5 ms·

Did you read the paper or are you just spouting off about the most obvious possible issue and assume that people who write and review papers on this subject for

Did you read the paper or are you just spouting off about the most obvious possible issue and assume that people who write and review papers on this subject for a living didn't think of it?

gfodor 4y ago
I don’t think I’ve ever seen put to words the question that runs through everyone’s minds at least once for any HN thread, but you’ve done it.
irrational 4y ago
Well, HN could stand for Hubris News. There do seem to be a lot of people around that seem to think that they are smarter in every field than actual experts in those fields.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  There may be a forum somewhere where those people don't post, but I have not yet found it.
  - googlryas 4y ago
    Those forums are all over the internet, generally from people running a phpbb instance by mistake.
    - aaron695 4y ago
- spoonjim 4y ago
  - freemint 4y ago
    Wow. Hubris found. Do you mean experts when you say experts or are you limiting yourself to "experts in the USA"? Because i am quite certain you would not out do the experts running Taiwan or Japan.
    - spoonjim 4y ago
      I do mean “experts” in the USA
  - not_kurt_godel 4y ago
    What specific examples are you talking about?
    - spoonjim 4y ago
      When Fauci said there’s no need to wear a mask in February, I was buying up N95s. When the CDC waited six months to declare COVID airborne, the rest of the world knew it was. When schools shut down, any discerning parent could tell that the damage to the kids would be severe and all parents who could afford to, like me, sent their kids to private school (I couldn’t get my kids into a local public school so I moved to a different state during the pandemic so that that they could attend school). When they said the kids vaccine should be given three weeks apart I did the reading and learned that it’s much more effective if spaced further apart. I am not arrogant enough to believe that I am some kind of Isaac Newton level genius. All I did was think for myself.
- everdrive 4y ago
  It's also hard not to be that person every so often. Lots of things seem simple when you don't know anything about them. If every commenter on HN makes this error only once a year (which seems generous!) I bet we'd still see this problem a lot.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
anigbrowl 4y ago
I went by the abstract, and didn't have time to look for a preprint since I don't have institutional access. Did you read the paper or are you just snarking for social points?
- ateng 4y ago
  And the abstract mentioned the colour changes are compared with Saturn. Surely that’s sufficient to address your concern on linguistics and cultural drift?
  - tomrod 4y ago
    I share the concern. When whole colors didn't even have names several thousand years ago, things can be dubious (e.g. wine-dark sea). This is part of peer-review -- being able to defend the ideas. When the academic "peer" group is reduced to "only those from certain institutions and pedigrees" it really waters down the quality of peer review. Go back 250 years, and peer review was your buddy you met at a symposium two countries over, because only a handful of folks had general interest (i.e. no Quanta magazine yet). If the exposition of those ideas are locked behind a paywall from peers with interest, then it really isn't very peer reviewable. I too do not have institutional access.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      wine-dark sea I have often wondered about that one - is it due to light intensity at Mediterranean latitudes, or the frequency of storms, or the predominance of bronze at the time? Or was there a greater variety of grapes and wine colors? Or is it to do with the absence of glass, so that colors were appraised as they appeared in metallic drinking vessels?
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    That defends on how broad or narrow bands of color similarity are across different cultures. Those do vary and mutate, and three are also zones of indeterminacy - remember the arguments over 'what color is this dress, blue or gold'? Linguistic drift can occur due to contact with other cultures, changing environmental conditions, availability of new dyes, or political factors. As an example of the latter, consider an absolute monarch with a color vision deviation from the biological norm. Their opinions about colors could become the 'official' one, and over a long reign this could become institutionalized. Chinese culture, for example, identifies 5 fundamental colors and they're invested with far more symbolic specificity than in western societies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture And I'm not trying to be dismissive of the paper. I just have some doubts because it needs to pile methodological inferences on top of each other over a wide variation in both space and time. If you throw lots of different circles on a Venn diagram and they all have a pretty consistent overlap, then yes, that probably means something. It's a worthwhile approach. But the fuzzier the boundaries, the harder that task becomes. I'm happy to buy into the idea that Betelgeuse changed color relatively recently and people noticed: my point was to list some confounding factors that make pinning that down very challenging.

Did you read the paper or are you just spouting off about the most obvious possible issue and assume that people who write and review papers on this subject for a living didn't think of it?

gfodor 4y ago

I don’t think I’ve ever seen put to words the question that runs through everyone’s minds at least once for any HN thread, but you’ve done it.

irrational 4y ago

Well, HN could stand for Hubris News. There do seem to be a lot of people around that seem to think that they are smarter in every field than actual experts in those fields.

BurningFrog 4y ago
There may be a forum somewhere where those people don't post, but I have not yet found it.
- googlryas 4y ago
  Those forums are all over the internet, generally from people running a phpbb instance by mistake.
  - aaron695 4y ago
spoonjim 4y ago
- freemint 4y ago
  Wow. Hubris found. Do you mean experts when you say experts or are you limiting yourself to "experts in the USA"? Because i am quite certain you would not out do the experts running Taiwan or Japan.
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    I do mean “experts” in the USA
- not_kurt_godel 4y ago
  What specific examples are you talking about?
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    When Fauci said there’s no need to wear a mask in February, I was buying up N95s. When the CDC waited six months to declare COVID airborne, the rest of the world knew it was. When schools shut down, any discerning parent could tell that the damage to the kids would be severe and all parents who could afford to, like me, sent their kids to private school (I couldn’t get my kids into a local public school so I moved to a different state during the pandemic so that that they could attend school). When they said the kids vaccine should be given three weeks apart I did the reading and learned that it’s much more effective if spaced further apart. I am not arrogant enough to believe that I am some kind of Isaac Newton level genius. All I did was think for myself.
everdrive 4y ago
It's also hard not to be that person every so often. Lots of things seem simple when you don't know anything about them. If every commenter on HN makes this error only once a year (which seems generous!) I bet we'd still see this problem a lot.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

anigbrowl 4y ago

I went by the abstract, and didn't have time to look for a preprint since I don't have institutional access. Did you read the paper or are you just snarking for social points?

ateng 4y ago
And the abstract mentioned the colour changes are compared with Saturn. Surely that’s sufficient to address your concern on linguistics and cultural drift?
- tomrod 4y ago
  I share the concern. When whole colors didn't even have names several thousand years ago, things can be dubious (e.g. wine-dark sea). This is part of peer-review -- being able to defend the ideas. When the academic "peer" group is reduced to "only those from certain institutions and pedigrees" it really waters down the quality of peer review. Go back 250 years, and peer review was your buddy you met at a symposium two countries over, because only a handful of folks had general interest (i.e. no Quanta magazine yet). If the exposition of those ideas are locked behind a paywall from peers with interest, then it really isn't very peer reviewable. I too do not have institutional access.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    wine-dark sea I have often wondered about that one - is it due to light intensity at Mediterranean latitudes, or the frequency of storms, or the predominance of bronze at the time? Or was there a greater variety of grapes and wine colors? Or is it to do with the absence of glass, so that colors were appraised as they appeared in metallic drinking vessels?
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  That defends on how broad or narrow bands of color similarity are across different cultures. Those do vary and mutate, and three are also zones of indeterminacy - remember the arguments over 'what color is this dress, blue or gold'? Linguistic drift can occur due to contact with other cultures, changing environmental conditions, availability of new dyes, or political factors. As an example of the latter, consider an absolute monarch with a color vision deviation from the biological norm. Their opinions about colors could become the 'official' one, and over a long reign this could become institutionalized. Chinese culture, for example, identifies 5 fundamental colors and they're invested with far more symbolic specificity than in western societies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture And I'm not trying to be dismissive of the paper. I just have some doubts because it needs to pile methodological inferences on top of each other over a wide variation in both space and time. If you throw lots of different circles on a Venn diagram and they all have a pretty consistent overlap, then yes, that probably means something. It's a worthwhile approach. But the fuzzier the boundaries, the harder that task becomes. I'm happy to buy into the idea that Betelgeuse changed color relatively recently and people noticed: my point was to list some confounding factors that make pinning that down very challenging.