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Comment by buboard | Hacker News Reader

This was inevitable and is the culmination of two things:

- Too much hypothesis-driven science that results in statistically significant, but untrustworthy results. It's easy to find statistically significant data to backup whatever crazy thing your brain comes up with.

- Too much pseudo-scientifically backed popular press. Popular science is useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of falsiability tests, not last month's papers.

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Some years ago, when I was working as production editor in New York, I had to manage a manuscript for a book of new-age woo that was trying to pass itself off as pseudo-science (one of these 'quantum magic' type books). Not only was the premise crap, but the author clearly did not understand even basic historical facts about science. I brought this up with the editor, who seemed surprised to be told that the author did not know what she was talking about. I'd guess the editor had not really read the manuscript very closely. I worked with the copyeditor to try to straighten some of it out, but it was pretty much futile.

The NY publishing system is set up so that editors spend most of their day doing tasks unrelated to actually editing their books, of which they have too many. It gets worse as you go up the food chain.

Was the book ever published?

Yes.

> Popular science is useful for disemminating science that has been solidified through decades of falsiability tests, not last month's papers.

Wow, never seen this worded so clearly before. Thanks for the great summation buboard!

That's a huge problem, but not the one this article is about. The examples given are things like books about 19th century court cases or insider stories about the trump admin, not science.

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