5 ms·

But we need an alex jones style headline to get in on the click bait... If this wasn't nature.com I would give it a free pass and shrug that "huh, everyone els

by rob_c 4y ago

But we need an alex jones style headline to get in on the click bait... If this wasn't nature.com I would give it a free pass and shrug that "huh, everyone else is doing it", but really.... 'C'MON!!!

ChefboyOG 4y ago
I'm pretty critical of click-bait headlines in what are supposed to be more academic journals, but I don't get the frustration with this one. 'Families' is written in quotations, which tells me right from the jump that the author is probably not speaking about literal family units, and the use of "family" or "family tree" nomenclature in discussing matters of genesis and inheritance is pretty commonplace.
- rob_c 4y ago
  Unfortunately if you do enough outreach it's not long until you encounter some nitwit who claims all "religion of science" is controlled by them (be they lizards, moonmen or voldermort). And articles structured like this don't help trying to people like that.
smegsicle 4y ago
and leading with "Evolution of mathematics traced using unusually comprehensive genealogy database" ? anyway, the more interesting aspect seems to be the drop-off after the top five, they don't even bother naming the others- see the first graph on the page
- wheelinsupial 4y ago
  I think they name them all in Figure 10 in the actual paper [1]. But it doesn't seem to contain a rank ordering of the mathematicians that is easy to recover. Also, it appears there is data duplication with the first four names appearing twice in the list (first four and last four). [1] https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0088-y/figures/10 https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...
- rob_c 4y ago
  I was hoping not to have to dig through source material but i agree i do wonder how many Ramanujan style (isolated) mathematicians are in the field.

5 ms·

But we need an alex jones style headline to get in on the click bait... If this wasn't nature.com I would give it a free pass and shrug that "huh, everyone els

by rob_c 4y ago

But we need an alex jones style headline to get in on the click bait... If this wasn't nature.com I would give it a free pass and shrug that "huh, everyone else is doing it", but really.... 'C'MON!!!

ChefboyOG 4y ago
I'm pretty critical of click-bait headlines in what are supposed to be more academic journals, but I don't get the frustration with this one. 'Families' is written in quotations, which tells me right from the jump that the author is probably not speaking about literal family units, and the use of "family" or "family tree" nomenclature in discussing matters of genesis and inheritance is pretty commonplace.
- rob_c 4y ago
  Unfortunately if you do enough outreach it's not long until you encounter some nitwit who claims all "religion of science" is controlled by them (be they lizards, moonmen or voldermort). And articles structured like this don't help trying to people like that.
smegsicle 4y ago
and leading with "Evolution of mathematics traced using unusually comprehensive genealogy database" ? anyway, the more interesting aspect seems to be the drop-off after the top five, they don't even bother naming the others- see the first graph on the page
- wheelinsupial 4y ago
  I think they name them all in Figure 10 in the actual paper [1]. But it doesn't seem to contain a rank ordering of the mathematicians that is easy to recover. Also, it appears there is data duplication with the first four names appearing twice in the list (first four and last four). [1] https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0088-y/figures/10 https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epj...
- rob_c 4y ago
  I was hoping not to have to dig through source material but i agree i do wonder how many Ramanujan style (isolated) mathematicians are in the field.