment. More broadly when someone earning half a million says you're wrong about their area of expertise, you should probably just listen. Deep understanding isn't easy to explain, and most people with deep understanding won't explain things laboriously.

grawprog 6y ago
To be honest, someone earning half a million a year, or even someone where $3.7 million isn't much money, doesn't tell me a whole lot about how much they know about anything. I'll agree, there's a chance someone earning a high salary has some in depth knowledge in their field. Or maybe they're a manager with some good connections? Or hell maybe they have in depth knowledge and they're a manager with good connections. Maybe that commenter earning a low wage has spent their life immersing themself in that knowledge because they enjoy it but never made it a career. The amount of money someone has doesn't necessarily correlate to how much they know about something. Money comes and goes, having lots of it let's you have and do some pretty cool things, let's you not worry about necessities so much, let's you throw some weight around. But I disagree it's a good indicator of how much knowledge a person has on a subject or that it automatically makes them a trusted authority on something.
- bananaface 6y ago
  What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider savants, the vast majority of non-expert comments end up being from people who are good at being pedantic and exaggerating their understanding. So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).

grawprog 6y ago

To be honest, someone earning half a million a year, or even someone where $3.7 million isn't much money, doesn't tell me a whole lot about how much they know about anything. I'll agree, there's a chance someone earning a high salary has some in depth knowledge in their field. Or maybe they're a manager with some good connections? Or hell maybe they have in depth knowledge and they're a manager with good connections. Maybe that commenter earning a low wage has spent their life immersing themself in that knowledge because they enjoy it but never made it a career. The amount of money someone has doesn't necessarily correlate to how much they know about something. Money comes and goes, having lots of it let's you have and do some pretty cool things, let's you not worry about necessities so much, let's you throw some weight around. But I disagree it's a good indicator of how much knowledge a person has on a subject or that it automatically makes them a trusted authority on something.

bananaface 6y ago
What I'm getting at is someone's reputation on a subject is not obvious in Reddit-style forums, so while this does allow the promotion of comments by outsider savants, the vast majority of non-expert comments end up being from people who are good at being pedantic and exaggerating their understanding. So you do get some outsider savants, and that's cool, but you also get endless waves of BS, superficial observations and contradiction for the sake of contradiction, while opinions from experts that are difficult to understand or digest get ignored (usually downvoted, unless they explicitly credential-drop).