Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t find it that harsh. He was direct and took pains not to ridicule a thirteen year-old for making an entirely age-appropriate mistake in measuring the results. Instead, he asked the perfectly valid question of how this becomes news without critical thought.

In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works. Why should science fair projects be treated any differently than crime, the personal lives of celebrities, politics, or economics? News outlets publish first and ask questions later or not at all. They have gone to court to defend their right to publish things they know to be false.

How did a confused science project become international news? Why, the same way that almost any overnight sensation becomes international news, by being digestible, by being something people want to be true, by appealing to their preconceived biases.

A commenter pointed out that this is the value of a peer-review process. And indeed, this result was published without peer review. So who is the fool here? The journalist for publishing without review? Or the reader who knowingly accepts the result despite it being published without peer review and/or corroboration?

I disagree, but I really believe he didn't do it intentionally. He was ridiculing the MSM and the people who jumped on the bandwagon without doing any analysis.

Unfortunately, nobody will see it that way. People will see it as him/her attacking Aidan Dwyer (the boy who did the experiment). He doesn't help his case by never referring to Aidan by name, instead using a fairly pejorative sounding "the kid.

If Aiden was my kid, I would try not to let him read the article, though I would explain the article and what went wrong within a teaching framework that included pointing out when other scientists did similar thing (don't know any off the top of my head, but I've no doubt the stories are out there).

It is sad, too, because this article needed to be written, but instead of writing it to help Aiden succeed in spite of the fanfare, the author has likely hurt Aiden. There is every reason to tell kids they are wrong when they are wrong, but there are appropriate ways and inappropriate ways to do it. This was inappropriate.

Finally, I've flagged this submission. Since the author took down the original, it is obvious he is rethinking whether the article was a good idea. Yes, the internet is forever, but people's wishes should count for something.

With the wide media coverage this article received, it's fair to say at least 100,000 people saw the headline or read the article. Most of these people took the 'discovery' at face value.

It's conceivable that a tech writer at CNN, New York Times, or some other more mainstream news outlet was getting ready to hit the send button to their editor.

This post was credible, timely, and well reasoned. Whether he had second thoughts or not, I think the good done by combating misinformation outweighs whatever reason he had for taking down the article. Though I would have preferred to have linked to the original post.

I agree with flagging a post that was taken down voluntarily. If the greater good is served by debunking the article, people can publish their own posts debunking the kid's findings based on their own expertise.

13 years old is old enough to take a dose of reality. Science isn't about people's feelings.

I can think of more than a handful of science fair projects that other kids have done, with incorrect results, that win the grade school science fair due to judges who have zero qualification. That multiple major tech news sites picked this up goes a long way in saying what the qualifications are of those who run those sites.

As for the story itself, I know nothing about solar power and little about electrical circuits. However, when I saw the picture of the thing I couldn't help but laughing.

Tone matters. You shouldn't lie but you also shouldn't be tone-deaf.

Tone matters for rhetorical persuasion. The only tone I desire from a scientific piece is the truth.

This wasn't only a "scientific piece" -- his stated reason for writing the post was to make a comment on the MSM -- and certainly it wasn't targeted only at scientific readers.

Anyone (like me) who read the commentary about the media, and mostly skimmed over the exhaustive detail on why the experiment was broken, was reading primarily an opinion piece, and certainly tone matters in that context.

I don't agree that tone "only matters for rhetorical persuasion" in the first place (or perhaps I disagree with the idea that rhetorical persuasion isn't always playing a role in scientific writing) -- but that's a larger discussion.

Turth has nothing to do with tone. And if you don’t care about tone I don’t want to work with you on anything. Scientists are humans, too.

One will have a difficult time being published in scientific journals if the tone is off. The paper has to make it through a series of editors and reviewers.

The thing about science is all of those working in the field are people. And tone matters when working with people.

You're expecting readers to know the difference? To know that this article was published without peer review?

That's like saying anything you read in the newspaper could be complete nonsense and you'd need to consult 50 different sources to determine what is and isn't true in today's news.

If that's the case then why the hell am I reading this garbage?

I think it's completely legitimate for the consumer to expect a certain amount of research and integrity go into these stories. I also think it's necessary to expose (like this) news sources that obviously haven't done due diligence.

I want to know which sources are garbage so I can blacklist them from my reading list before I dig a bunker because aliens riding unicorns pulled up to earth and are eating our trees.

Anything you read in the newspaper could be complete nonsense and you'd need to consult 50 different sources to determine what is and isn't true in today's news.

I assert this to be the case today with mainstream newspapers and television. I believe that some have less nonsense than others, but before I act on something I read in a newspaper, I consult other sources and verify.

You're probably right, and it's kind of depressing. I probably should fact check everything I read, but to be honest, sometimes I just can't be bothered. Better yet I shouldn't bother reading anything in the main stream news I don't have time to verify.

I'm pretty sure you're a minority on the fact checking by the way.

He could have been more polite but one can always be more polite.

Great comment. As Seth Godin said in http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/marketing-le... "Sell a story that some people want to believe. In fact, sell a story they already believe."

As a commenter on the Atlantic pointed out, lets not forget to consider the American Museum of Natural History's role here as the prime mover in the cascade of journalists. It surprises me that they didn't have more of an internal peer review.

So instead HN becomes the peer review.

You can either be quick or you can be thorough, usually being thorough switches your article from being O(n) to O(2^N). Much easier to reword a news release from somewhere than to actually comprehend what the article is saying & verifying it's logical. When eyeballs matter, getting the words out quickly matters more than what the words say.

Hurray for peer reviewed news.

> In that, the critique seemed hopelessly ignorant of how the news works.

I can't blame him for suffering from Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: http://harmful.cat-v.org/journalism/gell-mann-amnesia-effect

But he's not suffering from G-MAE here. G-MAE is about forgetting how factually wrong journalism is almost all of time vs. when it is wrong in relation to your specialty. Pointing out the errors when you can is part of the solution, not a continuation of the effect. The continuation occurs when one assumes generally that those errors aren't rampant in cases unrelated to what one already knows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com