I totally agree that merit of arguments should be earned by the argument, but on HN there's an awful lot of bad arguments posited in terms of "I think it probably works THIS way based on how I imagined up the entire industry in my head" that then go on to try to make a "hoho those stupid industry insiders, they didn't see solution X" point on said completely imaginary model. IE, not very rigorous models being used overconfidently.
> "I think it probably works THIS way based on how I imagined up the entire industry in my head"
That's how every opinion anyone's ever had works. Everyone has a mental model, which they use to understand the world. If you have a problem with the specifics, address them. Otherwise, you are simply appealing to authority.
Of course. But there's a difference between studying or being involved in an industry to formulate your model and being confident in that, and being confident in pure conjecture. Mental models are great and they're really all we have to understand the world, but they should be based in some kind of observation.
The arguments posited in terms of "I think it probably works THIS way ..." are arguably the best ones - they qualify someone's lack of expertise and save the reader from assigning undue confidence to claims :).
That said, Internet discussions are run on Cunningham's Law - you say what you think you know, and others will call your errors out, or challenge your assumptions. As long as people don't read any single comment as gospel, but consider the whole discussion in context of their own knowledge, applying basic critical thinking, everyone gets to train their reasoning skills and learn something. I'd expect this to be a baseline on HN.
I'm confident being the protagonist of that XKCD is a rite of passage in this industry :).
I think that there's a real problem with people using 'Cunningham's Law' as a way to learn. It might be fine for that person (because they know their limits), but then anyone reading it could incorrectly quote that person as being right (because it wasn't corrected). These ideas are then duplicated and we get into a real mess where we can't differentiate widely held views vs the experts/most agreed upon view by experts.
In general, this can't be a way to move forward as a society if people just make stuff up.
Closely related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/