A fun thing I've noticed among HN and HN-adjacent crowds (e.g. the rationalist movement) is - and I'm sorry to be disparaging here - this fetishizing of some of the worst and most boring aspects of science: opaque, always serious and long-winded writing, an obsession with citations and links ("do you have evidence to back this up?"), mindless statistics even if they don't make sense, trudging through bibliography and literature, and so on. I get that the intentions are noble (of course assertions need to be backed up, of course statistics are essential, and so on) but the end result is that arguing on HN feels like passive-aggressively LARPing as scientists, but not with any of the good stuff.
Actual discussions between scientists are much more lively: either both participants know the literature so no one bothers with citations and we try to directly jump to the key insights using our and other people's intuitions; one side knows the relevant literature and one does not (happens often in collaborations) and blindly trusts the former; both sides don't now anything (happens often in bars and conference cocktails) and just speculate wildly without any seriousness or defensiveness.
The writing part (with all the seriousness, opaqueness and citation overload) is utterly boring and mindless drudgery: I know very few people who actually take pleasure reading or writing papers, and the few ones that do are considered weird.
> Actual discussions between scientists are much more lively
This only works because the people are vetted. Almost everyone on HN is a rando and randos had better be able to back their assertions up. Otherwise you just end up spending all your time humouring crazy people.
But a scientific article is not an exercise in argumentation. The main purpose of citations is to guide readers who are new to the field, give credit to readers who are experienced in the field (indeed, many criticisms of an introduction or discussion from reviewers amount to "wtf you didn't cite that paper I wrote"), or contrast with previous results. It's not "here's why I'm right" but "here's how existing stuff relates to what I've found". The tone is much less assertive. Scientists are not a very assertive bunch in general.
I agree with the nature of your premise, but I think two sides share blame here. Part of the reason you see requests for citation/evidence is because there are common rhetorical points, often rooted in ideology or politics, that are simply untrue or misleading, which also isn't as much of a problem between actual scientists who are highly informed and are discussing in (reasonably) good faith.
It's been interesting the past few years to see this same stereotyped critique of HN coming up over and over. The consistency of certain aspects recurring together in them is interesting to me. Here's a few I've noticed:
1) They tend to at least in part be rooted in a problematic stereotype of the 'toxic HN reader,' which is inappropriately generalized to cover the entire community. The stereotype is generally of a rationalist bro/"man child" who thinks he (choice of gender intentional) is much smarter than he really is, with no comprehension of his privilege in society, or any awareness of the arts and humanities, with poor social skills, etc.
> "...the end result is that arguing on HN feels like passive-aggressively LARPing as scientists, but not with any of the good stuff."
Observe the key ingredients: generalizes to all of HN not just to certain users, implication that readers are insecure scientist-wannabes, implication of stunted growth (the choice of "LARPing" here is characteristic), poor social skills, and lack of taste ("but not with any of the good stuff").
2) The critique ends up being vacuous because any online community of sufficient size is going to have negative aspects to it. This fact leads to a necessary reading style where you seek out the best stuff among the less good stuff. I view it like panning for gold, filtering out a bunch of dirt in the process. I think most people are aware it's necessary to use sites like HN in this way.
Once you consider that, the critique starts to sound a little funny: it doesn't make much sense sense to characterize a large online community by its most boring parts if those parts are easily skipped over in accessing the interesting parts. So what's the critique really about?
3) The other aspect almost always present is that they're structured to make HN a foil for the speaker's own intelligence and enlightenment—and even more importantly, it's often used as a shibboleth to communicate that one is part of the group who has transcended HN.
Spend some time in certain Twitter circles (often made up of accomplished developers and/or researchers) and you'll see that this is so common it's developed abbreviations and can be communicated almost with something like a wink or a nod: snide comments disparaging HN can be tossed out in just about any context for a laugh and shared feeling of superiority.
It's interesting though because I've also noticed the critiques tend to have defensive roots: oftentimes the critic produced something that was not well-received by HN, at which point they become aware of all its problems.
In any case—it's a pattern I think HN readers should be aware of. The parent comment, for instance, is much more insult than substantive critique if you look closely—and yet it was the top comment on the article.
Actual discussions between scientists are much more lively: either both participants know the literature so no one bothers with citations and we try to directly jump to the key insights using our and other people's intuitions; one side knows the relevant literature and one does not (happens often in collaborations) and blindly trusts the former; both sides don't now anything (happens often in bars and conference cocktails) and just speculate wildly without any seriousness or defensiveness.
The writing part (with all the seriousness, opaqueness and citation overload) is utterly boring and mindless drudgery: I know very few people who actually take pleasure reading or writing papers, and the few ones that do are considered weird.