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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 cont
by 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 agoIt'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 agoThat 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".