For filtering opinions in areas I"m unfamiliar, I don't have a best approach—though I'd love to hear one. One thing I've done which has been helpful is to try

For filtering opinions in areas I"m unfamiliar, I don't have a best approach—though I'd love to hear one. One thing I've done which has been helpful is to try my best to be conscious of my relative level of expertise, and to treat opinions as interesting places to begin research. A plausible sounding theory from an "expert" in a comment isn't inherently factual, but provides me a good jumping off point to research the topic if I'm curious. As a corollary to this, I also do my best to be conscious of this relative level of expertise when sharing any information I might've gleaned from an HN thread with others.