Comment by hogFeast

> HN tends to attract people from an educational/professional background that encourages critical thinking.

I couldn't disagree more.

HN is one of the few places where you will get people who have no idea about a topic expounding at length on that topic. The psychology of this place is fascinating.

It is unrelated to education and, for some people, education is deleterious. Engineering is, in my experience, definitely one of the worst subjects for teaching false confidence. I worked in finance, sometimes client-facing, and worked a lot with individual investors in a business I started...any kind of engineering background was a red flag because, time after time, they rarely accepted the limits of their knowledge (doctors is another one, I don't think anyone who has met a doctor would dispute this either). Engineering backgrounds also seem to the cornerstone of most modern authoritarian states (the CCP and Singapore's fetish for engineers as an example).

So learning critical thinking is something that is totally distinct from attending university or even the job you do. People who are totally ignorant of something are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge. Not always, they are probably more prone to irrational or emotional reasoning but, again, I don't think critical thinking is something that can be taught in every case.

On the original post, I think people believe that it is difficult to have conversations about politics because of the behaviour of a small minority of people. In some online places that minority is very large. And in many communities, moderation is also aimed at limiting disagreement. The result is inevitable. HN has the community it moderates for.