Graphs That Showed Landmark Discoveries but Were Later Debunked | Hacker News Reader

Graphs That Showed Landmark Discoveries but Were Later Debunked

nautil.us

38 pointsdnetesn13 comments

There are some interesting politics behind the Higgs boson results mentioned in the article. The 144GeV result should not have been released because it was not significant by particle physics standards (>5 standard deviations). However, the world was frothing at the mouth for LHC news, so out it went

There's a great documentary on Netflix about it called Particle Fever https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_Fever

"Released" is a fuzzy term. If you mean published, well, yes, they should not be published to a peer reviewed publication, but most peer review publications wouldn't bother publishing them in the first case. Preliminary results/progress reports can and probably should be released in many cases, if only to let people know what's going on. That happens a lot, you get "Oh we noticed something with three sigma significance over here, but we don't have enough statistics" and then somebody else can examine their data and say "well I've got five sigma proof that's an artifact" and then more papers are written on methods, cuts, calibration, simulation, etc... while both experiments might still be running.

On one hand, sometimes this act itself can bias people into making bad cuts and stuff. On the other hand, when this process doesn't happen, you also get people working in a box for two years with some systemic error they didn't account for and then claiming a 6 sigma feature in publication that's really an artifact of noisy ADC channel and some massaged cuts.

In a couple year, we are going to have a round table about women issues at the UN and another table about men issues, it's going to be fun to watch both sides argue about a "polemic" subject.

For example:

If a guy impregnates a woman, and she decides to abort it, but he wants to keep it?

grabs popcorn

"Summer sale" popup, "subscribe now". Tab closed.

I wonder who makes that sort of decision is webland, harassing the first time visitor is /bound/ to work...

They have a sales funnel that you fell out of. It's a really common, and apparently effective type of funnel. By whatever measures they are using, they're probably better off without you.

I also miss the old web, where articles were just text dominating a page, but it seems to be dying. I have devoted some thought to what to do about it, but I've come up dry so far

Sorry for continuing the off-topic discussion with an unpopular suggestion, but without that site whitelisted for Javascript, it was only a webpage dominated by article.

Once you closed all of the X-10 pop-ups.

I write simple pages like that, but then I get lambasted for "archaic" web pages :-)

Funny, I just saw the article. NoScript improves the web yet again.

* kills.

""Summer sale" popup, "subscribe now"". Closed pop up, read free article, became informed.

Same effort, your loss.

close popup, tell them you're not a bot and the tracking cookie belongs to someone human. Ka-ching. close tab without clicking anywhere, you don't tell them that, and they can't really discriminate the user from a bot, and their 'effort' a tracking you failed (or at least, is less reliable)

Closed pop up, read free article, became informed, read further free articles, beacme intrigued, wanted more, remembered subscription offer, seached for information, decideed to subscribe.

More effort, but I will have a series of print magazines full of enjoyable and informative articles delivered soon. Definately GPs loss!

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