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Comment by awillen | Hacker News Reader

But on the other hand, with a severe replication crisis in science (https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/21504366/science-replicat...), isn't it a good thing that we have a bunch of boring papers that are close to stuff that's already happened? It's not people replicating others' findings exactly, but it at least gives points of comparison that can help to weed out some of the problematic work out there.

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Boring is often a good thing, not just in science. There's a reason that "May you live in interesting times" is considered a curse.

Think about the year we just had. Whatever else you might say about it, it wasn't boring.

[Clarification] Individual local experiences may have been boring at times, but the year as a whole, from a historical point of view, was not. And the things that made it non-boring also made it suck big fat honking weenies. IMHO of course, but I'm pretty sure most people on earth would agree with that assessment.

I disagree - boring is critical in science. Good science means detailed record keeping and precise experimentation. It's good if the results are exciting, but the process of doing good science is typically quite boring when it's done right.

Edit: This comment makes no sense, because I misread the comment I was responding to as saying "just not in science" not "not just in science"

This doesn’t sound like disagreement.

I was really confused for a bit there, and I finally realized the comment I was responding to said "not just in science," not "just not in science" as I had originally read it. Whoops.

"Think about the year we just had. Whatever else you might say about it, it wasn't boring. "

Well, from a global perspective maybe not. But subjective there were lots of freaking times this year that were just boring, because I wanted to go traveling and on festivals and just see something else and not be locked down (even though in my area the lockdown was quite light)

I can assure you : lots of people found last year extremely boring ( not me ).

> Think about the year we just had. Whatever else you might say about it, it wasn't boring.

Being restrained to the house, watching the same news over and over again, not being able to see friends, no evenings out, parties, restaurant visits, &c. and you call this "not boring"?

...because of an unexpected, persistent, global threat to the lives of everyone, whose appearance led to economies worldwide shutting down, getting everyone glued to the news you mention, and putting a lot of people in precarious economical situation? Yeah, I wouldn't consider that boring. Tiring, for sure, but not boring.

You may call the problems "interesting", but the political solutions I've seen so far are far from interesting ...

Yes, we're in economically difficult times (well, most people who are not in IT), but this is from an intellectual viewpoint not a much more intriguing problem than, say, global poverty, or climate change. And so it's not like there is a shortage of intellectual challenges. This crisis, therefore, doesn't add much in that sense. Yet it does take away a lot of freedoms that make life interesting.

Despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no known equivalent expression in Chinese.

The nearest related Chinese expression translates as "Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_ti...

Not saying you claimed it was Chinese but FYI.

I've only come across it as part of Pratchetts work, in the book Interesting Times, and had just assumed it was another of his witticisms.

There is a Chinese saying that every saying is eventually attributed to the Chinese given enough time

I think we need to take Vox documentaries with a grain of salt. They’re not as thorough as the Economist, etc. and have their own agenda mixed with YouTube content engagement metrics. You can argue that’s the case with any publication but IMO YouTube forces content makers to do crazy shit like exciting facial expressions in thumbnails for better engagement.

That's just one article - it's not a unique point of view from Vox.

https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on... https://ecrcommunity.plos.org/2019/11/18/living-in-the-repro...

I personally know the author of that piece very well and can vouch for their credibility - feel free to ask if you have any questions about their work or about the replication crisis in science.

This sounds like the age-old balance between maintenance/repair and breaking-new-ground/innovation. My personal sense is that there is and always has been a gendered dimension to striking this balance, and varying levels of predisposition that bellcurve along gender-specific neurotypes.

For me, once I was pointed to this axis, I started recognizing it everywhere -- legal institutions, the way companies are run, etc etc

Hofstede's cultural dimension studies commissioned by IBM in the 50s (?) have things to say about this too

Yes, boring in the conventional sense is desirable from a scientific point of view (because the preference for surprising results leads to the biggest problem science has today: most published findings are incorrect). The linked article doesn't really do a very good job of explaining what "boring" means to the author, but my hope is he doesn't have a problem with boring in the sense of negative findings or unsurprising results.

You make a good point.

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