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I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment. Well, I don't understand _why_ you choose to comment. The study itself identifies, acknowledges and presents som

I'm sorry, but I don't understand your comment. Well, I don't understand _why_ you choose to comment. The study itself identifies, acknowledges and presents some major limitations. It does not hide them. It's not like the study was concocted in some content factory in the Balkans, to make a couple of quick bucks on Facebook or whatever. The authors are very serious researchers and the study itself was supported by funds from prestigious organizations (that you can find in the "Acknowledgements" section). It does my head in why would you choose to cast aspersions on the science method. It's literally an example of science done by the book, published in a peer reviewed magazine. It's not amateur work, it's not fake news. It's ground breaking science: "We found this interesting thing and here we present it to you, with caveats, after some other people in the field did a quick sanity check on it". I'm sorry for the tone, but I'm quite exasperated by people doing this kind of low key, subtle, disparaging of science under the guise of scepticism. It always happens when studies are posted on HN (or reddit), people seem to find a perverse joy in finding weird gotchas that the study already mentions and then saying: see, science is such a mess.

mjburgess 5y ago
Err.. people actually posted in this section creduously thinking that sunlight would extend their life. The study spends 2/3rds of the time ignoring the obvious analysis which is already established -- this is common in journalism. The title is "what if?", the article spends most of the time imagining what-if, and then at the end says "probably not". why i chose to comment is that people do not weight parts of articles evenly, the read what they want to read into things. It is the responsibility of honest communication to make the most plausible conclusion the easiest to infer, and the least plausible, the hardest. If you want to think this study shows that more sunlight = more life, you should have to do a lot of cognitive work to get to that mumbojumbo. This paper does the opposite. It toes the line of dishonesty, making deeply implausible pseudo-science an easy conclusion to infer.

mjburgess 5y ago

Err.. people actually posted in this section creduously thinking that sunlight would extend their life. The study spends 2/3rds of the time ignoring the obvious analysis which is already established -- this is common in journalism. The title is "what if?", the article spends most of the time imagining what-if, and then at the end says "probably not". why i chose to comment is that people do not weight parts of articles evenly, the read what they want to read into things. It is the responsibility of honest communication to make the most plausible conclusion the easiest to infer, and the least plausible, the hardest. If you want to think this study shows that more sunlight = more life, you should have to do a lot of cognitive work to get to that mumbojumbo. This paper does the opposite. It toes the line of dishonesty, making deeply implausible pseudo-science an easy conclusion to infer.