20 ms·

Please read the paper before you comment

• evolve2k 6y ago
  When I first learnt to program the thing that I really enjoyed was learning to make a terminal app that took in the users input and used it as a conditional. I’d make all these little toy apps where my family had to type in the right word to continue. Eg “Who is the leader of the autobots?” => “Well done. Transform and roll out!!” It strikes me we could encourage better discourse with one word locked comments that the writer of the post draws from the article. “New research and on the impact of race on tenure” Per the article, what % of tenured professors identify as people of color in 2019? What do you think of something like this? Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key thing’
  • burlesona 6y ago
    It’s a reasonable suggestion, but I would predict comment participation to plunge. Maybe that’s just fine?
    • sircastor 6y ago
      Yeah, you’d get an increase in quality at a loss of quantity. As you suggest, that may be the key to the discourse we’re all looking for.
      • tomrod 6y ago
        You'd get an increase in target-specific informed commentary at the loss of the hallway discussion.
      • serf 6y ago
        you lose a bit of quality, too. It might up the ratio towards quality, but you'll definitely lose some comments that the author doesn't feel like jumping through hoops to send through. example : captcha/captcha-like services. I've written well-thought out responses and comments on various forums and communities , and finally when asked to identify all the buses or traffic lights I quit the process. Why? Is it because the comment isn't worth while? Is it because some moral repositioning enticed me to not to go through with the comment? No. Clicking every bus increases friction, I may not be all that motivated to begin with -- this friction pushes me over the edge and I close the tab. The captcha/whatever process may have succeeded in the job of fighting spam, but it also lost my comment to the ether. I contend that gatekeeper systems like pop-quizzing the reader, and to an extent captcha-likes, are not necessarily a good gauge for content quality but rather of poster motivation. Captcha doesn't stop spammers, it sets the bar higher -- requiring spammers to harbor a larger motivation in order to create the systems needed to circumvent captcha-likes. A pop quiz would not hinder someone filled with vehement hate from posting a comment -- they'd skim the text, cherry pick the answer, and proceed to post the hateful or incorrect comment. A community filled with people who post due to a large motivation seems like a bad thing.
        • prawn 6y ago
          I already abort a lot of comments I've written to post on forums, Reddit, HN, etc. Sometimes multiple paragraphs of written and re-written text. Usually my thinking is "someone will inevitably misconstrue my intent and start a dispute" - the chance of that often seems higher than the chance of someone finding my comment useful. So, I figure "what's the point?" Adding a gateway, like your example with the CAPTCHA, would only reduce that chance of my posting further. But as you indicated, it is a small barrier to a motivated, angry, agenda/conspiracy-fueled commenter.
          • Waterfall 6y ago
            I agree. On certain places I just give up. That place that is complete different from your opinions? But who cares? Your comment on an echo chamber will just be deleted, ignored, you banned, downvoted at hell at best. The only places to give dissenting opinions is places where all posts have no score and are merited not by the ego of the poster but the content of the post, the anonymous places have been both the most accepting and the most toxic.
        • Waterfall 6y ago
          Just be a little smarter than the average commenter. It's not reached critical mass yet. https://github.com/dessant/buster https://github.com/dessant/buster
    • cafed00d 6y ago
      I agree. It does sound like a valuable process. However, now we've increased the burden of work on the author. It is not only the author's job to conduct research, validate and share learnings; but also their job to make sure to keep noisy commenters away. At the limit, this could lead to knowledge getting concentrated to small groups of people? :shrug:
      • vertex-four 6y ago
        In situations where this could be used and the author would have the opportunity to create and enforce the use of such a "quiz", the author (or the collective of people the author associates with) has already chosen to give the commenters a platform when they don't have to.
    • sigmaprimus 6y ago
      I like the idea, Im not sure how you could implement it on Twitter though.
    • Tossrock 6y ago
      It doesn't need to be one or the other. The quiz could be optional, and answering correctly would simply give your comments a rating boost - or inversely, you could put a badge of shame on any comments from people who hadn't passed the quiz. Then you just let the natural human dynamics play out.
      • dgb23 6y ago
        > Then you just let the natural human dynamics play out. This sentence sent a shiver down my spine for some reason.
      • smichel17 6y ago
        Does it even need to be judgemental? Sometimes I see great comments in which the author admits they only read the title (and really, are just sharing some related insight, not responding to the article. I'd be up for just having two comments sections. The hard part would be getting people to use it correctly; I'm not sure exactly what incentives would accomplish that.
      • twic 6y ago
        Just collectively hellban everyone who fails.
      • evolve2k 6y ago
        Drawing on making the quiz optional and taking some inspiration from HN. Two ideas: 1. ‘Verified’ comments sort to the top. 2. Unverified comments go 50% grey. Eg “Wait whys my comment gray? Oh actually I’ll answer that verification question to push it up”
  • aantix 6y ago
    Sounds like a job for GPT-3?
  • cortesoft 6y ago
    This feels like the old anti-piracy techniques games used in the 90s... asking specific questions along with the page number of the answer in the manual.
  • jhardy54 6y ago
    I've been considering doing something similar, except with plain CSS: a.paper ~ a.comments { display: none; } a.paper:visited ~ a.comments { display: inline; }
    • zzo38computer 6y ago
      Some users (including myself) disable the :visited command.
      • jldugger 6y ago
        Sometimes we must all make sacrifices for the greater good.
      • asveikau 6y ago
        Thinking of reasons one would want to disable that caused me to do a Google search and find this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and_the_:visited_selector https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Privacy_and... I guess it can't be observed from a script? That would be a neat way to get potentially sensitive info.
        • Polylactic_acid 6y ago
          As mentioned in the article, firefox also limits what you can actually do with the visited selector so there is no way you can use css to change something which is detectable with js so the comments hidden thing won't work.
    • chrismorgan 6y ago
      That won’t work. :visited was neutered for privacy reasons a decade or so ago, so that all you can change with it is colours, and if you try to inspect it with JavaScript it will give you the answers it would if :visited didn’t apply (e.g. it’ll tell you that purple link is blue). The closest you’ll be able to get is a JavaScript click handler on .paper revealing .comments. If you do such a thing, you should probably only hide the comments with JavaScript in the first place, so that users with JavaScript disabled can still see them.
  • jayd16 6y ago
    I can't help but think the top comment will always be the answers to the prompts.
  • madhadron 6y ago
    > Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key thing’ I have gotten good results from including these in my expository writing. Having the reader stop and go through actively using the material at even a basic level seems to really help them integrate and retain it. They're multiple choice questions embedded throughout the text. There's no reason you can't force everyone to correctly answer them before being able to comment. That being said, writing good incremental questions like this is actually quite a bit of work.
  • sebmellen 6y ago
    I adore this idea, and it's brilliant. It would get me to stop commenting on things I have no business commenting on, and make me consider whether or not I really want to read a certain article. And, of course, the more honest and balanced discourse we can have the better. This is one of the reasons I appreciate HN over other social media.
  • wruza 6y ago
    That would be fun to implement in election voting worldwide. I still don't get why you have to pass a test before driving, healing and working at your profession, but not before changing how your society works.
    • michaelt 6y ago
      Historically, societies have given a pretty shitty deal to people who can't vote, and a much better deal to people who can. After all, if you're a politician, you want to get re-elected - so appeasing voters is much more important than appeasing people who can't vote. And appeasing demographics where 90% of people can vote is more important than appeasing demographics where 50% of people can vote. So any type of testing to be allowed to vote - high school graduation, reading, IQ, current affairs - would be quite detrimental to the people who don't get to vote.
      • wruza 6y ago
        I'm not saying that you have to be cool and smart to vote. Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease <xyz> in their program to be sure that a voter is able to at least read and understand the damn booklet before putting their [V] into the bin. But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0. That would be fair — you didn't care to inform your decision, so it doesn't count as much as one's who did.
        • michaelt 6y ago
          > But a problem that you described could be addressed by counting invalid votes as 0.5 instead of 0. Unfortunately that doesn't solve the problem - because spending money in the town with lots of people with a full vote will produce more votes than spending the same amount of money in the town with lots of people with half a vote. > Just ask them how much percent a candidate is going to increase/decrease <xyz> in their program Everyone knows whether they feel happier, healthier, more successful, and whether they've got more money in their pocket today than they had 4 years ago. Why is a candidate's policy on tariff rates on steel imports from Canada more important than that?
• baddox 6y ago
  > Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad. The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper itself is a primary source. If you want to know what the paper’s about, you gotta read the paper! And what about this article, which is about the tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release?
  • GavinMcG 6y ago
    It's about discourse, not the paper, so it would likely tell you to read the paper.
  • alextheparrot 6y ago
    I know this isn’t a serious comment, but given he actually read the paper the shortest path from the paper to the author isn’t through that route
  • samatman 6y ago
    I'll freely admit that the article about the tweets dunking on the press release for the paper, is as much as I'll ever want to know about this particular kerfuffle.
• sigmaprimus 6y ago
  I read your rant, so I'll comment on that. It is generally good practice to put your name or pseudonym on things that you write. I am assuming your nane is Wayne. While I do agree with most of your points, your article reads more like a soccer mom scolding a teenage referee for not calling that obvious foul on her star child. Twitter trolls do suck, I just think you have taken this particular incident far to personal. So how about adding another caveat and fill us in on how you are realted to one or all of the three authors?
• renewiltord 6y ago
  I used to be upset about this. But now I just use a chrome extension to ban people who have clearly not read the article. It just kills any comment thread they start. My HN is much more useful now. My Twitter is fine because I only follow people who don't do this.
  • striking 6y ago
    Which extension?
    • wittyreference 6y ago
      And is it available for Firefox?
      • renewiltord 6y ago
        Not as far as I know, but he's really big on the "increase SNR" thing so I could ask him to write it.
        • breakfastduck 6y ago
          +1 for interest in something like this for firefox. If anyone knows anything else similar then I would like to know about it
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      It's my friend's. https://www.overmod.org https://www.overmod.org
  • aeternum 6y ago
    This does not seem possible technically unless you own facebook's ad network.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      Perhaps they just find people who don't read articles and marks them permanently.
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it Once upon a time, there were two main characters on Twitter in a single day: two escaped Llamas and a dress. And it was actually not a bad thing. Maybe we could try repeating that occasionally instead of accepting that it's a lousy world full of lousy people and that's all it will ever be.
• fouc 6y ago
  > I have about as much ignorance of these domains as all the people mocking the paper on Twitter. But there’s one big difference between me and them: I actually read the paper. All of this information is on the first page. Even if you don’t know about sci-hub, you could still read the abstract and check out the researcher bios! Nobody read the paper before dunking on it. Nobody read the abstract either. About half the people yelling at this paper had only read the press release. The other half hadn’t even done that. They had only read tweets about the press release. This is a real problem. I'm guilty of not bothering to read the paper many times. I instantly look for the easily digestible reviews or comments that other people made. I'm part of the problem. Damn.
  • andykx 6y ago
    Without wishing to downplay the fact that this is a major issue, it’s hard to read scientific literature from a field you haven’t previously studied. Layman summaries are a great way to get a sense of what the paper is actually saying, though summaries made by random commenters are unreliable.
    • cxr 6y ago
      Many papers in general are just not well written, even if the subject is interesting. I wish it were seen as a social requirement that if you publish a paper, then you accompany it with a blog post—even if it's the only thing on your blog. With multiple authors, each author would write their own blog post. I'd rather read three different takes on the same subject, generally, than to slog through any given paper even once. Sprinkle in the not-minor accessibility problems around the tendency to publish exclusively in PDF, and there are good reasons to seek out a digest instead of looking through the real thing. Heck, most abstracts verge on being almost unreadable, for that matter.
      • mzl 6y ago
        While there are reasonably good reasons that most scientific articles are in PDF format (way too much work to change), I heartily agree with writing blog posts on articles. I started doing this: the effort (once you have somewhere to publish it) is negligible compared with the amount of effort of writing a paper, and it is also quite fun to be able to write more free-form text on the subject.
• unobtaniumstool 6y ago
  Reminds me of that dustup about Netflix the other day. Woman of color makes a semi-biographical movie about her experience with the dangers of oversexualizing children on social media. Reddit, having only seen the poster: Netflix is pedos!
• sghiassy 6y ago
  I didn’t click the link. Here’s a comment :)
• hardwaregeek 6y ago
  I've thought about this with respect to sources. I was reading a book which mentioned Emile Durkheim's work. I have never read any Durkheim. I cannot speak to Durkheim's points nor whether the author accurately represented them. What's even worse is that if I did read Durkheim, he'd probably discuss someone before him. And I wouldn't know if he accurately represented that person's points. I'm not sure if the author who referenced Durkheim has read the people who Durkheim cites^[1], so I'm not sure if they know either. We have this game of telephone where we all cite these sources and people rarely, if ever check. And this is in academic literature where publishing happens pretty slowly! In Twitter it's easy to reach a source chain of 5-6 deep in days, let alone months. [1]: They probably have but I can't say.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement, follower count, retweets, and likes. In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something. Likewise, that's how I try to structure my own engagement. When people have 50 Tweets per day or more, it's unlikely that they're taking time to really think and engage. It's more about rapid fire comments designed to get the most engagement.
  • Covzire 6y ago
    So you're saying we need a platform with both characters/post and post/day limits?! I mean... that's beautiful, because I created a second twitter account just so I can follow a select few people for the pretty much the same reason you gave without having to worry they're getting lost to the noise.
    • rgoulter 6y ago
      If the guiding rule from GP was "the best people to follow on Twitter are the people who don't use Twitter much" or "who only use Twitter to share what happens elsewhere", I don't think a rate limit would really help to satisfy that.
    • 0_____0 6y ago
      If you build those limits into the system then you lose some of your ability to filter for people who would naturally post below those limits.
      • foerbert 6y ago
        You don't have to do it so simply as X posts/day. You can give some kind of 'influence points' per account or whatever that get automatically spread between posts. Tune it so at X/day each post is neutral, while more frequent become penalized and less frequent get a boost. There are probably better ways to do it, but this should get the idea across.
• peterwwillis 6y ago
  Twitter is a machine for removing intelligence from communication
• irjustin 6y ago
  I appreciate the author's rant. It touches on the larger problem of the 'telephone game'[0] in media, news, youtube, twitter. Syndication of syndications of summaries of abstracts of research. Any abstraction or simplification runs into the risk of having its underlying meaning changed. It is our duty as humans to be willing to chase the core of truths or to change our minds given new evidence pointing to truths. It was said well in Hamilton - "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers Also, i hate that it's called Chinese Whispers... I digress.
  • bewuethr 6y ago
    This reminds me of "The Science News Cycle": http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
  • dgellow 6y ago
    > Also, i hate that it's called Chinese Whispers... I digress. Small detail: We call it “téléphone arabe” in French, which means Arabic phone.
• mherdeg 6y ago
  As a rule of thumb, I try not to quote from media unless I have seen the whole book/story/article/movie myself and am sure I understand the quotation in context. Part of that comes from the kind of frustration Hillel Wayne voices here: > People will offhand use famous quotes to support their arguments, when the context the quote was given in has nothing to do with it. I spent a lot of hours in high school debate listening to people misattribute quotes or misconstrue them to mean the opposite. This was frustrating at the time but in retrospect this was a valuable lesson -- if EVERYONE is gonna say that Voltaire said that thing about disagreeing with what you say, what else is everyone wrong about? I'm also pretty sure I had this idea reinforced by an Asimov book where he argues that intellectual societies decay as they begin to rely on secondary-source research (going to the library and reading what people have written about others' experiences, instead of going out there yourself and looking at stuff). But I can't find the source now, ha ha.
  • chrisdirkis 6y ago
    This is a thing I've been pondering recently, and I don't have the same takeaway as you. My thought is: The context doesn't always matter, and a quotation can mean different things in different contexts, and that's not a bad thing. For example, with the Knuth quote, both interpretations can be valuable? There are people who need to be told "don't optimise yet", and there are people who need to be told "there are critical times and places to optimise, and you probably shouldn't just breeze past a 12% execution time improvement". Neither of these lessons are "wrong". The main wrong thing is probably attributing the intent of the first to Knuth, which uses his status as an expert to (falsely) back it. I think Scott Alexander from SSC wrote something about opposite pieces of advice (eg. telling college nerds to "get out more" and telling college partygoers to "buckle down and study more", because neither of those can be universal pieces of advice), but I don't feel like searching for it rn. It's a good read though.
    • kelnos 6y ago
      I guess it depends on the purpose of using a quotation. My belief is that most people cite a quotation when arguing something as an appeal to authority. "Knuth says don't optimize at all, so we shouldn't do it either." In that case, I think understanding the context is key: if you use someone's words to back up your point, but that's not actually what they meant, then context does matter. Yes, it's true that different people might need to hear different things at different times. If you're trying to tell someone not to micro-optimize ahead of time before profiling, then quoting Knuth is appropriate. If you're trying to tell someone not to optimize at all (let's say you have a valid reason for not optimizing at all), then its disingenuous (or at best ignorant) to use the Knuth quote.
• drivebycomment 6y ago
  I mean, this applies to many of the discussions on HN too. I've noticed that there's so many people getting the facts around the topic completely wrong, and quite a few will push some simplistic narrative or long-standing grievances, instead of the relevant point which often is subtle and nuanced. I suppose that's just being human.
  • wutwutwutwut 6y ago
    It's not just getting the facts wrong, it's often about them misunderstanding the topic entirely because they didn't bother to read. I don't think it's about being human, I think it's because HN is a BBS where people can get points by chatting, which also happens to link to articles which you can read if you feel like it. Of course this is how it ends up.
    • lmm 6y ago
      People play the game according to the rules they're given. In the early days when HN was more caustic, you got more points by reading the articles and posting accurate facts. But in the dang era where comments are required to be nice and calling people out is discouraged, you get more points by rushing to post something plausible-sounding and vaguely related to the headline. So people do that instead, unsurprisingly.
      • 082349872349872 6y ago
        It's news to me that the goal of HN is getting more points. I'd always thought it was about getting more bits.
      • Kednicma 6y ago
        Indeed, the rules are slanted to give bad-faith word-salad as much of an advantage as possible. Even the site's layout is hostile to correcting those posts; in addition to the rules prohibiting us pointing out that the article doesn't say what they claim (because we cannot directly imply that they did not read), the formatting of quoted text is messed up and ugly and distracting. On this current account, I don't really care about overall karma, just per-post karma. I try to post simple but defensible points when I get early top-level timing, and I put effort into upvoting people that I agree with rather than adding on yeah-me-too posts for more karma. But I'm punished for not playing by the rules of the game; I can't downvote or vouch or any other useful features, so (-1, flagged) is a common fate. In the design circles that I frequent, we often consider Conway's Law for social communities. The API of HN, including the rules, generates the shape of the conversations. The shittiness of discourse here is inherently due to the low-quality rules just as much as the lack of meta-moderation.
• thesagan 6y ago
  People read the headline. The small words beneath it are there for the headline to rest upon. Sometimes a picture also rests on the small text. That small text is pretty useful. When I worked at a newspaper a lot of work went into headlines and pictures, in relation to the rest of the copy. We knew what we were doing, and we also knew what are readers weren't doing.
• stevenalowe 6y ago
  no - the title is not compelling, and the paper is paywalled.
• aaron695 6y ago
  > Every time a press release gets popular on Twitter or Hacker News or Reddit or whatever, nobody actually reads the primary source. First question are we commenting on the media article or the research paper? It'd be interesting to have a site were to comment or vote you have to mark if you read the article and separately if you read the paper.
• cgrealy 6y ago
  Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns. https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lots-of-risk-ambiguity https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lot... About halfway through a one-page article was this quote. "If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below. We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it first." Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned bananas. Read the paper? You're lucky if they read the article
  • cm2187 6y ago
    Hence the way journalists love to misinform people: a headline and first paragraph that pushes their bias and narrative, while the facts that completely mitigate if not contradict the start of the article are buried somewhere in the middle. How to lie without lying, better than a legal footnote.
    • gmac 6y ago
      This is exactly what I’ve noticed lately. Is it a known/named phenomenon? Do you have a reference?
      • martin_a 6y ago
        > Is it a known/named phenomenon? I think it's just called "journalism" these days. I find it hard to find publications without clickbaity stuff like this.
        • pbhjpbhj 6y ago
          I'd say it's marketing/business rather than journalism, the journalism takes something of a back seat - like the role of music in hit factories.
          • cm2187 6y ago
            It's not wrong, but I do not see it used only for clickbaits. It is also largely used to push political opinions. And these are editorial decisions.
• bfung 6y ago
  RTFD, ‘nuff said. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=RTFD https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=RTFD
• wbobeirne 6y ago
  For anyone who wants to see this in action, refer to this front page post from a few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23885684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23885684 First read the article, then read the comments, and spot who didn't read the article. You may have to scroll down / go to the more section, as the people who are way off base didn't get upvoted as much as the ones who actually read it.
• tssva 6y ago
  From the title this seems to be a violation of HN guidelines. "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article."
  • wittyreference 6y ago
    I wish the addendum to that rule was “because we will just delete their post anyway.” The lowest value contributions on HN are inevitably those that use a headline to air personal grievances vaguely related to the subject of the post (“Apple releases new cure for diabetes”, top comment: “Let me tell you why I hate the touchbar.”) the second lowest are those that clearly read the headline and ran with it, without reading the content that utterly contradicts what they imagine the article would contain. Not having read the article / not discussing anything in the darn article should absolutely be grounds for criticism.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      Hey, can I tell you about how Firefox uses too much of my battery and is made by Mozilla Foundation who I will never donate to in a million years and why the person who gave me my last whiteboard interview probably clubs seals? Oh, you're telling me the article was about performance improvements in IonMonkey and how in-person interviews overwhelmingly fail to pick African American applicants? Drives me mad. Any Hacker News discussion has an extremely strong push towards the same couple dozen topics that anyone can relate to, and commenters who drag the conversation in that direction for no good reason are doing the thread a disservice.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    • twic 6y ago
      Surely the lowest of the low are "why is this on the front page?"?
    • krapp 6y ago
      I wish Hacker News would remove that rule and replace it with two: 1) Please read the article before you comment. 2) If you haven't read the article, please refrain from commenting. It wouldn't accomplish much, but it will at least prioritize engagement over politeness, as the current rule does. And yes, both of those are the same thing but I feel it's worth mentioning twice.
• xupybd 6y ago
  This is true of most news. Headlines claim something crazy, the article has some nuances and clears up the click bait confusion. Then people read the headline without reading the article. Then they form a world view accordingly.
• JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
  The problem is people want their internet points. If you take the time to read, and then comment, your comment won't get enough visibility on all social media platforms, especially if dozens or hundreds of other comments quickly begin appearing. You have to 'show up early' to get visibility. Optimizing for that dopamine hit, users choose to maximize points over thoughtful discussion.
  • alex7o 6y ago
    Yes they do that, however sometimes I feel like nobody will read your comment (opinion) if you post too late. And the competitive thing to do in that case is to try to be first to comment if possible, and when people who don't read the article are always first you are kind of forced to comment without reading the article too.
  • kelnos 6y ago
    It would be interesting to see if hiding all points would change things significantly. That is, you wouldn't even be able to see the point count for your own comments.
• nextlevelwizard 6y ago
  This also goes the other way. Someone who people think of as a thought leader or a science communicator says something that seems reasonable, but is not actually based on any science gets amplified and soon if you even dare to ask for evidence you are painted as "the enemy" and "russian bot" for daring to think on your own and actually request papers on the matter. Then people will start linking you papers that are only tangentially related to the question at hand and get offended when you actually go and read the paper and point out that the paper has (almost) nothing to do with the actual question at hand.
• 12xo 6y ago
  People are lazy. Our entire economy if based on this fact.
• halotrope 6y ago
  You don’t need to read anything. Just parse the headline and comment with some tangential personal anecdote or a vaguely provocative statement about the likely conclusion of the text.
• ColoradoDev 6y ago
  > Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. I had to have a conversation with my wife over this yesterday. She ran into the office in tears because opposing protestors were standing off with guns as if it was the American revolution. The reality of the situation is a couple people had paintball guns but that’s not what she saw. What she had seen was a tweet about a tweet referencing another tweet that in turn referenced a video. While I know this example is extreme, it really opened my eyes to just how far we have come.
• master_yoda_1 6y ago
  This is everywhere. I have to deal with lots of jokers at work, who just suggest to use GPT-3 without understanding what it is :)
• neilwilson 6y ago
  You get the same when people cry "peer-review" without actually understanding what peer-review actually means. Once you dig into it, you find it is far from the last word in validation in a modern world and very often an argumentum ad verecundiam As explained, in depth, in "Why I don't publish in Peer-Reviewed Journals". https://risk-monger.com/2020/07/31/why-i-dont-publish-in-peer-reviewed-journals/ https://risk-monger.com/2020/07/31/why-i-dont-publish-in-pee... Please read the article before commenting....
  • WA 6y ago
    Read it. And read more from the blog. Certainly some truth to this, but the blog is a great example why peer review actually matters. The article itself is a bit of a straw man: one example of a bad peer review dismisses the whole process. Other articles are similar. For example one talks about how "green parties want 100% safety", which simply isn’t true. Some are click bait like "if there is no Corona vaccine, how about we ask anti-vaxxers how to deal with this?" And gives some generic advice that every doctor also says while neglecting that the core argument of anti-vaxxers often goes like "vaccine is bad for you and you actually should contract a virus because it makes you stronger in a natural way". Stopped reading after having found too many of these fake arguments in several posts.
• habosa 6y ago
  Is there a way I can see Hacker News comments alongside the article with a chrome extension or something? I normally click to the comments here first for tab management purposes (comments contain a link to the article but reverse is not true) but I know that's a bad pattern.
• rendall 6y ago
  Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and, unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so I looked into it. The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly, illustrated how it was mathematically possible for 2+2 to sometimes be 5. The argument may have been weak, and some people may not have found it convincing, but it was a mathematical argument, meant as a joke for a small Twitter audience. Through the Twitter telephone, many retweets and steps later, the original argument - considered, funny, valid, perhaps weak - somehow transformed into "2+2=4 is a mere social construct, and 5 is a valid answer" - which, yes, would be a disturbing trend if that were actually the argument. Thus the unduly passionate took up "2+2 is 4 not 5" as a political rallying cry. People I otherwise respect as rational began tweeting this. It became complicated because there are always people who believe dumb things, like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct", and as always with the unduly passionate, extreme opinions are held up as examples of dangerously typical. The author of the original thread was bullied by a mob. It's complicated even further by the existence of an actual replication crisis in academe, in part driven by post-modern ideological pressures; there is actual loss of academic freedom even for the tenured. But the lesson at the end of the day, to my mind, is that articles about whatever goes on over at Twitter, such as this one, such as this my post here, are always going to involve mobs of people being shitty, because the nature of the medium. Maybe they are as inevitable as "mobs of people are gambling in Las Vegas"
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    Lesson is don’t joke or use sarcasm or hyperbole on the internet because you are begging to be maliciously misunderstood.
    • tokai 6y ago
      On the contrary - use jokes and sarcasm to root out posers, trolls, and ideologues.
    • vsareto 6y ago
• neiman 6y ago
  This points a difference between Internet public discussions an private interactions discussions. In private interactions, either chatting or RL, I quote "facts" without references, discuss papers I never read, and in general do things just for the act of communication, knowing I'm often wrong, and knowing the other side knows to take me with a grain of salt. However, in public discussions you can't afford this liberty. Stating a wrong fact in a public discussion may cause a diffusion of false information which is almost impossible to undo. I think most people are aware of this difference, and even in the academy the accuracy required in private conversation is not as harsh as the accuracy required in a public forum. The problem is that for many people, Internet discussions feel like a private conversation. Hence I see even people I highly appreciate throwing the accuracy standard out of the window, and making public Internet comments as if it was a pub conversation over a drink with some friends.
• necovek 6y ago
  I think a better exercise is to ignore (it's hard, I know) those who haven't obviously read the paper/article: it's not like they'll read your reply either. And sometimes (usually?), people will truly not understand what a paper is about, and that makes it even harder to figure out which comment is which.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  Good luck with that. For the record, I did read the article, but my life is not significantly richer (or poorer) for having done so. A classic technique for reading scientific papers, is to read the abstract, then the conclusion. If they motivate us to read the rest, then we do so. What I often do here, is first check the comments, and see if I want to go and read the OP. If I do that, I’ll generally read it all; unless it’s really painful. As a prolix author[0] (and commenter[1]), I’m fairly familiar with low reader engagement, and I’ve learned to do good abstracts/intro sentences that hook the reader. I’ve also learned not to lose too much sleep over whether or not people read my stuff (spoiler: they don’t). I write for my own satisfaction. It would be nice if others enjoyed it, but I won’t live or die by the opinions of others. Don’t get me wrong; I do care what others think of me, but it isn’t a principal driver of my life. I have great respect for good tech writers. The world needs more of them. A lot of what I write is basic information. It needs to be complete, clear and concise; not great literature. A simple ToC is useful in these cases, and good information architecture is important. If I really want others to read my stuff, it’s incumbent upon me to write short, brutally-edited, articles, with clear, succinct, paragraphs, “hooky” abstracts, and conclusions that encourage people to go back, and read what they missed. Basically, my experience is that it’s my job to write stuff in a way that encourages reader engagement, and to lead them to the important components of the document. [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/ [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisMarshallNY https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisMarshallNY
  • bagacrap 6y ago
    Abstract and conclusion are useful for quickly determining what the authors want the takeaway to be, so they're better than journalism which can misconstrue even that. But the problem with reading just the abstract and conclusion is that you don't learn the methods the scientists used. Lots of science is junk due to bad methodology. Of course laypersons are not likely able to determine that even if they read the whole thing, which leaves me to conclude that you should never modify your world view in response to a scientific publication until many credible sources all say the same thing.
    • 6y ago
• FeepingCreature 6y ago
  Yeah I'm gonna go subscribe to the journal for €100 a year before I comment... Right.
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    Well then don’t comment. How were you commenting without reading?
    • FeepingCreature 6y ago
      Ah, that's why the post is titled "Please don't comment."
  • Confusion 6y ago
    Ironically, you obviously didn't read the OP, as it clearly mentions people could at least bother to read the, free, abstract.
    • FeepingCreature 6y ago
      Sure, once, and for the rest of the article pretends reading the whole thing is easy. I don't see the title being "Read the abstract before you comment." edit: Didn't see the Scihub link admittedly, but come on. "Yeah just do the illegal thing."
  • breakfastduck 6y ago
    It's actually kind of beautiful to see an organic example of the behavior that the article quite rightly criticizes happening on the sharing of said article. Out of interest, how many lines even of the article did you read before you decided to post this? Because it can't be many.
    • FeepingCreature 6y ago
      Oyeah, didn't see the sci-hub reference. It says something about the sad state of affairs that the universally agreed answer here seems to be "yeah just pirate it, nobody cares, everyone does it."
• harsh3195 6y ago
  Does it make sense to have a service that checks whether people have read the article before talking about it in the comments section? Could be done by some js, I presume. I mean, it obviously won't work in case people share it on twitter, but could reduce people from talking bullshit in the comments section.
• TheUndead96 6y ago
  Didn't read the paper, but I agree completely.
• ratel 6y ago
  Expecting people to make meaningful even informed comments in an arena that is in no way suitable to the information your sending is not a failure of the receivers or the commenters. It is a failure of the sender. Asking people to invest their time to actually read extensive information about what your try to say, with no perceived additional benefits to them is just hubris. Pick your audience or tailor your message to your audience. Don't blame the receiver.
• timwaagh 6y ago
  From what I hear twitter has become one of the more 'basic' social networks. the 140 characters force you to write quick sound-bite opinions without any nuance. Anonymity makes sure your opinions do not follow you around. I quit a long time ago.
• kobayashimaru 6y ago
  no
• Traster 6y ago
  Whilst I sympathize with why this person is ranting, I find it kind of funny. People act the way they do on social media due to a mix of the design of social media, and human nature. It's not complete chance that twitter has an entire underclass of people who just yell vitriol at the blue checkmark brigade. It's not chance that reddit divides itself into lots of echo-chambers that are essentially repeating the same handful of opinions in various different colours (in reddit's defence this can be avoided using extremely hands-on moderation). Fundamentally, there aren't too many people who can meaningfully comment on most papers. The alternative to commenting before reading the paper is almost certainly reading the paper and then not commenting because you don't really have much to add. So let's assume some people do start reading the articles? Well, they're just going to say less. There's a thousand ways to have an easy and wrong take on a paper. If you want good reasoned discussion about papers you're better off looking elsewhere - for example, The Weeds podcast from Vox, where they actually take a white paper, read it, think about it and discuss its implications. You can disagree with them and talk about how effective they are at engaging with the topic (or as is often the case you can get irrationally angry because you don't like their politics), but fundamentally it's a much better venue for having that sort of nuanced and informed discussion than 140 characters at a time mixed in with the sewer that is twitter.
• whereistimbo 6y ago
  sci-hub? are there any other legal way? open access or bust for me.
• patatino 6y ago
  Most people just want to express their opinions and not really learn anything or truly discuss it. I accepted that life is a lot easier that way
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• segmondy 6y ago
  Folks are accustomed to arguing off twitter tweets, why should we expect them to read articles?
• jandrusk 6y ago
  Perhaps they should check the grammar on their article before they post it: "They also do a literature review of existing work in word meanings, making in very clear they were building on the existing work in anthropology and linguistics. " :)
• fortran77 6y ago
  One of the HN rules, though, is to not accuse someone of not having read the article. Of course, few people read the articles here. (A lot of the posts are people complaining that a linked source is subscription only, then going on to comment based on the title!)
• cmehdy 6y ago
  I wonder how many of the comments here right now have been written/discussed without having read the article.
• nwsm 6y ago
  Twitter is much worse than HN or Reddit about this. The author hits the nail on the head that Twitter in any news- or article-sharing context is about dunking on headlines. Read the headline, tweet a one-liner reply or quote. I don't think users are entirely to blame; this is what the app incentivizes. So for Twitter I don't think there's much hope in asking people to read articles. It's like wondering why people aren't reading your 8 paragraph Instagram caption- that's not why people use the app, and the app does not encourage using it in that way. However I do empathize with authors who dedicate years of their life on academic work, only to have someone post it to Twitter with a 1 sentence jab and that be the most common level of familiarity with the work their "readers" have.
• Noos 6y ago
  It's amazing how much the author lacks self-reflection. If there was no misunderstanding, would he have even bothered to read or even know about the paper at all? The bad use of the paper was probably his primary driver of engagement. Otherwise at best you would see the source or original tweet, think "Oh that's nice" unless you have a serious interest in linguistics, and move on. The darkly cynical thing is that as the flood of information grows, the value of that information lessens as opposed to its ability to create a happening and drive engagement. You can say the sky is blue all you want, and it's true, but people will mill about the person who says the sky is green because they can interact with it, if just to disprove or mock the person and use it as a "gathering place" like the author himself did. I mean, this is how flat earthers exist. The idea is rubbish but it creates a space that people inhabit.
• yashap 6y ago
  I feel sorry for the postdoc here. You have a seemingly decent paper, but the press release really doesn’t do it justice. For reference, the Tweet about the press release https://twitter.com/princeton/status/1296779082663964673?s=21 https://twitter.com/princeton/status/1296779082663964673?s=2... vs the paper https://sci-hub.tw/downloads/2020-08-10/f1/10.1038@s41562-020-0924-8.pdf https://sci-hub.tw/downloads/2020-08-10/f1/10.1038@s41562-02... The press release DOES have a very “machine learning ‘discovers’ trivial thing people already knew” vibe. The actual paper doesn’t - it’s not trying to “rediscover” anything, it’s just building on existing work, there’s none of the arrogance in the press release that’s triggering everyone on Twitter. The press release taints the actual research, which is a sadly common pattern, and I think a fair bit of that lies with the writers of press releases, not just the readers.
• goto11 6y ago
  Tangential I know, but how is the Knuth quote misunderstood? I have only ever seen it interpreted as you should only optimize for performance when you know a section of code is performance critical. Which is typically only the case for small parts of the code (3% according to Knuth).
• IncRnd 6y ago
  The article's page had a terrible viewing experience. With js turned off, visiting the page shows content split across 12 columns with a single row that took up just a quarter of the screen's real estate. Given all this, and the nondescriptive title, I was not about to turn on js.
• jdkee 6y ago
  Here is an example by a professor of history at Harvard misinterpreting 0.1% of ER visits for young adults as 61%. https://copinthehood.com/2020/07/26/history-isnt-bunk-part-1/ https://copinthehood.com/2020/07/26/history-isnt-bunk-part-1...
• vfclists 6y ago
  This sounds like mainstream media vs James Damore
• nojvek 6y ago
  > Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad. The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper itself is a primary source. If you want to know what the paper’s about, you gotta read the paper! This a 100%. Applies the same for code.
• rjkennedy98 6y ago
  This is a good article and it would be great if people felt an obligation read the source papers more, but the nature of sensationalist journalism and gamified social media means in all practicality they never will. The journalist gets views by writing stories that fit into an emotional narrative regardless of the actual facts. Social media gives users reinforcement for telling people what they want to hear. That echo chamber drowns out everything else. There is almost no room for nuance anymore.