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Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people (2018)
- ketanmaheshwari 6y agoImportant point to note here is that the Internet is not same as social media much less one specific website.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ibn-python 6y agoI’ve realized after building a small amount of competency in 2-3 narrow fields over the years how wrong most people are about those same topics online. Since becoming aware of this several years ago I’ve slowly limited my surfing to higher quality sites such as this one. I’ve always wondered how many completely incorrect beliefs I have about the world due to the compulsive surfing/reading of my younger years.
- RhodesianHunter 6y agoI don't feel like this really changes much with competency due to Dunning Krugerand competency being a near limitless spectrum. How many times have you come in to hacker news and read someone's complaint about x where "someone" is an expert with a decade of experience in the field only to have someone else chime in with the "well actually, I'm the creator of that project and..."
- whoisburbansky 6y agoUnrelated, but the missing space between Kruger and "and" had me go down the rabbit hole of trying to piece together what your comment had to do with Bitcoin. Dunning-Krugerrand is used in certain circles to refer to the crypto coin, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion.
- User23 6y agoThat plus GP’s username made me laugh
- dougmwne 6y agoSame. I was working on some personal projects that are not of a technical nature. There was a lot of information and discussions on the internet about it, but it was all incredibly wrong and written with great confidence by people who had zero authority on the topic. I ended up hiring professionals to help and I got my money's worth. My conclusion is the internet is mostly marketing and entertainment aside from a few very specific corners.
- kasey_junk 6y agoYou’ll read pretty wildly off comments on this site about certain topics. For instance, it’s gotten better over time but effectively anytime you see comments about how the markets work on HN it will be filled with inaccuracies.
- TylerE 6y agoMy personal favorite: Any topic involving airplanes will involve 99% of the people sounding very confidant and very very wrong.
- kasey_junk 6y agoI have no knowledge of nuclear sea vessels but the sheer number of comments and the certainty implied makes me suspicious on that topic.
- User23 6y agoI don’t know about that, but I’m absolutely certain the bicycle shed needs to be green.
- sentenza 6y agoBelieve me, there are worse topics. The best way to get yelled at or down-voted on HN is having a basic understanding of how EU regulations and the EU legislative process work.
- mongol 6y agoThat is actually a topic I hardly see discussed here. And one that would be interesting to see a factual discussion about. Seems to me that perceived conceptions about it are behind Brexit.
- claudiawerner 6y agoIf you think discussions on markets are bad, try philosophy, especially political philosophy, or sociology. I don't often comment on "very wrong" comments because they're unlikely to get anywhere. I've found that for all HN detests conformity, more often than not it tends to be a certain kind of perceived conformity, and more often, what is seen as conformity in startup culture. What is often missed in my (honestly) humble opinion, is that this counter-conformity rests squarely in the larger conformity!
- bitcharmer 6y agoI don't think HN is a higher quality site in the sense you are referring to here. At least not recently. You will see some well grounded, expert opinions here down-voted into oblivion simply because they clash with the mental picture of a number of HN users. As much as I love HN it is slowly sliding into reddit-ism.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI mean, people have been saying this basically since the site began: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926703 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=66057 (I didn't find these, they're linked in the site guidelines.)
- bitcharmer 6y agoI'm aware of that. It's just that it got much worse recently.
- Pfhreak 6y agoYou joined recently, not sure how you've got any ability to say it's gotten worse 'recently.' Unless you are referring to the past 10 months or so where there was one or two things that might have impacted the discourse a bit. HN still is the place it's always been. You have more data now, perhaps, but fundamentally it hasn't really changed. People continue to upvote and downvote in roughly the same ways, and they are used to agree and disagree just as they always have been.
- bitcharmer 6y agoWe might have different definitions of "recently", but I've been here 7 years in total: 3 years lurking, and 4 years as a user.
- daniellarusso 6y ago
- agumonkey 6y agoAlso how a majority of the world lives on the average wrong understanding of things. I guess society is not about precision efficiency.
- roenxi 6y ago> I’ve always wondered how many completely incorrect beliefs I have about the world due to the compulsive surfing/reading of my younger years. A good rule of thumb, if maybe excessively defensive, is the more strongly held a belief the more likely it is to be wrong. Reality has a nasty habit of being moderate, murky and uncertain. An extremist moderate might be on the right political track, I suppose. One of the fun parts of being an engineer is that they have to interact with the real world and the theoretical one and learn just how many stupid practical details blow apart theoretically pure ideas.
- drivebycomment 6y agoI wholeheartedly agree. I would add that it is very difficult to tell when to break away from that rule of thumb thus a good decision making is a never ending struggle with a self doubt and a leap of faith.
- austincheney 6y agoThat’s why I deleted my Reddit account.
- GuB-42 6y agoOne strange thing I noticed on HN is that some of my most upvoted posts are in area outside my field of expertise. I do everything I can to fact check myself, but I'm sure I have been wrong several times and there are people more qualified than me to answer. And some of my posts that are well within my field of expertise stay at zero. When I get downvoted it is usually when I post an unpopular opinion, but rarely as a result of being wrong. All this to say that while HN is, I think, one of the best communities, it doesn't mean you should leave your guard down. I'd say it is even more insidious here because you won't find easily debunked bullshit, no flat earthers here. Falsehoods here are to be subtle enough to go unnoticed by an educated mind, and you are not guaranteed to be corrected by a real expert.
- ehnto 6y agoMy least popular comments are also comments I have made with hard won experience in my field. My not-very-humble guess is that it is two fold: One, if you only have a shallow understanding of something, it is easy to dismiss things as wrong if they don't align with your understanding so far. Two, if you do have a deep understanding of a topic but different experiences in the field, you may have really strong opinions in a different direction. Disappointingly they are also usually the least discussed comments of mine and I rarely figure out why they were downvoted.
- croissants 6y agoCan you link to some of your "hard won experience" comments? Now I'm curious about them.
- randcraw 6y agoIn my case, I work for a large pharmaceutical. Many of the driving forces behind drug development or healthcare decisions arise in business priorities, practices, and regulations that are complex and unintuitive to outsiders. Unless I reinforce my POV with explanation of why and how these subterranean forces drive outcomes, I'm likely to find myself downvoted — presumably because readers discount my perspective as insufficiently plausible or wrong outright, perhaps because I haven't offered enough explanation. But since longwinded explication of arcane background minutiae is tiresome to write and for others to read, so I often demur to the detriment of my score.
- deathgrips 6y agoI think HN is lower quality than Reddit because it's harder to spot who doesn't know what they're talking about. On Reddit the clowns have bad grammar and don't even attempt to substantiate their beliefs. On HN the clowns have flowing prose, a Stanford degree and immaculate clown makeup.
- da02 6y agoWhat are those 2-3 fields? What are some of the things people say that are wrong about those topics?
- hinkley 6y agoI’m sure you’ve had the experience of being downvoted for being right but with unpleasant news.
- Bakary 6y agoThere's no guarantee that what you describe as higher quality sites offer much better views of the world.
- raunakdag 6y agoI’ve been searching for this post for what seems like years, but I’m sure is just a couple of months! I remember reading this oh so long ago, thank you for submitting it here.
- _qulr 6y agoThe definition of insanity is submitting the same link to HN over and over again and expecting different comments. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fslatestarcodex%2Fcomments%2F9rvroo%2Fmost_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written%2F&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- geoah 6y agoHehe, it’s an interesting post so once every half a year i guess is fine :p
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoFWIW, I'm a pretty dedicated HN reader and this is the first time I've seen it.
- cm2012 6y agoI live my life refreshing HN and haven't seen it before, so I appreciate it.
- netizen-9748 6y agoHow do you know that different comments are what is expected
- Glyptodon 6y agoI think there's room for it to be a little misleading without knowing set intersections. Like say someone subscribes to 50 subreddits, submits 2 posts a month, and averages 4 comments a day. On average they're lurking, but I wouldn't call them a lurker.
- tayo42 6y agoIt's an interesting spin on the 1% of people actually post thing. How many people actually create, and create and share in general though. Since I got into art and sharing it people tell me they also create but don't share it online anywhere. People might want to participate but don't for whatever reason. The internet does also give a equal megaphone to everyone. Actual crazy things can sound reasonable. The act if down and upvoting on reddit is also similar. 4 or 5 downvotes, which in reality is only 4 or 5 people can bury a thought, essentially censoring it and makes it seem more unpopular then it is. It was only unpopular to those 4 or 5 readers.
- pgustafs 6y agoThe problem is that the sites don't have feedback loops to the real world, just imaginary internet points. People who optimize for imaginary internet points are either ahead of the curve or insane, depending on how you look at it.
- motohagiography 6y agoOne wonders, who is reading them, precisely?
- hindsightbias 6y agoThe other 99%
- koolk3ychain 6y agoI could not agree more. Findings like this in regards to first party content on the internet, in other words content written deliberately for consumption or gain of some kind - will always essentially trend toward a surface level and / or biased take. At least in terms of what you will find via most search engines. This line of thinking I believe is one of the best cases to seek a college education instead of being self taught. The fallacy of "you can learn everything you could in college online" is quickly becoming more and more wrong. I hated college, I was bad at it, but I still value the time I spent working on hard things and having smart people provide a curated palette of application based knowledge. I know people who are self taught engineers, however by their own admission they're likely more focused or motivated than the average and acknowledge they likely closed the doors on many future opportunities given their lack of a degree.
- vbezhenar 6y agoI’ve read some content produced by schizophrenic people. It’s pretty obvious. I would say that those mega comment guys are as insane as writer or artist. 99.9% of people don’t write books or pictures.
- supernova87a 6y agoAgreed, clearly a selection effect going on, not just in long content-filled opinions/articles, but also comments, even here on HN. Use caution and don't take the average commenter to represent reasonable consensus opinion -- in either how you think you should feel about your own opinion, or what you think others think. You have to have your own external sense of what's reasonable or not, tested by multiple sources. People who are opinionated here are generally outliers on the spectrum. (particularly on non-technical opinions about public policies) Those who feel strongly enough to take the time to write may not represent the mainstream.
- dang 6y agoA thread from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827
- bretthopper 6y agoOver the past year I've slowly started to realize this as well. What changed? Working for a company that is publicly known enough for people on HN (and Reddit) to comment about it. It has been hilarious and scary to read comments from people who don't work at the company say completely inaccurate things like they are facts. In this case, it's easy for me to recognize they are wrong. But what about other topics (or companies) I don't know much about? I have no easy way of recognizing inaccuracies so I default to mostly accepting them. Sadly, you need to be skeptical of almost everything you read even when the person sounds like they know the subject matter.
- robomartin 6y agoThe problem is that the masses are not equipped to separate fabrication from reality. It often takes hours of research to actually get to the bottom of a story. Nowhere is this more prevalent and hideous than in US politics. Media outlets, under cover of constitutional protection lie with impunity, consequences be damned. All they care about is hitting resonance and feeding it. It is hard to estimate the damage they have caused this nation. In some cases discovering the truth has a time element as well. I remember a very specific case from the 2016 elections that drove this point home for me. I was watching CNN. They featured this story about a black church that had been burned down and the phrase “Vote Trump” spray painted on the side. The network pounded on this story for a week or so. They painted Trump as the racist instigator who inspired someone to do this. None of this made sense for me. Unless crazy, a supporter of any political candidate would know that burning down a church would not be a net positive for their candidate. Something was wrong, yet it was impossible to discover at that time. I was so puzzled that I set a calendar reminder to look into the story a few months later. Sure enough, three months later they arrested the guy who did it. Who was he? A member of the church. Yes, a black man. Why did he do it? Because he had a problem with the pastor. Why did he spray paint “Vote Trump”? Because he thought that would send investigators in a different direction. Do you think CNN devoted a week’s worth of 24/7 coverage to correct the absolute falsehoods they spread? Of course not! They could not care less! Millions of people walked away from a one week carpet bombing campaign across most of the media with lies upon lies pounded into their heads. This one event truly changed my views. I started to research everything. I can say that in nearly 100% of the stories I look into the media lied with impunity. While I don’t consider myself a Trump supporter, I started to understand what the man was dealing with. He has had to endure this for four years. This is a horrific violation of the trust and privileges granted to the media by the US constitution. Some might be OK with this because they dislike Trump. That is a terribly myopic position to adopt. Today the media attacks those you dislike, yet nothing in life is constant. Tomorrow, whenever that may be, the tables might change...sadly that’s when people finally realize that a principled unbiased position in favor of truth and justice is the only one that can protect everyone.
- hughw 6y agoAre we commenters on HN only 1%?
- dang 6y agoI just checked. 25% of all HN accounts have posted at least one comment. That's higher than I thought I remembered. 6% of accounts have posted 10 or more comments, accounting for 96% of all comments. 2% of accounts have posted 100 or more comments, accounting for 83% of all comments.
- forgingahead 6y agoHappy New Year @dang! Thanks for all your hard work as always. Thanks for sharing these stats -- seems like HN is similar to other internet communities. 2% covering 83% of all comments is certainly pretty skewed. I do notice a tussle over upvotes/downvotes when making comments that might be against the HN vocal orthodoxy, so maybe that's where the silent majority make themselves heard? Via upvotes/downvotes? What percentage of uniques have accounts here? Would be interesting to know if commenters are also a minority of total lurkers.
- dang 6y agoI commented about this sometime in the last year. Let me see if my search fu can dig up the post... Edit: I was about to plead too much beer, but https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20accounts%20numbers&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... delivered. This is the post I was thinking of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22622983.
- twicetwice 6y agoThanks for sharing, that's super interesting! If it's easy to dig up these stats, I'd be interested to know—how does that compare to unique viewers? What percent of page views are logged in? I suspect these numbers would be even more striking in that context.
- 6y ago
- notjtrig 6y agoThe author notes by the use of insane he means different, but is it really that unique for a person to post online or are we just seeing a pattern where there is none. Books are written by insane people, on average person does not write a book. Rock climbers are insane people, very few people rock climb so why listen to safety tips the 0.2% of the population who do. They are not normal people from a statical standpoint. On average a person does not do any one spicific thing. Everyone online has contributed to the internet, everyone has written something and everyone has excersised. I've seen this brought up before that only 2-3% of redditors contribute, like it's a bad thing or a unique thing. That number it's way higher than books, tv, radio any form of convenientional media.
- chaganated 6y agoFrom the comments: "Creation has always been the province of outliers. Has every creator--from Grady Harp all the way back to God--been insane?"
- pontifier 6y agoI remember reading about a study to try to find the statistically average soldier. I seem to recall that after doing hundreds of measurements on thousands of soldiers they found that there was too much variation. None of the soldiers was average in all measurements. Edit: here's a link https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-...
- jl6 6y agoI think these examples still support the broader hypothesis that creators are outliers and not representative of everybody else. Normal people don’t write books. Reading only books and not talking to normal people will give you a skewed impression of reality.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoEven that statement "creators are outliers" doesn't really seem supported by the evidence from the article. Seems just as plausible that most people create in a singular or small set of domains, but consume from a much broader set. I mean, sure, only .2% of visitors contribute to Wikipedia, but that's because Wikipedia has huge general applicability. I bet the 99.8% of non-contributors also includes the guy that streams on Twitch 12 hours a day, or folks who moderate Reddit forums, or lots of book authors. Far from being "outliers", could be that most people just focus their creative pursuits on one thing.
- didibus 6y agoBased on the other comments here, and the actual content of the posted link, I can also say that most of the comments I read on the internet have not actually consumed the content they are commenting on.
- throw999666 6y agoit's not just comments online it's most of the world is created by insane people. And most of those are men because men are more insane than women and in different ways. Jordan Peterson has a similar theory and the reason that men are more overrepresented in creators of the world around us is because there's more insane men than there are insane women or they're insane in different ways.
- bouncycastle 6y agoHave you ever thought that you might be insane?
- throw999666 6y agoYes I've thought about that many times. Maybe i am. Maybe i'd not really know nor understand if i was, or maybe i would see myself and think, yes, i am insane! But either way, if I'm insane or not, by your definition, or any definition, or not, I'm okay with it. And i often consider if i might be deluded or psychotic. It's definitely possible sometimes. Delusions are just so compelling, and very flattering and soothing to the ego. But right now, no i don't believe myself to be, and i do believe what i say. If that let's you feel more or less credulous about my statements, i understand that, and yet neither your reaction nor interpretation is my responsibility, so i can't help you with it, I feel sorry for you to say. But if it makes it easier for you to hear my statements while believing I'm insane, i encourage you to continue to do that. I don't want it to be hard for you. Please continue to make it easy on yourself, and have a great two zero two one. Edit: your comment was downsided but i think it's a great question and a very interesting thing to think about. It for me thinking might about other things, so I'll add. Sometimes I wonder why do I care so much about such and such a topic e.g politics or geopolitics or something like that and I have to admit sometimes I don't really understand why I care so much about it, at first. so I think it could be useful for me to take a step back and go why do I feel so strongly about this? Cuz I don't want to be an instrument of the will of some idea that I don't understand, nor of someone who's not me.
- bouncycastle 6y ago
- Guthur 6y agoThe use of the word insane has a little too much negativity in my opinion but otherwise it shouldn't be surprising the Pareto principle is at play here, it's the case on nearly every other example of output to one degree or another.
- dorkwood 6y agoWhen I was younger, I wasted a lot of time following the advice of online strangers who seemed to have a lot of conviction in their ideas -- much more conviction than I'd ever had about anything myself. To me, that was a sign that they must know what they're talking about. It turned out to be the opposite. These days, I try not to blindly follow the advice of anyone who can't demonstrate their knowledge to me in some way; if you're telling me how to paint a picture, you better be able to show me one of your paintings.
- da02 6y agoWhat was some of the wrong advice you received in the past from this over-confident strangers?
- mrfusion 6y agoThe only twist I’d add to this is that the 1% contributing could be different people at different times. So maybe spread over time it’s a little more even. That matches how I contribute. I’ll passively read comments for weeks or months, then get interested in something that comes up enough to start commenting on it.
- kjgkjhfkjf 6y agoThe world would be a better place if people unqualified to do so stopped labeling people with whom they disagreed as "insane", "narcissists", "psychopaths", etc. When you do this, you dehumanize the person, and minimize the positive aspects of their contributions. If you are not a qualified doctor, please make a new year's resolution to stop doing this.
- Bakary 6y agoMental disorders are by definition relative to the broader society and to other individuals, so they're not that off the mark. That said, I would indeed rather describe people who spend their lives in specific minutiae as performance artists or zen monks rather than just calling them insane. It's not like anything we do is particularly sane in any cultural context.
- karaterobot 6y agoThe majority of content isn't made by the Grady Harps and Justin Knapps of the world. Those are the individuals with the most contributions in their respective areas, but their total input still amounts to a rounding error. Given that's the case, the fact that we even recognize people like that as outliers means that the majority of what you read on the internet isn't written by insane people (for any meaningful definition of the word).
- ehnto 6y agoThe real world is usually more dynamic, maleable and workable than the internet has you believe too. If you believed the internet, you would believe you can only ever use the best parts in the perfect configuration for almost everything. Be it metalwork, mountain biking, computing, drones or any other hobby regularly discussed online. The reality is you can make do with in so many different ways that if you can't afford the best you can still have oodles of fun on cheaper equipment. Half the fun is learning all this "expertise" the internet has on your own. Can't afford a Bridgeport mill? Buy something cheaper and work around the edge cases. Can't afford a full suspension bike? Get a hardtail and have tonnes of fun. Someone is always quick to add in the caveats, but guess what, a new rider doesn't give a shit that he can't send 8ft drops on his hard tail. There are hours of fun on the bike ahead, none of it sending 8ft drops. The new hobby machinist isn't bothered that they can't mill titanium, they are just stoked to be getting started.
- leetcrew 6y agoeven if I can afford it, I usually find it more satisfying to work my way up through tiers of equipment for {insert hobby}. it's hard to appreciate what makes the high-end stuff nice if you haven't tried the low- and mid-range first.
- audiometry 6y agoThis is such an underrated comment. I find so much of this “right way” thing to just be cliquish gate keeping.
- city17 6y agoAgreed. Funny thing is that even if you're aware of this it can affect you. I noticed this recently when I spent a bit of time watching 3D printing videos to find a solution to a small problem. When I was done watching this video I felt like I absolutely had to buy this much more expensive printer to get any decent results, which was completely false.
- Bakary 6y agoI made a rule-of-thumb checklist for this sort of thing: -Is the advice primarily based on every more finely delineated consumption? (e.g. the bikes or mills you mentioned) Then you can safely ignore it as the users responding are well past the diminishing returns curve in their obsession -Are there any bits of advice that seem to pop up across various sources? → investigate and think about their validity -What are the main "things I wish I knew before starting" that keep popping up? → investigate and think
- excalibur 6y agoI think sane people are a myth. If someone believes strongly in their own sanity, they're most likely even crazier than we are.
- blooalien 6y agoAnd the few rare actually sane humans we have alive on the planet today are mostly smart enough to stay silent about it to avoid getting crucified or burned at the stake. ;)
- galkk 6y agoIt could be is that the "ultra-productive" folks (except Ninja, who is real person), may be actually collectives, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki
- nwah1 6y agoThis was true even before the internet. The Oxford English Dictionary owes its existence to the paranoid schizophrenic Dr. William Minor, who did his work from an insane asylum after murdering a man.
- voiper1 6y agoWikipedia says he was a major contributor, but there's a large team other than him. I don't see any suggestion that Oxford English Dictionary "owes its existence" to him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Early_editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#Earl...
- nwah1 6y agoWikipedia? Are you going to take the word of a bunch of internet lunatics? To be serious, the book The Surgeon of Crowthorne describes it as if their decades-long work was going at a snail's pace and Dr. Minor was crucial to making sufficient progress and avoiding the project being cancelled.
- forgingahead 6y agoThis implication is striking, not just for us individuals & communities to realise how niche perhaps opinions online are compared to our own, but also for engaging with: - Media orgs, that often take offhand/random opinions online and blow it up beyond proportion. Overton Window shifts occur because of this, and political impacts often happen as a result. - AI models, like those trained off of publicly available text sources online (comments and otherwise).
- TMWNN 6y agoReddit/Twitter/etc. are always, Always, ALWAYS wrong about everything.[1] ... and thank God for that. As one whose political and cultural beliefs are mostly opposite that of Twitter/Reddit's as a whole, the sites' existence (including subreddits like /r/politics, /r/news, and /r/worldnews) is gratifying and validating. If the mass of Redditards/Twitter users agreed with my opinions I'd carefully reexamine every one of them. As bloodraven42 wrote in response to a pretty cringe-inducing example of a Redditard (who was agreeing with an even more cringe-inducing example (http://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/urodq/british_guy_here_considering_a_job_in_la_but/c4xxeny?context=3 http://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/urodq/british_guy_...)): >Please note the fact that you've gotten this impression from "reading Reddit". I assure you, reading Reddit gives you about as accurate a portrayal of reality as reading North Korean "news". Did you know Kim Jong Il is literally a God? As Anal_Justice_League added: >So wait, your world view comes from reading Reddit? >Do I even have to explain how catastrophically stupid that is? And as 1foryes said in another thread (https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/be2p5a/cbc_predicts_ucp_majority/el2rfl2/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/be2p5a/cbc_predicts_...): >But fortunately, reddit does not represent reality. If it did, the ice caps would have melted years ago and we'd all be fighting in WW6. [1] Except bacon
- cafard 6y agoWhat do they say about bacon?
- legulere 6y agoThe reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw In the end I think we underestimate the insanity of “normal“ people. What is considered normal is a pretty subjective question and prone to change.
- chadcmulligan 6y agoEveryone in the world is crazy except for me and thee, and I'm not to sure about thee - one of my Dad's favourite sayings.
- gary_0 6y ago"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." — Pascal
- SergeAx 6y agoMost of things we use during our day invented by people who put insane hours and effort into creating those things. There is a layer of factory workers between them and us, the only thing with the Internet is that this layer is fully automated here.
- zuhayeer 6y agoI would be curious how many people on Twitter tweet vs retweet vs just heart
- hyperpallium2 6y agoCustoms are contingent truths and can only be learnt from others: which side of the road to drive on, language, laws, etiquette. Neither pure reason nor empirical fact fully determine them. When you hear them in your social context, you adopt them unconsciously and uncritically. Therefore people from a disjoint graph of social interaction have different customs, which aren't supported by fact or reason. They are insane.
- hyperpallium2 6y agoTFA is about power laws, and how the few contribute much for the many. These extremely prolific contribitors are outside the norm, and obsessive - or "insane", according TFA. All contribution to society follows such power laws: classical music, scientists, authors, leaders etc. Einstein, Newton, Mozart, Tolstoy. The surprise here is that social media internet contribution appears grass-roots, egalitarian and norm-representative.
- runawaybottle 6y agoYou know, I’ve watched movies my whole life and now literally have a phone that could probably record good quality video to make a documentary or a short film, with platforms to upload and get it distributed to people. I just won’t do it, but I’m not arrogant enough to call the people that do do it insane.
- thisisusername 6y agoIt reminds of just a few days ago when I checked out a Catholic forum with hundreds of comments and literally one third were by the same person who still hasn't been confirmed. One dude who hasn't gone through an essential Catholic ritual is one third of the comments on a Catholic site. That's just nuts. It's like claiming to be an expert on Mexican culture because you eat tacos.
- habosa 6y agoIs there a good estimate for what fraction of people have a mental illness (diagnosed or undiagnosed)? I bet higher than 1%
- INTPenis 6y agoA lot of people are just chasing that notification-high. Like the top youtube commenter mentioned in the OP. It's scary how addicitive it can be to receive little notifications of confirmation that you exist.
- biolurker1 6y agoIf that argument were true Trump wouldn't be president
- moralsupply 6y agoIt's not really different here in HN. Most comments on anything that isn't about pure technology have a strong political leaning (leftist for the most part, therefore authoritarian) and generally angry about the idea of people and businesses taking care of themselves without government intervention.
- krapp 6y ago>Most comments on anything that isn't about pure technology topics have a strong political leaning (leftist for the most part, therefore authoritarian) and generally angry about the idea of people and businesses taking care of themselves without government intervention. This is a good example of something else very common on HN - the attempt at a sly anti-leftist non-sequitur.
- yawaworht1978 6y agoAs this is a throwaway, I will not disclose the field I am working in, but I can say that anything out there on the web is 99-100% wrong, and the things that are shared in dearly expensive seminars are truthful, albeit a bit outdated and they like to omit 50% of the story. You truly learn when you are out there working on projects in a somewhat transparent company. There is a reason why experts in a field exist. Once companies desperately pay you to share your skills, you are building up a track record. Anything less is nothing. A good and worrying example are the many nodeJS tutorials on the matter of authentication or log in/session protocols. Good forbid if you implement that stuff in your own product. The devs posting these articles should and do know better but it seems like they are more after subscribers and revenue than anything else.
- NilsIRL 6y agoHow different is this from "real life"? Books and other non-internet media are written by a subset of the population as well.
- varjag 6y agoThe author has a point perhaps, but this Twitch streamer Tyler Blevins (Ninja) films himself playing video games for people to watch for 12 hours per day sounds not unlike any other workaholic at work. Replace 'gaming' with 'coding' and you'd hardly get anyone surprized on HN.
- taneq 6y agoEveryone here's mad except me and thee, and I have my doubts about thee...
- Cloudef 6y agohttp://n-gate.com/ http://n-gate.com/
- dukeofdoom 6y agoWell not always, some of it is written by very sophisticated people. Like Q is probably a disinformation campaign. Mixes truth with fact, with the sole purpose to put people off the right track.
- rapind 6y agoI always assumed Q was just a troll, screwing with people and laughing his / her ass off. I figured the name "Q" came from Star Trek NG. I honestly don't know much about it though (I don't pay attention to most social or mainstream media crap). Is the current thinking that it's a serious and well-funded disinformation campaign?
- monopoledance 6y agoI think the tragedy of the internet is that it could be all at the same time: started by a troll, adapted by trolls... but also lunatics and those who make a living exploiting lunatics ("content creators", "influencers", ad biz,...), and destabilization campaigns by state players. I think by now "Q" is a complex creature, with its own incentives, beyond the control of any particular fraction.
- k__ 6y agoThere are around 45k authors/writers in the US, which means not even 0,001% of the US writes books. Are these people insane? Well, you have to be bold to assume you could make a living of writing, I guess. But insane is probably a bit far fetched.
- yurielt 6y agoAnd this is quite honestly a good things. Wait before you downvote. Hear me out the current system is horrible and what it determines as insane people is a product of such system. Back in the Middle Ages when we had a different approach to mental health non neurotypical people were regarded as different, yes but not as garbage or plainly wrong just because of being odd. Instead in some cases they were even regarded as wise as a result of this. Think about alchemy for example something like that could only have been tried by very very mentally ill people and if they weren’t so at the beginning their handling of mercury sure made them crazy after a while. Modern society easily ditched the mentally ill. However they can give a lot and if that makes a couple companies in the internet mad so be it. I recommend you watch the following video on Foucault https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLwtCVTcEu-8-3urANmn5Tm6coTfl1NdQO&v=BBJTeNTZtGU https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PLwtCVTcEu-8-3urANmn5Tm6coT... it is an over simplification but it will help you understand. I also recommend reading the anti edipous from Delouse and Guatari to get an insight in how the current system hides and destroys the mentally ill in spite of how much they have given to history and humanity. The truth is without mentally ill a people society would be different and thus anti mentally ill sentiment of modernity is but a depravity as non neurotypical variations are for memes(social culture and the academia for example) what mutation is for genes
- thrower123 6y agoBlocking bluechecks is the greatest thing you can do for your own mental health.
- kelvin0 6y agoThere is a reason why so many people who have made their mark in history are deemed to be crazy kooks (at first anyways). When you start following your intuition and powers of observation (yourself, and others), you tend to diverge from mainstream views. Not to be confused with delusions and other fantasy based models.
- underdeserver 6y agoWhat does this say about commenters on HN?
- 7373737373 6y ago"You Wouldn't Get It"
- hpcjoe 6y agoWell, yes, I agree.
- anonunivgrad 6y agoNot just insane people, but also people who in real life you would immediately dismiss as losers.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoI can't actually read this because I've blocked reddit at the router.