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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

> I have about as much ignorance of these domains as all the people mocking the paper on Twitter. But there’s one big difference between me and them: I actually read the paper. All of this information is on the first page. Even if you don’t know about sci-hub, you could still read the abstract and check out the researcher bios! Nobody read the paper before dunking on it. Nobody read the abstract either. About half the people yelling at this paper had only read the press release. The other half hadn’t even done that. They had only read tweets about the press release.

This is a real problem. I'm guilty of not bothering to read the paper many times. I instantly look for the easily digestible reviews or comments that other people made. I'm part of the problem. Damn.

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Without wishing to downplay the fact that this is a major issue, it’s hard to read scientific literature from a field you haven’t previously studied. Layman summaries are a great way to get a sense of what the paper is actually saying, though summaries made by random commenters are unreliable.

Many papers in general are just not well written, even if the subject is interesting. I wish it were seen as a social requirement that if you publish a paper, then you accompany it with a blog post—even if it's the only thing on your blog. With multiple authors, each author would write their own blog post. I'd rather read three different takes on the same subject, generally, than to slog through any given paper even once. Sprinkle in the not-minor accessibility problems around the tendency to publish exclusively in PDF, and there are good reasons to seek out a digest instead of looking through the real thing. Heck, most abstracts verge on being almost unreadable, for that matter.

While there are reasonably good reasons that most scientific articles are in PDF format (way too much work to change), I heartily agree with writing blog posts on articles. I started doing this: the effort (once you have somewhere to publish it) is negligible compared with the amount of effort of writing a paper, and it is also quite fun to be able to write more free-form text on the subject.

Thanks for saying this. Lots of people like to jump to their own defense like "I always analyze every primary source thoroughly before forming any mote of an opinion on the subject". But identifying and understanding and accepting our flaws is much more important than trying to be right all the time IMO.

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