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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

A major science conference at which other Indian scientists absolutely repudiated Newton and Einstein, and pushed Von Daniken style theories about ancient Vedic aircraft and stem cell technology.

So clearly there are scientists in India who are fighting the good fight for scientific rigor and accountability, but this is in the context of ruling party politicians making comments pushing these sorts of crackpot theories in support of a nationalist glorification agenda. There is currently plenty of reason to worry about the politicization of science in India.

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I don’t consider these folks scientists.

What you consider or dont is irrelevant. They are speaking from a premier platform that represents the country's scientific progress.

Yes there are flat-earthers in the US, but they dont speak from the podium of the most premier scientific platform of their country. Trump himself is another matter, in fact there are some parallels between Modi and Trump.

Of course this corruption of a science conference is a serious concern but what BBC is doing with its misleading headline is to painting all “India” scientists with a broad brush when they (as well as HN readers) should be supporting the real scientists who are aghast at what is going on.

There are indeed lots of parallels between the two men.

Completely agree about BBC's bias. Hopefully articles such as these will create enough outrage and some good will come out of it. I doubt it though.

Its important to expose these guys and make people uncomfortable enough, have their ego hurt enough so that they feel compelled to respond. So in a backhanded way BBC is doing a good thing.

There is also the question of how the headline is read. Is it read as 'all Indian' scientists or Some whose nationality happen to be Indian. Given that its being broadcast from a forum called the "Indian Science Congress" I cannot honestly complain because that platform is intended to speak for India and its scientists.

Sp you agree about the BBCs bias, but you also can't honestly complain. I do agree with your point that it's important to expose this issue and I think the BBC did a good job here. Headlines are necessarily short and the very first sentence in the article makes it perfectly clear there is disagreement on this among scientists in India and there are scientists with integrity fighting the good fight for science. In fact the headline and first sentence sum up the whole issue very succinctly.

"In fact the headline and first sentence sum up the whole issue very succinctly."

Surely you jest.

An April, 2016 academic study of bit.ly links shared on Twitter to BBC, CNN, Fox News, New York Times and Huffington Post articles found that 59 percent of the links were never clicked. And another study of push-through news alerts to mobile phones found that “People click on the alert about half the time.”

Source: https://honestreporting.com/tag/misleading-headlines/

What this means is most people only read the headline and not even the first line.

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