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Oh good an article about complete bullshit. I haven't read enough bullshit lately. Edit: Oh good the pseudo science crew is here to downvote me. Good lord peop

Oh good an article about complete bullshit. I haven't read enough bullshit lately. Edit: Oh good the pseudo science crew is here to downvote me. Good lord people read the article; you can tell by the opening paragraph it's complete bullshit. Look at the studies they reference and how shitty their controls are. Good god people try being skeptical for once. Edit2: Today I learned Hacker News is a great venue for spreading pseudo science and quackery. That kinda makes me sad.

_delirium 12y ago
> Today I learned Hacker News is a great venue for spreading pseudo science and quackery. On non-programming topics that's always been the case. HN is full of programmers who are not knowledgeable in science, and tend to trust their personal political or cultural beliefs on other subjects where science might be applied. Today's frontpage is actually great because it contains an example of that with both political valences. There's a "left-ish" pseudoscientific story about toxins, and "right-ish" pseudoscientific story about evolutionary psychology. Amazing. We're only missing a thread on weightlifting or nutritional fads to complete the bingo card.
- pedalpete 12y ago
  I've often found quite the opposite. I've been amazed at how knowledgeable HNers are about random and obscure science and medicine.
  - gus_massa 12y ago
    It's more complicated. For each obscure subject, there are one or two users that are experts or at least have enough knowledge. The problem is that there is a big amount of enthusiastic, that are exited about the new possible result and forget to see that it's almost sure a incorrect result. In some threads the enthusiastic user overhead the experts. A typical subject (without political interest) is faster than light travel. Or in other words: http://xkcd.com/955/ http://xkcd.com/955/
- ZenoArrow 12y ago
  Do you know the difference between pseudoscience and a soft science? I don't think you do. Hard sciences like physics and chemistry are able to describe processes in minute detail because the systems being studied are relatively simple. As you scale the systems up, the level of detail that science produces is diminished, because there's a higher level of uncontrolled variables. This is why people make the difference between hard science and soft science, you can still try to follow scientific principles without getting a high level of conclusivity. What soft sciences rely on is a body of observational evidence. Here's a classic example from the article... "For decades, chlorpyrifos, marketed by Dow Chemical beginning in 1965, was the most widely used insect killer in American homes. Then, in 1995, Dow was fined $732,000 by the EPA for concealing more than 200 reports of poisoning related to chlorpyrifos. It paid the fine and, in 2000, withdrew chlorpyrifos from household products. Today, chlorpyrifos is classified as “very highly toxic” to birds and freshwater fish, and “moderately toxic” to mammals, but it is still used widely in agriculture on food and non-food crops, in greenhouses and plant nurseries, on wood products and golf courses."
  - BinaryIdiot 12y ago
    > Do you know the difference between pseudoscience and a soft science? I don't think you do. Science follows a well known process. There are no hard or soft sciences. There is one that follows evidence and another that's pseudo science bullshit. With great claims comes great evidence and your soft science example not only lacks proper, vetted scientific evidence but is actually complete bullshit that simply fits with your cultural belief.
    - ZenoArrow 12y ago
      Oh dear. Let's start from the beginning, what is this well known process that science follows?
    - nisa 12y ago
      You won't make a lot of friends here with this kind of reasoning. Please refute the article in a way that is at least somewhat open to scrutiny from the wider audience. That should at least include concrete examples and preferably sourced rebuttal of said claims. Calling something "pseudo science bullshit" because of "science"... is a lot more similar to pseudoscience than having an actual sourced debate based on concrete examples.
jaekwon 12y ago
Whether or not the article is true, why don't you provide more constructive information? Presumably you've read the referenced studies and seen how bad their controls are. Which studies, and why is it bad?
kristiandupont 12y ago
>Today I learned Hacker News is a great venue for spreading pseudo science and quackery. I don't know very much about this topic but it interests me and this article looks like a quick introduction to some concerns. If you would like to inform me of why it's complete bullshit, I would love to hear. Your comment as it stands adds no value which I think is the reason why you were downvoted (I didn't personally) -- not because people "take sides" with the article.
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  > If you would like to inform me of why it's complete bullshit, I would love to hear. Your comment as it stands adds no value which I think is the reason why you were downvoted (I didn't personally) -- not because people "take sides" with the article. My problem with this is I would be on HN, Reddit and other places all day. With every extraordinary claim someone makes it can take actual science a few minutes to explain (this is why extraordinary claims should always come with extraordinary evidence otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time like this article). Pseudo science is incredibly easy to generate; you just find something that makes easy correlations (regardless of their validity) and fits within a narrative people love and you're done. Science then has to go through each item and explain why each one is wrong. I shouldn't have to go through articles like this and look up and source each piece that's incorrect; if readers simply apply some critical thinking and do a little investigation on their own (and, hey, actually READ a REAL study once in a while so you can see what a good study and a bad study looks like) they can see right through it. I don't have much experience with HN and pseudo science articles; because this crowd is usually really smart I kinda assumed it would have been really easy to tell this was bullshit.
  - judk 12y ago
    Find or make a website that explains the problem with detailed information, and then quickly post a link wherever needed. Example (from a totally different issue): http://begthequestion.info http://begthequestion.info
    - unhammer 12y ago
eruditely 12y ago
Lol. Most of us are well entrenched into our specific scientific & empirical schools. We would be ready at any instant to defend against "Pseudo-science" the idea that synthetic chemicals causing unforeseen harms and conditions does not need forty billion pieces of evidence. We're going to see and decide for ourselves. I know nothing of the author/etc have no allegiances.
namenotrequired 12y ago
I can only speak for myself, but I for one am not downvoting you for your opinion but for the way you chose to express it.
hliyan 12y ago
This is why you are being downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html See the comment guidelines halfway through. This is not Reddit.
- judk 12y ago
  dang, please add "Don't make snarky and irrelevant claims about Reddit and its similarity to HN" to the guidelines.
  - hliyan 12y ago
    That particular guideline is already present: > If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
wpietri 12y ago
You don't seem to understand much about science. The way bad claims get dealt with in science is by providing better data and better analysis. A random anonymous dude pissing all over something doesn't qualify in either regard. It's reasonable to think there's some cost to widespread use of various chemicals. E.g., lead's neurotoxicity is well studied. I think it's therefore reasonable to try to come up with a best estimate of the total cost. Nobody's expecting an estimate like this to be perfect. As long as it's better than the existing estimate, it's a useful contribution. I don't even understand what your counter-claim is. That all industrial chemicals have zero neurological harm? That neurological harm exists but is entirely unestimatable? That the harm is estimatable but is significantly lower or higher? By all means criticize, but just being a content-free dick isn't useful criticism. And following it up with name-calling isn't helping.
eqdw 12y ago
Both of the mentioned articles (I'd say "cited" but only one was named; I had to find the other based on author names) are specifically scoped to only developmental problems. eg: If 3 year olds are exposed to too much lead, what happens. And then the article goes on for 15 minutes, fear mongering about evil corporations putting poisonous chemicals in everything. But that's not what the studies said. The studies were explicitly only about developmental effects. Bah science reporting is terrible
anateus 12y ago
No, you're being downvoted because your comment was neither constructive nor civil. While I'm sure the reasons you stated might have been a component of that, if you look at various other threads you will note that a lot of other comments in a similar vein--ones that lament the subject being brought up again, or just expressing vague dissatisfaction with the subject matter--also get downvoted.

_delirium 12y ago

> Today I learned Hacker News is a great venue for spreading pseudo science and quackery. On non-programming topics that's always been the case. HN is full of programmers who are not knowledgeable in science, and tend to trust their personal political or cultural beliefs on other subjects where science might be applied. Today's frontpage is actually great because it contains an example of that with both political valences. There's a "left-ish" pseudoscientific story about toxins, and "right-ish" pseudoscientific story about evolutionary psychology. Amazing. We're only missing a thread on weightlifting or nutritional fads to complete the bingo card.

pedalpete 12y ago
I've often found quite the opposite. I've been amazed at how knowledgeable HNers are about random and obscure science and medicine.
- gus_massa 12y ago
  It's more complicated. For each obscure subject, there are one or two users that are experts or at least have enough knowledge. The problem is that there is a big amount of enthusiastic, that are exited about the new possible result and forget to see that it's almost sure a incorrect result. In some threads the enthusiastic user overhead the experts. A typical subject (without political interest) is faster than light travel. Or in other words: http://xkcd.com/955/ http://xkcd.com/955/
ZenoArrow 12y ago
Do you know the difference between pseudoscience and a soft science? I don't think you do. Hard sciences like physics and chemistry are able to describe processes in minute detail because the systems being studied are relatively simple. As you scale the systems up, the level of detail that science produces is diminished, because there's a higher level of uncontrolled variables. This is why people make the difference between hard science and soft science, you can still try to follow scientific principles without getting a high level of conclusivity. What soft sciences rely on is a body of observational evidence. Here's a classic example from the article... "For decades, chlorpyrifos, marketed by Dow Chemical beginning in 1965, was the most widely used insect killer in American homes. Then, in 1995, Dow was fined $732,000 by the EPA for concealing more than 200 reports of poisoning related to chlorpyrifos. It paid the fine and, in 2000, withdrew chlorpyrifos from household products. Today, chlorpyrifos is classified as “very highly toxic” to birds and freshwater fish, and “moderately toxic” to mammals, but it is still used widely in agriculture on food and non-food crops, in greenhouses and plant nurseries, on wood products and golf courses."
- BinaryIdiot 12y ago
  > Do you know the difference between pseudoscience and a soft science? I don't think you do. Science follows a well known process. There are no hard or soft sciences. There is one that follows evidence and another that's pseudo science bullshit. With great claims comes great evidence and your soft science example not only lacks proper, vetted scientific evidence but is actually complete bullshit that simply fits with your cultural belief.
  - ZenoArrow 12y ago
    Oh dear. Let's start from the beginning, what is this well known process that science follows?
  - nisa 12y ago
    You won't make a lot of friends here with this kind of reasoning. Please refute the article in a way that is at least somewhat open to scrutiny from the wider audience. That should at least include concrete examples and preferably sourced rebuttal of said claims. Calling something "pseudo science bullshit" because of "science"... is a lot more similar to pseudoscience than having an actual sourced debate based on concrete examples.

jaekwon 12y ago

Whether or not the article is true, why don't you provide more constructive information? Presumably you've read the referenced studies and seen how bad their controls are. Which studies, and why is it bad?

kristiandupont 12y ago

>Today I learned Hacker News is a great venue for spreading pseudo science and quackery. I don't know very much about this topic but it interests me and this article looks like a quick introduction to some concerns. If you would like to inform me of why it's complete bullshit, I would love to hear. Your comment as it stands adds no value which I think is the reason why you were downvoted (I didn't personally) -- not because people "take sides" with the article.

BinaryIdiot 12y ago
> If you would like to inform me of why it's complete bullshit, I would love to hear. Your comment as it stands adds no value which I think is the reason why you were downvoted (I didn't personally) -- not because people "take sides" with the article. My problem with this is I would be on HN, Reddit and other places all day. With every extraordinary claim someone makes it can take actual science a few minutes to explain (this is why extraordinary claims should always come with extraordinary evidence otherwise you're just wasting everyone's time like this article). Pseudo science is incredibly easy to generate; you just find something that makes easy correlations (regardless of their validity) and fits within a narrative people love and you're done. Science then has to go through each item and explain why each one is wrong. I shouldn't have to go through articles like this and look up and source each piece that's incorrect; if readers simply apply some critical thinking and do a little investigation on their own (and, hey, actually READ a REAL study once in a while so you can see what a good study and a bad study looks like) they can see right through it. I don't have much experience with HN and pseudo science articles; because this crowd is usually really smart I kinda assumed it would have been really easy to tell this was bullshit.
- judk 12y ago
  Find or make a website that explains the problem with detailed information, and then quickly post a link wherever needed. Example (from a totally different issue): http://begthequestion.info http://begthequestion.info
  - unhammer 12y ago

eruditely 12y ago

Lol. Most of us are well entrenched into our specific scientific & empirical schools. We would be ready at any instant to defend against "Pseudo-science" the idea that synthetic chemicals causing unforeseen harms and conditions does not need forty billion pieces of evidence. We're going to see and decide for ourselves. I know nothing of the author/etc have no allegiances.

namenotrequired 12y ago

I can only speak for myself, but I for one am not downvoting you for your opinion but for the way you chose to express it.

hliyan 12y ago

This is why you are being downvoted: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html See the comment guidelines halfway through. This is not Reddit.

judk 12y ago
dang, please add "Don't make snarky and irrelevant claims about Reddit and its similarity to HN" to the guidelines.
- hliyan 12y ago
  That particular guideline is already present: > If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

wpietri 12y ago

You don't seem to understand much about science. The way bad claims get dealt with in science is by providing better data and better analysis. A random anonymous dude pissing all over something doesn't qualify in either regard. It's reasonable to think there's some cost to widespread use of various chemicals. E.g., lead's neurotoxicity is well studied. I think it's therefore reasonable to try to come up with a best estimate of the total cost. Nobody's expecting an estimate like this to be perfect. As long as it's better than the existing estimate, it's a useful contribution. I don't even understand what your counter-claim is. That all industrial chemicals have zero neurological harm? That neurological harm exists but is entirely unestimatable? That the harm is estimatable but is significantly lower or higher? By all means criticize, but just being a content-free dick isn't useful criticism. And following it up with name-calling isn't helping.

eqdw 12y ago

Both of the mentioned articles (I'd say "cited" but only one was named; I had to find the other based on author names) are specifically scoped to only developmental problems. eg: If 3 year olds are exposed to too much lead, what happens. And then the article goes on for 15 minutes, fear mongering about evil corporations putting poisonous chemicals in everything. But that's not what the studies said. The studies were explicitly only about developmental effects. Bah science reporting is terrible

anateus 12y ago

No, you're being downvoted because your comment was neither constructive nor civil. While I'm sure the reasons you stated might have been a component of that, if you look at various other threads you will note that a lot of other comments in a similar vein--ones that lament the subject being brought up again, or just expressing vague dissatisfaction with the subject matter--also get downvoted.