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Comment by kseistrup | Hacker News Reader

You know it's clickbait when you see the word "mysterious" in a headline. Why not simply write "Celestial object unlike anything astronomers have seen before."

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The original is better than your proposed rewrite.

"Mysterious" does convey useful information. Something can be new but not mysterious.

"Celestial", on the other hand, conveys almost no useful information because generally every object astronomers look at is celestial.

The astronomers used the word "spooky", so I propose the headline below, for maximum correctness and confusion:

Spooky action at a distance

My proposed title:

Neutron star (or a white dwarf) spotted emitting massive radio bursts thrice every hour

But it is peculiar. Since neutron stars inhibit the momentum from their previous lives, they usual spin extremely fast when they collapse into a far smaller state. Magnetars do spin more slowly because of their magnetic field.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_braking_(astronomy)

They still usually spin much faster than the newly discovered object. Perhaps someone installed a strong magnet in the near vicinity.

I reused the definition used in the article itself, stripping down the sensationalism to a minimum.

It actually is mysterious though. Not mentioning the mystery would be click-repellent.

It's not that they've seen it before, it's that they haven't heard it like this before. It's almost like someone put the star on 33 1/3 instead of the 78rpm it's meant to be played.

The astronomers quoted in the article used the words "spooky", "unexpected" and "peculiar". It's not like the headline writer went completely off the rails.

If clickbait gets people reading science why do we care?

I'll tell you why. I read clickbait about molecular biology when I was a teenager (quite some time ago) and ended up thinking that biology was far more advanced than it really is. it took me decades of training to understand that publicly, scientists are more optimistic and likely to overstate the quality and applicability to their results. It would have helped me a lot if the original articles about gene therapy had said "this is a very risky technology and it's likely it will never be approved because people are terrified of side effects"

It took you decades of training to understand that?

Yes. I'm a slow learner, and basically the entire training system makes it hard to recognize just how juiced biology scientific communications are. There are legitimate subfields, and journals that aren't as bad as Nature. I mean if you want to be a successful scientist you have to practice some level of reality distortion to make progress.

I also didn't expect nearly all gene therapy would be stopped for over a decade due to a single patient dying in a trial in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger That sort of educated me ot the fact that people take some medical risks really seriously (OH GOD EGGS HAVE CHOLESTEROL) and others they completely ignore/downweight (like Flu).

I am still waiting for de-extinction.

Yes the World needs more clickbait that takes to actual learning resources, not people-ish articles, property porn and other horrors.

"Is this is the best XXX algorithm in the world?" "I have tried XXX low-level programming language and it's amazing!" "We went to the Science Museum and met XXX" "Top tips to enjoy working late at night on subject XXX and YYY" "Why STEM studies makes you look more sexy than XXX" "15 ways to look good while loving maths & physics" "You won't believe why the Riemann hypothesis was right!" "The 6 thing to do when banish Economics teacher fatigue" "Can't focus on XXX? Try this, it works!"

etc, etc, etc.

Because "Celestial object unlike anything astronomers have seen before" might be happening every day.

"Astronomers puzzled by enigma in the sky"

Astronomers puzzled by object wrapped in mystery inside an enigma in the sky

still it's a good read.

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