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A Moment in the Life of an HN Genius: 1. Reads a technical document outside their domain. 2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts
by jancsika 6y ago
A Moment in the Life of an HN Genius:
1. Reads a technical document outside their domain.
2. Feels dumb because they don't have a grasp on any of the concepts.
3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost.
4. Sees the word "manipulation"
5. Substitutes the laymen's definition of "manipulation"
6. Builds a fantasy World of Wall Street from first principles around that definition
7. Argues their fantasy first-principles Wall Street against other participants' fantasy first-principles Wall Street
8. Everyone leaves sync'd on the fantasy of feeling smarter than when they arrived.
- TLightful 6y agoTL/DR: You're a HN Genius. Appreciate your generosity.
- johnfn 6y agoCan we not write posts like this? The air of superiority without actually offering any insight doesn't contribute to interesting discussion.
- loljeffbee 6y agoThat’s Step 9: lament posts that shatter the shared fantasy as disruptive to the forum.
- sidlls 6y agoThat is pretty accurate even for many software and tech related discussions here (it’s a big field with lots of specialties).
- nvarsj 6y agoYes, it's a reductionist argument that can apply to literally anything. Let's just delete all user discussions on the internet, and only allow PhD granted experts to discuss things on panels where they must provide primary sources for everything. Or you could simply point out when someone is wrong, and explain why, assuming you are an expert. Then we all learn.
- philosopher1234 6y agoYou could interpret it as an insightful observation rather than an argument to delete all comments.
- Armisael16 6y ago> Or you could simply point out when someone is wrong, and explain why, assuming you are an expert. Then we all learn. That’s pretty rare in online discussion, especially the kind with voting. The most popular argument wins, not the most correct one.
- nvarsj 6y agoYeah you're not wrong. I think HN is pretty good here though - we do have genuine experts (on tech) that correct people. That's why I value HN so much - I learn a lot even when I make stupid, wrong comments.
- sidlls 6y agoI didn’t mean to imply anything about who should be permitted to post or the subject matter of posts. My apologies that it came across that way. I simply meant it as an observation. I could explain, as you suggest, and so could other experts. In my experience the likelihood of a response with denials, shifting goalposts or similar is much higher than an acknowledgement and gratitude for education. I’ll pass, but others might enjoy the challenge.
- esoterica 6y agoWe shouldn't make fun of people for not knowing things, but it's perfectly okay to make fun of people for being narcissistic enough to think they are experts on a topic and arguing fervently based on their shallow and distorted understanding of the topic and hand when they are clearly not.
- egwor 6y agoI think it would be helpful if folk highlighted when they don't know an area and are not experts. I think this is a better way to do it because it is clear that the person is trying to learn rather than spouting nonsense. Also, it takes a lot of effort to correct people, and when emotions are high this is a painful process. The RH post was a great example of this. I've commented on some of the RH posts and got downvoted because people didn't like the facts (and I think maybe took it personally too). I've worked in Finance long enough professionally to know that I don't understand this fully and few people do. I do know enough to know when the comments are nonsense though. I think that some of these issues comes down to respect and also arrogance. Imagine going into a new field and after 30 seconds deciding that you know everything (the Dunning–Kruger effect?)! Have a little bit of respect for those in the field and listen. Feel free to comment/ask, but don't spout 'facts' without checking and I think we'd all move forward faster.
- hatsunearu 6y agoAnd then there's another guy writing smug 8-point steps! Truly the pinnacle of hacker news culture.
- christiansakai 6y agoAnd then there's another guy who will comment on the comment of guy writing smug 8-points step! internet karma wohoow!
- iamacyborg 6y agoChoo choo.
- wizzwizz4 6y agoIs it dang time?
- notahacker 6y agotbh I thought I'd have to go to n-gate to get this take on recent discussions...
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYou're fined for violating the Prime Directive! That said, when I saw that top comment I thought for a second I've confused the domains, this sounded like something taken straight from there.
- listless 6y agoHonestly disappointing that trolling is the top comment here. This is the kind of thing that we should hold each other above doing.
- hatsunearu 6y agoThe comment isn't without substance but yeah, could have had better delivery
- kodah 6y agoPersonally, I think smart people just do this. When I got sick with COVID I cannot begin to describe the number of people who became doctors during this unprecedented time, only to send me outdated comments, articles, and speculation. All of these people thought they were smarter than the instruction I received from a real doctor, nurse practitioner, and the CDC. These were smart people, though, and mostly (but not limited to) highly educated engineers.
- robntheh00d 6y agoSympathetic response is a thing. One has to balance that with awareness they’re talking out their ass.
- Tenoke 6y agoI saw plenty of smart people ahead of institutions and real doctors on masks and to some extents other aspects of the pandemic. Yes, in general if you don't know much on a topic you'd on average do best if you listen to the experts but you can outperform that if you can identify the right kind of smart people with a good track record.
- nemo44x 6y ago"Right kind of people" have no accountability to their advice. A doctor can't really just hazard a guess without actual facts to base them in or risk losing their ability to practice and/or reputation. "Right kind of people" can be and are often plenty wrong about things but it fades into obscurity and they are never held accountable. Of course they are right sometimes but on many issues with a binary choice (should or shouldn't wear masks) that's a 50% chance. In the long run you want to be able to discern hearsay, opinion, and rumors from facts and accountability to them. You see it today when inquiring if a pregnant woman should get the vaccine. Doctors won't really advise you because although they maybe feel it's totally safe if you're far enough along, they would be held accountable if something happened. They can be "pretty sure" about things, but that isn't enough. Meanwhile, "very smart person" on Twitter can reference a bunch of content from unaccountable people that says it's safe and come off as an expert when they aren't. It's easy to be "right" when you don't have skin in the game and especially so when no one is going to hold you to account for all the times you were wrong or misinformed.
- temp8964 6y agoYeah. Common sense no longer makes sense. Let me write a technical document stating how killing half of population is justified, but it is not for laymen to understand.
- vntok 6y agoDepends on whether your document's field is microbiology and "population" commonly refers to lethal viruses that we want eradicated, or it is sociology and population specifically refers to humans. Which is exactly the parent's point. Don't assume words mean the exact same thing from one field to another.
- germinalphrase 6y agoNatural human behavior that smart people fall into just as easily as anyone else. Go read any HN thread on airplanes, education, or war...
- titzer 6y agoCongrats, you hit the Smarty's Catch 22--thinking you found the error in the smart people's oversimplified reasoning with oversimplified reasoning and then throwing stones. /ducks
- dang 6y agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That just makes this place even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tompccs 6y agoI am so sick of this 'stay in your lane' attitude. Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market. You're welcome to your opinion but this appeal to authority is seriously wearing thin. Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, and even that might not last forever (I remember the smugness with which Stephen Wolfram is routinely dismissed from having non-consensus views of physics). Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!
- xapata 6y agoI think bullets 3 and 5 were the main point of that comment. It wasn't well-said, but it is in fact valuable to spend a moment to get familiar with the jargon a person is using, even if that jargon happens to have homonyms with a different field's jargon. That effort is what allows us to "swim out of our lanes" as you might say.
- tompccs 6y agoFair enough, it's more the condescending attitude that rubs me up the wrong way. And if the words regulators use mean to them different things than they mean to everyone else (the people whom the regulations are ostensibly supposed to protect), that's probably interesting in itself! If you are charged with 'theft' under a law that defines 'theft' in a very different way to how you or your peers would define it, that's probably going to be a problem. So I'm all for a discussion on what the jargon actually means, if anyone has any insights beyond making general snipes at the HN community.
- oasisbob 6y agoTheft is a pretty good example, actually. In many US states, the legal definition of "assault" is much different than the battery most people picture. Robbery is not larceny. Burglary is not larceny. Your peers probably don't know what robbery actually is.
- dalbasal 6y agoTrue (and funny) but, there's a lot of actual learning happening too. Nothing like limit testing to understand a system.
- kibwen 6y agoIn general it's good for people to be more aware of the fact that, outside of a few narrow technical domains, HN users are no less foolish, uninformed, and irrational as you those will find anywhere else on the internet. Source: HN expert, to my continual shame.
- klodolph 6y ago> 3. Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build to magically render learning materials to the screen in front of them at zero marginal cost. I will say that I’m not too busy for this at the moment, and getting to my very basic level of understanding has required me to sort through, at the very least, a fairly decent chunk of reference material and reading interpretations and explanations online. Like, here’s some things I’ve been grappling with understanding recently: How do settlement risk, clearing brokers, and clearinghouses work? Why does buying an ordinary stock carry so much settlement risk? Why do market makers buy stock for delta hedging? How do they figure out how much stock to buy? To make an analogy, it feels like I’m some kid in chemistry class who just learned how to draw bond diagrams, and then I watch a video of someone talking about how they figured out the structure of some chemical using Raman spectroscopy.
- alexpotato 6y agoSo maybe I can help a little with the above: - prior the 1980s, when you bought a stock a physical stock certificate was passed back and forth between your broker and the broker selling the stock - as you can imagine, as trading volumes increased this became unmanageable. In fact, at one point, the exchanges would close every Wednesday just to give people time to catch up on all of the exchange of certificates - everyone, rightly, agreed that there needed to be a better way and the idea of a clearing house emerged. In this model, all of the physical certificates lived in one place. Ownership was tracked via a central "database" (originally not electronic). This made it MUCH easier to transfer ownership aka "settle". This is very similar to how gold is traded e.g. the NY Fed holds it for other countries etc - An added benefit of a clearing house: it's easy to see how much everyone owns of everything. e.g. if one party is over leveraged or has gone extremely short, in theory, the clearing house can choose to not deal with that party or, more flexibly, request additional capital etc. Here is also a specific example about settlement risk: - let's say you report all of your trades to your clearing broker (think of them as a mini-clearinghouse) - a data file gets lost or corrupted and the clearing broker says "Wait! Something is wrong! We are not letting you trade until we get this figured out!" - EVEN IF YOU ARE CORRECT and they are wrong, you now have market risk because you may be holding a position that is losing you money. So much money in fact that it might drive you out of business. The above is an actual answer to a settlement expert when asked "What is your nightmare scenario?". This in turn, could have ripple effects to other clearing brokers and trading firms and is generally all part of "settlement" or "clearing' risk. Source: have worked in fintech trading for many years.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> 6. Builds a fantasy World of [X] from first principles around that definition That is most every online discussion these days. I would only add "first principals learned at highschool and/or undergrad". The real scientists/lawyers/doctors with deep backgrounds in fields, the ones who dare to talk online, stand out like sore thumbs.
- Flott 6y agoI get the point. They way it's delivered is just so passive agressive.
- SirSavary 6y agoSeems like you struck a nerve. I'm impressed by how many people are replying to this, quoting your points, and then talking about those points as if they were addressed directly at them. When did HN become overrun by narcissists?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoYou say "narcissists", I say I'm tired of seeing people shutting down anyone who uses their brain to try and comprehend the facts - and god forbid they know some math and are capable of formal reasoning. This approach is just teaching people to repeat memes after pundits and not use their brain - instead of teaching them to work on better reasoning skills, and applying these skills to the problems they face, while accounting for their lack of expertise. Discussions should be about arguments, not people's authority. If you see someone being wrong and you know better because you've studied the field for longer, point out the flaws in their arguments, offer corrections, but embrace that they're at least trying for understanding, instead of condemning them.
- beaconstudios 6y agoI totally agree that merit of arguments should be earned by the argument, but on HN there's an awful lot of bad arguments posited in terms of "I think it probably works THIS way based on how I imagined up the entire industry in my head" that then go on to try to make a "hoho those stupid industry insiders, they didn't see solution X" point on said completely imaginary model. IE, not very rigorous models being used overconfidently. Closely related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThe arguments posited in terms of "I think it probably works THIS way ..." are arguably the best ones - they qualify someone's lack of expertise and save the reader from assigning undue confidence to claims :). That said, Internet discussions are run on Cunningham's Law - you say what you think you know, and others will call your errors out, or challenge your assumptions. As long as people don't read any single comment as gospel, but consider the whole discussion in context of their own knowledge, applying basic critical thinking, everyone gets to train their reasoning skills and learn something. I'd expect this to be a baseline on HN. I'm confident being the protagonist of that XKCD is a rite of passage in this industry :).
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- cblconfederate 6y agoIt's because "ze nerds" have rebuilt multiple industries that were "too hard to understand", because they work bottom-up, from first principles and reject gatekeepers. They 've even created an entire substitute version of the 'conomy which currently most people are mocking, but soon will be using daily.
- bcrosby95 6y agoSo, the HN "Genius" is just like most other people on the internet? I think the problem isn't with the HN "Genius", it's you expecting people on HN to not behave like people. Stop putting STEM workers on a pedestal. We're still just people. Like everyone else.
- young_unixer 6y ago> Builds a fantasy World of Wall Street from first principles around that definition Haven't politicians and regulators been doing the same thing for ever? Can't a normal person challenge that? Why should we blindly follow the narrative of the politicians and regulators?
- cambalache 6y ago> Too busy to use the very internet which some of them probably helped build I didnt know Vincent Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee et al were HN users.
- at-fates-hands 6y agoI have to admit, this wasn't me to a tee, but I did initially believe manipulation of any kind - whether you do so to push the price up or down is illegal. My basis for this was from several friends who have been financial planners for 10+ years and two have lived off day trading for more than 15 years. Then I had a few people tell me, "Nope, its called a "short squeeze" and totally legal. Then I had to go back and do some research on how short squeezes work. Then I found several instances where this had happened, just not nearly as public because of social media. The small amount of research opened my eyes to the fact even though something may seem illegal, in the finance world, there's a lot of gray areas and details most people will never know about until something like this happens.
- twblalock 6y agoThe flood of articles about this topic hitting the front page, and the flood of comments on those articles full of conspiratorial thinking, have been surprising. Even during the election, the controversy following the election, and the Capitol riot, the front page didn't get taken over by a flood of articles. Something is different this time. It was not good. I hope it won't happen again. The moderators on this site do great work, and I'm sure this caught them by surprise and they did their best. I hope a controversy like the one that happened with WSB and Robin Hood in the past few days will not be able to take over this site to such an extent again.
- mancerayder 6y agoYour criteria for moderating/censorship is that the post suggests a conspiracy? Are you not worried the scope might be wider than intended and the net cast snag ideas tagged as conspiracies that aren't or are later discovered to not be? Or is the criteria that it's a negative and implicates mainstream institutions? I'm asking an honest question in good faith because I'm nervous at people conflating fringe ideas and extremist ideology with merely non mainstream ideas or suggestions.
- twblalock 6y agoThere were quite a few stories about this on the front page (many of which were duplicates), and a frenzy of posters positing conspiracy theories in the comments to those posts -- stuff like accusing Robin Hood of being paid off by hedge funds, general conspiracies about market manipulation and rigging, and trolls posting WSB-style content. If I want to see a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories there are plenty of other places to go. HN is not supposed to be the kind of site where that happens. Somehow the norms that prevented that from happening before on this site, even during times of extreme political controversy, have been broken.
- mancerayder 6y agoI don't think it was that bad. Also, do you have a better option?
- bigsteve90 6y agoYou got a good point. SV types like HM tend to be textbook examples of Dunning-Kruger in action. 1. Read Wikipedia on another field 2. Decide, based on that knowledge, that the field is “ripe for disruption” 3. Usually fail miserably if parasitic ad tech isn’t the core business model Even politicians show more humility than these people. It’s as if typing into a computer makes them think they are omniscient high priests. Most of them even have the gall to call themselves engineers. We don’t call machinists engineers, and most programmers are digital machinists.
- DataWorker 6y agoWhen someone tells you not to believe what you read on the internet, on the internet.
- Chris2048 6y ago> Builds a fantasy World of Wall Street from first principles or what experts call "a model"
- glitchc 6y agoI don’t know where this perspective comes from. Reading the SEC note suggests that they are actively investigating or looking to actively investigate to see if there was market manipulation. No conclusions made as of yet. When the market wildly diverges from steady state operations, this is an entirely reasonable thing for the SEC to do. An unstable market hurts the average person far more than a stable one.
- Nasrudith 6y agoYeah it is essentially just a boilerplate post that just says "We heard and are looking into it" essentially. It will probably be months to years after the event for them to conclude who if anyone rose to the level of illicit market manipulation or other offenses and who would be responsible. Robinhood was at risk of being fined by the SEC for their infamous infamous leverage glitch as opposed to the users. (Not sure if it ended in a real fine as the media lost interest post patch.)
- whateveracct 6y agomy favorite topics this gets applied to are physics and rocket science. it's amazing how many HN physics comments start with "my theory"
- leothecool 6y agoDo you have any metrics to back this up? Or is this your own fantasy you've built up...
- bart_spoon 6y agoYou are both constructing a strawman and appealing to authority. Are you going for fallacy Bingo?
- esoterica 6y agoNumber 2 is obviously false, a HN commenter would never have enough self-awareness to feel dumb.
- literallyWTF 6y agoThis is absolutely perfect.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago"let's not discuss anything because we aren't experts or even amateurs in _____________. HN discussion is therefore useless and I declare the site be taken down immediately, post haste"
- JKCalhoun 6y agoCynical? Thoughtful people who have been on this planet for decades build up a world view based on the countless examples of actors on the world stage behaving the way that they do. A single article or internet search is not how we are informed.
- dang 6y ago"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." "Be kind. Don't be snarky." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you know more than others, that's wonderful. Please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn. None of what you wrote here helps anyone learn—it just puts others down, makes you sound supercilious, and makes the community worse. A comment like this stuck at the top of a thread, letting off fumes and polluting the environment with meta nastiness, is one of the worst things that can happen on HN. No one intends it to happen—I'm sure you had no such intention, nor did the upvoters, but it's the default that we co-create on the internet unless we consciously do otherwise. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you just pour acid on stuff that you scorn, it may get heavily upvoted because everyone is feeling anger and scorning others is a way to relieve that feeling—but you can't pour acid without pouring it on the commons, which is extremely fragile. By getting upvoted, the damage you cause is amplified 1000x. People posting here need to take care of the commons, the same way none of us would pour toxins into a mountain lake, leave campfires burning in a dry forest, or litter in a city park. I totally get how frustrating, nay maddening it is when others are wrong and ignorant on the internet and self-satisfied about it. But being a good citizen on HN means learning to tolerate the pressure and metabolize the irritation this activates in you. Then you can come back to the commons with a response that builds it up—for example with interesting, relevant information—rather than tearing it further apart. Our brains are hard-wired to weight painful impressions—like internet comments that seem dumb or wrong—much more heavily than pleasurable ones, like comments we agree with. This makes it feel like HN is dominated by wrongness and dumbness and meanness to a greater extent than it actually is. We all need to become more aware of this mechanism (especially by observing our own reactions more closely) so we don't destroy this place by making the mistake of feeling like it's already been destroyed. The truth is that it's hovering precariously in between. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=demons%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098