>Makes me wonder how much faith I should put in comments on topics where I don't know as much.
Despite murmurings to the contrary hn is no different from any other social media site that doesn't curate content. The fact that the denizens are techies or whatever doesn't supervene that fundamental fact. So the answer here is you should trust comments on hn just as much as you trust comments on Facebook.
As another funded academic in an area that comes up very frequently here (deep learning), personally I use hn as a link aggregator for interesting content and pay very little attention to the discussion.
Despite murmurings to the contrary hn is no different from any other social media site that doesn't curate content. The fact that the denizens are techies or whatever doesn't supervene that fundamental fact. So the answer here is you should trust comments on hn just as much as you trust comments on Facebook.
As another funded academic in an area that comes up very frequently here (deep learning), personally I use hn as a link aggregator for interesting content and pay very little attention to the discussion.