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Comment by JohannesH | Hacker News Reader

I find it odd that the responses from the LIGO team and supporters are so hostile, while it seems Jackson have a fairly constructive perspective:

Jackson says he hope that “our concerns will be taken constructively and lead both to improved methods for data analysis and to a better understanding of LIGO’s results and its exciting long-term potential.”

It seems to me that Jackson just wants to eliminate potential flaws in the result rather than overturn the result itself. Isn't that exactly what we expect from the scientific method?

I wonder if it is a media created image that the tone between the teams are so hostile instead of collaborative.

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The article clearly states:

"While LIGO has gained a (not entirely undeserved) reputation for excessive secrecy, Shoemaker says the collaboration has spent a great deal of time interacting with Jackson and his group over the last two years to improve their understanding of LIGO's methods, including extended visits to the Niels Bohr Institute and inviting Jackson et al. to discuss the issue in depth in teleconferences with LIGO team members. So if LIGO's response whenever that drum begins banging anew sometimes comes off as a bit exasperated, there's a very good reason for it."

I think you are overlooking into this, there is no hostility whatsoever.

I have two coworkers like that. No matter how much communication we have seemingly nothing ever gets settled nor progress made. The one calls himself an anarchist. There’s a large difference between constructive “skepticism” and destruction of progress - but so much can hide under the false umbrella of “just trying to understand.”

It’s a difficult problem to solve. For example the phrase, “I want to have a serious conversation about immigration” can mean that you want to have an intellectually honest, detailed conversation about immigration. You want to talk about the pros and cons and how best to balance them for everyone involved, seek out more perspectives and information, and in general shine some light on an issue that often generates nothing, but heat.

Or it can be the prelude to a racist scree laden with FUD. We have to be careful not to let the the purveyors of the latter poison the well against the former group, but it can be hard to manage when people are smart enough to disguise their intentions.

I am genuinely curious - how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place conflict?

> how do you (did?) resolve that kind of work-place conflict?

Figure out a domain they operate exceedingly well in, determine the minimum amount of information they need and firewall them from everything else. A side effect of such disagreeability is not being involved in the sort of open-ended discussions which delineate upper from middle management.

"LIGO spokesperson David Shoemaker of MIT thinks the controversy all boils down to a misunderstanding about LIGO's methods for analyzing its data. "[Jackson et al.] came to it skeptically, and I think skepticism in science is a really important thing. You have to question results," he says."

The statement of the Jackson's team can be read as constructive skepticism or it can be read as FUD. In both cases they can use the same polite tone. It's difficult to distinguish them without reading carefully the technical objections to understand if they have some specific criticism or just generic concern.

My guess is that the easiest way to solve the controversy is to build three or four more detectors, and try to build a second team to make an independent analysis of the data. (But this is not cheap.)

(This is similar to the Atlas/CMS teams at CERN. They share the accelerator but they have independent detectors and analysis.)

Three or four more detectors is definitely not easy. The current ones were built, tuned and retuned over 25 years, and with approximately $1B spending on the US side alone (ignoring efforts in Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, etc). There are early plans for new detectors but to surpass the sensitivity of the existing network they will need even larger, more expensive facilities and equipment - unfortunately pushing the boundaries of human understanding is expensive.

Anyone who's spent any amount of time in academia knows it's the other way around: extreme [1] internal viciousness, external kumbaya PR for the tax-paying public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

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