Comment by tptacek
1 year ago
There's a lot of expertise about COVID here! The problem is, in a variational autoencoder discussion, that's mostly all there is, and in COVID threads there is lots of energy from non-COVID experts.
This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is. That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
>This isn't complicated. You can just look at any COVID thread and see what a shitshow it is.
I hardly see any covid threads here. I happened to see the one of this week. It got 8 comments before being flagged into oblivion.
>That's not for lack of COVID expertise, though most of that expertise is probably Homer-melding-backwards-into-the-hedges when they see the thread.
You cannot have it both ways. Either you flag covid threads preemptively [1] along with a bunch of other users [2], or you try to learn from domain experts in these threads.
But making assumptions about what these experts would have thought of these threads, had they not been flagged down prematurely, is a weird leap of reasoning.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232084
Sometimes the signal to noise ratio is so bad that I can't blame the experts for no longer engaging and/or me disengaging before I encounter an expert steering the discussion towards more fertile grounds