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Comment by wegs | Hacker News Reader

I suggest clicking through to the NAP paper, which unlike this reporting fluff/hype piece, is very reasonable.

This is part of the standard academic fake science pipeline. The researchers did reasonable work (best summary: "We don't know how well they work"). The university PR departments turned that into hyped-up nonsense to gain publicity and brand recognition. Next step will be science reporting, which will exaggerate the press release, and finally, popular news, which will use this to bash random policy decisions.

Direct link to the original paper:

https://www.nap.edu/read/25776/chapter/1

In general, NAP pieces tend to be well-researched and well-written summaries of what's known. This one is no exception.

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You forgot about the other half of the cycle: time passes, another wave of publicity bashes the initial hype, people assume the scientists themselves are responsible (even though they have been freaking out about their work being misrepresented), scientists lose funding, people don’t trust scientists.

You forgot about the third half of the cycle: scientists exceedingly rarely submit a correction note to tone down the hyped up claims made by the PR departments / science press. They are very good at keeping the freak out to themselves. A systemic problem, not sure how to solve for, if even there is a solution.

Yea right, it’s just so weird to deal with this problem as a scientist unless you do work that is regularly in the news and you have opportunities to learn how to better control what is written/said and deal with instances where the wrong message is getting out. Vast majority of scientists are doing work for an audience of themselves, other scientists and funding agencies, and are working for respect, not fame or media attention. So when a their research suddenly gets churned through this bullshit cycle, they’re really troubled but don’t necessarily know the most effective way to control the message once it gets out of their hands. It can be really unfair and stressful.

Sometimes.

Self-promotion tends to help specific universities and researchers. If my name make NY Times, that's a big deal. On the other hand, blame is diffuse. People start to distrust the scientific establishment as a whole.

Successful scientists themselves tend to grandstand and overstate their work when talking to the popular media. Idealistic grad students don't do that, but idealistic grad students also don't get faculty jobs and later tenure (politically savvy graduate students do).

Unfortunately, dishonest, shameless self-promotion is how one gets ahead in the academy, and how universities get ahead of each other, even if it is a lot like pissing in a big, common, shared pool. You get a slap-on-the-wrist for bad research results in a scientific journal. That doesn't happen for the popular press.

It depends on the school too. I'd love to see a replicability study based on school tier. I bet hyper-competitive schools (Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and the rest of the Ivy+) would come in far behind state schools for replicable results.

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