> the people involved have a clear sense of what they do and don't know.
As someone who has, on more than one occasion, called out top-posts that were flat-out wrong, but conformed to HN's biases (I was 100% certain of this because the posts concerned either my area of expertise or my first-hand experiences) - I will disagree with you. The occasions made me wonder about the other HN posts where I'm not an expert.
HN isn't anywhere near as free of the usual human love of gossip, valuing social pecking order over objective facts, etc as it imagines itself to be.
But it's a little like that saying about democracy being "the worst thing ever -- except for everything else". In spite of HNs serious delusions about how objective etc it is, it still remains vastly more objective, rational etc than anything else I've found.
As someone who has, on more than one occasion, called out top-posts that were flat-out wrong, but conformed to HN's biases (I was 100% certain of this because the posts concerned either my area of expertise or my first-hand experiences) - I will disagree with you. The occasions made me wonder about the other HN posts where I'm not an expert.