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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

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BurningFrog

Well, I think it's a fact¹ that a large majority of "science" stories that go viral turn out to be wrong.

So the rational approach to them is "what might be wrong with this one?".

¹ Citation Missing

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If you want to avoid this, just read the paper.

I don't understand why technical people waste their time complaining about this stuff. We all have the acumen to read, understand, and debate research.

Because there’s only 24 hours a day? Because my tax dollars are often funding this research?

Why not take this farther and just do the research myself, eh?

> I don't understand why technical people waste their time complaining about this stuff. We all have the acumen to read, understand, and debate research.

But to be honest, the reason I read the comments (at least on a place like HN) is to get the key insight / failure without reading the article.

When scientists disagree among themselves, it's hard to use this strategy.

It's paywalled. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00950...

If I had access, I'd try to dig into more depth into how they approached decoupling this from temperature, because that seems like a really strong confounder. I'm also a bit curious about the underlying physical cause of the change in pollution levels, (weekends? summertime?) because that seems like it could also be a confounding common cause.

Alas, I'm not interested in paying $35 for the paper.

Preprint from the Colorado State website:

https://pierce.atmos.colostate.edu/Monthly_Pollution_and_Cri...

Thanks!

Just use SciHub like everyone else. Even if it's not up on SciHub the Supplementary MAterials are usually available free.

Reading scientific papers uses less time than complaining about them?

Is there a study to back that up? :)

from my experience, when science stories that go viral turn out to be wrong it's some secondhand reporting by people misunderstanding or misrepresenting the actual firsthand report

The replication crisis says otherwise.

Both of those phenomenona are common. They aren't mutually exclusive.

That's definitely also a factor.

I tend to agree, and this article is no different. Articles often report the underlying research in misleading ways.

The rational approach to all peer review is to assume there's a flaw and look for it. Quite a few commenters seem bothered by this reflexive reaction to published research, when the entire point of publishing research is to have it picked apart by critical thinkers everywhere.

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