5 ms·

I would if I could find it, but I've been thinking I might need to create it myself. You make it sound like it's just my opinion. That's not what I'm talking ab

I would if I could find it, but I've been thinking I might need to create it myself. You make it sound like it's just my opinion. That's not what I'm talking about at all. I'm saying that I would prefer if people upvoted good science rather than spammy press releases. Is that too much to ask?

dang 11y ago
Given human nature, that probably is too much to ask for stories in fields where the community has a low density of specialists. Excessive claims about, say, computing are less likely to be entertained here, simply because HN has lots of users who know about computing. We see the same thing with big news stories: often a sensational splash with tons of upvotes and comments is followed a few days later by a follow-up showing how the original story was wrong, but going largely un-noticed. I don't think it's too much to ask, though, for substantive articles reporting debunkings and refutations to get their share of attention. We just emailed you a repost invite for the one on deep brain stimulation, and I hope you'll continue to post those as you find them. It is a valuable service to the community. Btw, any time you (or anyone) know of a particularly good article that fell through the cracks, you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can send a repost invite or put it in the second-chance pool. Some of the most interesting and popular links that have appeared on HN recently have been rescued from oblivion this way, so there's evidence that it works. We'll probably eventually add a feature to HN for people to nominate stories for a second chance this way.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  Thanks, got it. Yes, it would be good to have a prominent mechanism to request a second-chance for a good article, although I can imagine it could be prone to either abuse or a lot of work on your end.
  - dang 11y ago
    That's why we still have some design thinking to do. :) By the way, we just put this into the second-chance pool for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10678573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10678573.
philh 11y ago
This particular submission is not a spammy press release. It's an actual paper published in an actual journal. Your refutation is another paper which found contradictory results - that doesn't mean this paper is bad science, even if it's wrong.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  It's a 45 year old hypothesis that was mostly disproven over a decade ago and then rehashed 2 years ago. It certainly isn't newsworthy, and the title is way overblown.
  - philh 11y ago
    That may be, but it's not obvious from the link, and it's not clear to me that it would have been easy to discover. "Don't pay attention to things that aren't true" doesn't work as a heuristic. "Don't pay attention to press releases" does, but it wouldn't have caught this. Can you suggest a heuristic that would have rejected this without requiring prior background knowledge or significant effort, and would have a low false positive rate? Basically, even if this is bad science, it looks superficially like good science. "HN users paying attention to obviously bad science" seems like a substantially different problem from "HN users paying attention to superficially good science that happens to be bad".

dang 11y ago

Given human nature, that probably is too much to ask for stories in fields where the community has a low density of specialists. Excessive claims about, say, computing are less likely to be entertained here, simply because HN has lots of users who know about computing. We see the same thing with big news stories: often a sensational splash with tons of upvotes and comments is followed a few days later by a follow-up showing how the original story was wrong, but going largely un-noticed. I don't think it's too much to ask, though, for substantive articles reporting debunkings and refutations to get their share of attention. We just emailed you a repost invite for the one on deep brain stimulation, and I hope you'll continue to post those as you find them. It is a valuable service to the community. Btw, any time you (or anyone) know of a particularly good article that fell through the cracks, you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can send a repost invite or put it in the second-chance pool. Some of the most interesting and popular links that have appeared on HN recently have been rescued from oblivion this way, so there's evidence that it works. We'll probably eventually add a feature to HN for people to nominate stories for a second chance this way.

cpncrunch 11y ago
Thanks, got it. Yes, it would be good to have a prominent mechanism to request a second-chance for a good article, although I can imagine it could be prone to either abuse or a lot of work on your end.
- dang 11y ago
  That's why we still have some design thinking to do. :) By the way, we just put this into the second-chance pool for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10678573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10678573.

philh 11y ago

This particular submission is not a spammy press release. It's an actual paper published in an actual journal. Your refutation is another paper which found contradictory results - that doesn't mean this paper is bad science, even if it's wrong.

cpncrunch 11y ago
It's a 45 year old hypothesis that was mostly disproven over a decade ago and then rehashed 2 years ago. It certainly isn't newsworthy, and the title is way overblown.
- philh 11y ago
  That may be, but it's not obvious from the link, and it's not clear to me that it would have been easy to discover. "Don't pay attention to things that aren't true" doesn't work as a heuristic. "Don't pay attention to press releases" does, but it wouldn't have caught this. Can you suggest a heuristic that would have rejected this without requiring prior background knowledge or significant effort, and would have a low false positive rate? Basically, even if this is bad science, it looks superficially like good science. "HN users paying attention to obviously bad science" seems like a substantially different problem from "HN users paying attention to superficially good science that happens to be bad".