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aargh, the confusion presented by this headline is infuriating and is a continues problem in how we present science to the general populace. "just a theory" is

aargh, the confusion presented by this headline is infuriating and is a continues problem in how we present science to the general populace. "just a theory" is imply meaningless in the scientific method. What is the theory of gravitation just a theory?

dang 5y ago
Please don't react to the most objectionable aspect of a title. We can always change the title. I've done so now. What we want are reflective responses to content, not reflexive reactions to surface bits.
- ghaff 5y ago
  But it was the headline of the NYT article. While the history presented in the book review is interesting, it also seems relevant that a headline in the "paper of record" mischaracterizes what a theory is. Which is relevant in this case because "It's just a theory" trivializes that theory in a lot of popular discourse.
  - dang 5y ago
    You're giving the headline writers too much credit. They want clicks. It's their job to sex up the titles, our job to deflate them, and commenters' job not to take the bait. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22sex%20up%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... A large part of what HN is about is training ourselves as a community to respond to the interesting bits in a story and leave the provocative bits. That's a fancier way of saying what I just said about not taking bait. If you think about it, it's really a multi-year—or rather multi-decade—community project, for us to learn together not to be driven crazy by gimmicky shit. No doubt gimmicky shit has always been with us, but the quantity of it that we all encounter in the internet era is orders of magnitude greater, so if we want to have a culture of interesting conversation, we don't really have a choice.
Kranar 5y ago
I think the whole argument over the definition of theory is overblown. Sure there's a group of people who use "theory" to mean some unconfirmed hypothesis as a way to discredit the theory of natural selection in favor of creationism. This is hardly a matter of confusion for the general public nor is it a particularly big deal. There is no singular "theory of gravitation", there are multiple theories of gravitation and they are just that, theories. Some are meaningless (like the theory that gravity is due to the earth and every physical object growing in size), some are useful for every day uses, like gravity is some kind of force whose charge is mass and whose strength decreases with the square of the distance, and some theories are very accurate but very hard or impractical to work with, like gravity is due to some sort of 4 dimensional space-time curvature. All of those are just theories, they have various pros and cons and use cases and problems to varying degrees. I don't think this is a problem for most people to understand.

dang 5y ago

Please don't react to the most objectionable aspect of a title. We can always change the title. I've done so now. What we want are reflective responses to content, not reflexive reactions to surface bits.

ghaff 5y ago
But it was the headline of the NYT article. While the history presented in the book review is interesting, it also seems relevant that a headline in the "paper of record" mischaracterizes what a theory is. Which is relevant in this case because "It's just a theory" trivializes that theory in a lot of popular discourse.
- dang 5y ago
  You're giving the headline writers too much credit. They want clicks. It's their job to sex up the titles, our job to deflate them, and commenters' job not to take the bait. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20%22sex%20up%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... A large part of what HN is about is training ourselves as a community to respond to the interesting bits in a story and leave the provocative bits. That's a fancier way of saying what I just said about not taking bait. If you think about it, it's really a multi-year—or rather multi-decade—community project, for us to learn together not to be driven crazy by gimmicky shit. No doubt gimmicky shit has always been with us, but the quantity of it that we all encounter in the internet era is orders of magnitude greater, so if we want to have a culture of interesting conversation, we don't really have a choice.

Kranar 5y ago

I think the whole argument over the definition of theory is overblown. Sure there's a group of people who use "theory" to mean some unconfirmed hypothesis as a way to discredit the theory of natural selection in favor of creationism. This is hardly a matter of confusion for the general public nor is it a particularly big deal. There is no singular "theory of gravitation", there are multiple theories of gravitation and they are just that, theories. Some are meaningless (like the theory that gravity is due to the earth and every physical object growing in size), some are useful for every day uses, like gravity is some kind of force whose charge is mass and whose strength decreases with the square of the distance, and some theories are very accurate but very hard or impractical to work with, like gravity is due to some sort of 4 dimensional space-time curvature. All of those are just theories, they have various pros and cons and use cases and problems to varying degrees. I don't think this is a problem for most people to understand.