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Title as submitted here is pure flamebait. Most of the quoted statements aren't in fact problematic at all (many of them I would in fact describe as so obviousl
by gjm11 17y ago
Title as submitted here is pure flamebait. Most of the quoted statements aren't in fact problematic at all (many of them I would in fact describe as so obviously not-problematic as to call into question the integrity of the person offering them up as evidence of dishonesty, and I wouldn't be surprised if every one of them turned out to have an innocent explanation), but even if each of those quotations demonstrated that the person who sent it had no integrity whatever, that would not justify the scare-quotes around "scientists" (dishonest scientists are still scientists), nor the blanket condemnation of "the climate scientists", as if the ones whose emails have been pilfered are the only climate scientists in the world.
Better would be something like "Leaked email archive allegedly calls into question the integrity of a few climate scientists". Better still would be "62MB of climate science emails leaked; here are some alarming quotations" or something.
- jordyhoyt 17y ago"Dishonest scientists are still scientists" I disagree. If they are not following the scientific method, but fudging their data to agree with their pre-determined conclusions, they are not scientists.
- gjm11 17y ago1. Assuming, for the sake of argument, the most uncharitable interpretation possible for all the quotations on display at the Examiner, it seems to me that most of them do not involve any sort of data-fudging. 2. I appreciate the rhetorical point you're making, but I prefer to distinguish between "not a scientist", "bad scientist" and "evildoing scientist". (But I do agree that if someone's found to have been falsifying results, whatever scientific work they've done is of little use to anyone unless there's some reliable way to disentangle the fraudulent and non-fraudulent bits.)
- nkurz 17y agoI agree that the title is bad, but it is empirically effective. I earlier submitted a parallel article with pretty much the title that you suggested, and it went nowhere: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952082 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=952082 Leaked FOIA files 62 mb of gold Even before me, 'ellyagg' submitted an even closer parallel with a non-sensational title. It also has not garnered any discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951915 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=951915 Climate News: Hadley CRU hacked with release of hundreds of docs and emails So while I personally will continue to submit with the title of the original article rather than bait, one could argue that having a discussion is better than not having a discussion.
- gjm11 17y agoConsidering the rather poor heat-to-light ratio in this discussion, I'm not sure that "get as much discussion as possible" is a terribly good goal. In any case, there's a "tragedy of the commons" risk here: every submitter, considered separately, wants to get their submission read and commented on, so every submitter wants to tweak their titles to be "empirically effective", and if that determines the actual titles then we end up with a front page full of sensationalist titles, all of them less informative than if everyone had refrained from attention-grabbing. And then everyone is worse off.
- nkurz 17y agoI agree. The only solution I see is not to use a title provided by the submitter. When I design my own system...