Comment by chimeracoder

> IMO HN actually scores quite highly in terms of health/politics and so forth content because the both mainstream and fringe ideas get both shown and pushback.

As someone with domain expertise here, I wholeheartedly disagree. HN is very bad at percolating accurate information about topics outside its wheelhouse, like clinical medicine, public health, or the natural sciences. It is also, simultaneously, extremely prone to overestimating its own collective competency at understanding technical knowledge outside its domain. In tandem, those two make for a rather dangerous combination.

Anytime I see a post about a topic within my area of specialty, I know to expect articulate, lengthy, and completely misguided or inaccurate comments dominating the discussion. It's enough of a problem that trying to wade in and correct them is a losing battle; I rarely even bother these days.

It's kind of funny that XKCD #793[0] is written about physicists, because the effect is way worse with software engineers.

[0] https://xkcd.com/793/