4 ms·
I disagree, but I really believe he didn't do it intentionally. He was ridiculing the MSM and the people who jumped on the bandwagon without doing any analysis.
by SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I disagree, but I really believe he didn't do it intentionally. He was ridiculing the MSM and the people who jumped on the bandwagon without doing any analysis.
Unfortunately, nobody will see it that way. People will see it as him/her attacking Aidan Dwyer (the boy who did the experiment). He doesn't help his case by never referring to Aidan by name, instead using a fairly pejorative sounding "the kid.
If Aiden was my kid, I would try not to let him read the article, though I would explain the article and what went wrong within a teaching framework that included pointing out when other scientists did similar thing (don't know any off the top of my head, but I've no doubt the stories are out there).
It is sad, too, because this article needed to be written, but instead of writing it to help Aiden succeed in spite of the fanfare, the author has likely hurt Aiden. There is every reason to tell kids they are wrong when they are wrong, but there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways to do it. This was inappropriate.
Finally, I've flagged this submission. Since the author took down the original, it is obvious he is rethinking whether the article was a good idea. Yes, the internet is forever, but people's wishes should count for something.
- DevX101 15y agoWith the wide media coverage this article received, it's fair to say at least 100,000 people saw the headline or read the article. Most of these people took the 'discovery' at face value. It's conceivable that a tech writer at CNN, New York Times, or some other more mainstream news outlet was getting ready to hit the send button to their editor. This post was credible, timely, and well reasoned. Whether he had second thoughts or not, I think the good done by combating misinformation outweighs whatever reason he had for taking down the article. Though I would have preferred to have linked to the original post.
- raganwald 15y agoI agree with flagging a post that was taken down voluntarily. If the greater good is served by debunking the article, people can publish their own posts debunking the kid's findings based on their own expertise.
- AJ007 15y ago13 years old is old enough to take a dose of reality. Science isn't about people's feelings. I can think of more than a handful of science fair projects that other kids have done, with incorrect results, that win the grade school science fair due to judges who have zero qualification. That multiple major tech news sites picked this up goes a long way in saying what the qualifications are of those who run those sites. As for the story itself, I know nothing about solar power and little about electrical circuits. However, when I saw the picture of the thing I couldn't help but laughing.
- ugh 15y agoTone matters. You shouldn't lie but you also shouldn't be tone-deaf.
- dereg 15y agoTone matters for rhetorical persuasion. The only tone I desire from a scientific piece is the truth.
- jtheory 15y agoThis wasn't only a "scientific piece" -- his stated reason for writing the post was to make a comment on the MSM -- and certainly it wasn't targeted only at scientific readers. Anyone (like me) who read the commentary about the media, and mostly skimmed over the exhaustive detail on why the experiment was broken, was reading primarily an opinion piece, and certainly tone matters in that context. I don't agree that tone "only matters for rhetorical persuasion" in the first place (or perhaps I disagree with the idea that rhetorical persuasion isn't always playing a role in scientific writing) -- but that's a larger discussion.
- ugh 15y agoTurth has nothing to do with tone. And if you don’t care about tone I don’t want to work with you on anything. Scientists are humans, too.
- alttag 15y ago