5 ms·

"consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s" Is it just me or is that comment just a tad chi

by xd 16y ago

"consists entirely of a crude and ugly website that looks like it was sucked through a wormhole from the 1990s" Is it just me or is that comment just a tad childish? I'm finding it hard to take this guy seriously, let alone the other guy.

metachris 16y ago
That was exactly the point where I stopped reading -- upvoted.
jarin 16y ago
Yeah, just like every university website ever. Case in point: a couple of weeks ago I was building a web-based tool under contract for conducting studies for a university's psychology department. I sent them over a functional prototype with a note that I hadn't done any design work on it yet, and they were blown away. Some direct quotes: "that looks amazing." and "we love it".
tokenadult 16y ago
Making comments like that is part of the shtick http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtick http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtick of PZ Myers when he writes blog posts. Most of his conduct in writing posts on his blog would not be considered civil or decorous conduct here on HN, but he knows his biology, and his reply to the biological aspects of the recently reported claim should be taken seriously. PZ Myers also had one of the first good analyses on the Web of the claim that a different scientist affiliated with NASA had found an "arsenic-based" life form. Not so, as PZ aptly pointed out. Anyway, PZ continues in his blog post to write, "So let's look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus." He then comments that he can't even count on links to the website for the article staying valid, because of the way the website is administered, but he proceeds to analyze the content of the paper, and to find it below the usual standard of biology papers about newly discovered microorganisms. In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium. Sometimes good factual points are made with less than ideal decorum.
- waterlesscloud 16y ago
  "In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium." Even though that's precisely one of the things the author does.
  - arbitrarywords 16y ago
    PZ Myers has a fair bit of credibility. After years of helping deal with torrents of nonsense, I'm prepared to cut the guy a little slack on the snark front. Also I think the key word in "it is not always valid in either direction to judge" is "always". Would you feel wrong incorporating the fact that someone had submitted a resume in badly formatted handwriting as part of your assessment of their application?
vog 16y ago
It seems to be that you apply double standards here. On the one hand, you say that the ugliness of a website doesn't matter, it should be taken seriously nevertheless. On the other hand, you don't take an article seriously because it contains superficial statements. I mean, ranting is just another kind of ugliness, on language level instead of the graphical level. It's a bad first impression, that's all. I find it strange to apply different standards to both kinds of ugliness.
- Groxx 16y ago
  There are still major differences between the two, however. Visual ugliness is often either an intrinsic quality of something or comes from a lack of effort to improve the visual quality. Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand, are at best fallacious - they're simply illogical at their core. At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal, in a way that is both wrong and simply mean. It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.
  - archgoon 16y ago
    One of the first questions one might wonder is "If it's really poor quality, how'd it get through peer review?" This is answered by information about the journal that it was published in.
  - vog 16y ago
    > Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand [...] At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal If ranting was really extra work, it wouldn't happen so often. Ranting is actually easier than trying to convey the message objectively and fair. The differences between a first draft and good writing are editing, editing and editing. And by editing I don't mean just finding better words here and there, but also cutting out lots of irrelevant stuff and rewriting whole paragraphs for the sake of clarity. So a big text that contains lots of crap doesn't mean it was designed this way. It merely means that the "editing" phase was very short or has even been skipped. It's a sign that the author took less effort rather than more – on the perfect analogy of poor website design. > It's a net decrease of quality in every single way. I strongly disagree. You can always strip cut out these nasty (half-)sentences and see what's left. The real content of a text doesn't magically decrease just by adding some childish/insulting stuff to it.

by xd 16y ago

metachris 16y ago

That was exactly the point where I stopped reading -- upvoted.

jarin 16y ago

Yeah, just like every university website ever. Case in point: a couple of weeks ago I was building a web-based tool under contract for conducting studies for a university's psychology department. I sent them over a functional prototype with a note that I hadn't done any design work on it yet, and they were blown away. Some direct quotes: "that looks amazing." and "we love it".

tokenadult 16y ago

Making comments like that is part of the shtick http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtick http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shtick of PZ Myers when he writes blog posts. Most of his conduct in writing posts on his blog would not be considered civil or decorous conduct here on HN, but he knows his biology, and his reply to the biological aspects of the recently reported claim should be taken seriously. PZ Myers also had one of the first good analyses on the Web of the claim that a different scientist affiliated with NASA had found an "arsenic-based" life form. Not so, as PZ aptly pointed out. Anyway, PZ continues in his blog post to write, "So let's look at the paper, Fossils of Cyanobacteria in CI1 Carbonaceous Meteorites: Implications to Life on Comets, Europa, and Enceladus." He then comments that he can't even count on links to the website for the article staying valid, because of the way the website is administered, but he proceeds to analyze the content of the paper, and to find it below the usual standard of biology papers about newly discovered microorganisms. In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium. Sometimes good factual points are made with less than ideal decorum.

waterlesscloud 16y ago
"In other words, it is not always valid in either direction to judge a message by its messenger or its medium." Even though that's precisely one of the things the author does.
- arbitrarywords 16y ago
  PZ Myers has a fair bit of credibility. After years of helping deal with torrents of nonsense, I'm prepared to cut the guy a little slack on the snark front. Also I think the key word in "it is not always valid in either direction to judge" is "always". Would you feel wrong incorporating the fact that someone had submitted a resume in badly formatted handwriting as part of your assessment of their application?

vog 16y ago

It seems to be that you apply double standards here. On the one hand, you say that the ugliness of a website doesn't matter, it should be taken seriously nevertheless. On the other hand, you don't take an article seriously because it contains superficial statements. I mean, ranting is just another kind of ugliness, on language level instead of the graphical level. It's a bad first impression, that's all. I find it strange to apply different standards to both kinds of ugliness.

Groxx 16y ago
There are still major differences between the two, however. Visual ugliness is often either an intrinsic quality of something or comes from a lack of effort to improve the visual quality. Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand, are at best fallacious - they're simply illogical at their core. At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal, in a way that is both wrong and simply mean. It's a net decrease of quality in every single way.
- archgoon 16y ago
  One of the first questions one might wonder is "If it's really poor quality, how'd it get through peer review?" This is answered by information about the journal that it was published in.
- vog 16y ago
  > Ad hominem attacks, on the other hand [...] At worst they're signs of someone spending effort to decrease something else's appeal If ranting was really extra work, it wouldn't happen so often. Ranting is actually easier than trying to convey the message objectively and fair. The differences between a first draft and good writing are editing, editing and editing. And by editing I don't mean just finding better words here and there, but also cutting out lots of irrelevant stuff and rewriting whole paragraphs for the sake of clarity. So a big text that contains lots of crap doesn't mean it was designed this way. It merely means that the "editing" phase was very short or has even been skipped. It's a sign that the author took less effort rather than more – on the perfect analogy of poor website design. > It's a net decrease of quality in every single way. I strongly disagree. You can always strip cut out these nasty (half-)sentences and see what's left. The real content of a text doesn't magically decrease just by adding some childish/insulting stuff to it.