Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

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Just to play devil's advocate... sometimes a little spectacle is OK.

A lot of these ideas really are "new and exciting." Science just moves at a slower pace than media. It's not a monthly. By exaggerating the pace they're.. uhm... bridging the gap or something.

Controversy is even more engaging than novelty. Maybe a pop science article gets you sucked into the pre-clovis camp of a paleoanthropology controversy. Now you are engaged in paleoanthropology. Three years later, a possibly butchered snake skeleton is found and you go "aha! I was right! They ate snake soup! Clovis people didn't even like snake!" It's a little cheap, but it's also fun. Why not.

People enjoy having opinions. No one loves sports without having a favourite team, strong opinions regarding training schedules and sports rehabilitation practices... an occasional gamble. Most know that they're not really experts, but they enjoy being in the fray nonetheless.

Pop science magazines aren't supposed to be textbooks or encyclopedias. We are fortunate to have wikipedia for that. Give me a little sauce, a little clickbait. I might not always admit to it... but sugar tastes good.

That's a fair point. I love reading computer hardware rumours, most of which are probably total garbage (and probably obviously so to anyone in the field). And in this case, whether the general public thinks the universe in MOND or LCDM really doesn't matter at all.

My real issue is when this reporting is on things where the general public's opinion does matter. Things that the general public might vote on. Economics, medicine, etc. Having seen this type of reporting in a field that I do know something about (and a field where there is no real incentive to mislead, again MOND vs LCDM, who cares), I'm a lot more distrustful of science reporting in fields I don't know much about (and where there are incentives to mislead).

If they had published the article exactly as is, giving you all the excitement, but just added a single line somewhere saying "this is new work that is up against a large body of previous work that points in the opposite direction. Let's see what happens, but its a cool idea" I'd be totally fine with it.

The final sentence of the linked article is this:

> But it’s important to keep in mind that so far the bulk of the evidence still points towards dark matter, and it’ll take much more work to topple that hypothesis entirely.

Lol, TLDR; strikes again. Guess OP should've read more than the abstract if they "would've been fine with the article if it had contained a sentence like this one"

Eek! I guess I'm more OK with this now...

The funny thing is that I agree with you that there are a lot of bad pop-sci articles that are misleading in the ways you're talking about. This particular article just isn't one of them.

Even though it's light on detail, I'm actually impressed at how measured & factual it is. They even managed to resist a clickbait headline.

I find this within the sciences also. A lot of the more provocative scientists are willing to be wrong while promoting strong versions of their hypotheses. While this can be criticized as unscientific, I tend to believe that it serves a scientific purpose. Presenting a strong version of a hypothesis pushes people to contend with it, gather empirical evidence, and then incorporate a more moderate version into the idea-sphere.

I think OP's point is that pop science reporting is more than "sometimes." Keeping up with controversial theories is fine, often ideas that turn out to be revolutionary are controversial, but it's important not to get a warped perspective about what the broader scientific consensus is.

I know more than one person who has taken it to the extreme, to the point that they latch onto any and every controversial idea seemingly only because it's controversial. That's what you want to avoid.

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