Hacker News Reader

Comment by sriram_malhar | Hacker News Reader

I really DETEST people like this. All they do is rob people of their trust and leave the world worse off. They are no different from the likes of Tucker Carlson who chuckle that they got a rise out of their critics. "We weren't being serious. We are entertainment, not news", when caught out.

Then they have their usual defenders, including in this thread, who take the stance that it serves the uninformed reader right, that one should do one's own research and not trust everything that is written or said. What does one base one's research on? What sources does one trust? What does one do when one is not an expert on that topic, but merely interested in it?

Trust is a beautiful thing. Let the trust-breakers not get a free ride.

View on HN

I'm thankful for people like this. They make apparent the systemic flaws that we--the people of the earth who depend on those systems--may otherwise be unaware of.

I see this as a form of white-hat hacking. Telling off white-hat hackers leads to less white-hat hackers, which leads to less vulnerabilities discovered by white-hats, which leaves you open and vulnerable to grey- and black- hat hackers (e.g.: a student of dietary studies hoping to receive acclaim for their research, even if the outcome of that research being published is overall harmful).

This is one white-hat publishing one paper. I assure you there are far more grey- and black-hats out there producing a greater many more papers.

The people of the groups that we have delegated authority to (the governments, megacorps, and supporting companies/associations/schools of the world) are doing a rather mediocre job of managing all this stuff, so I don't mind an individual stepping up and trying to bring attention to something like this that has such negative effects on so many people.

I think if you hacked a bunch of people and then were like, "see, look, you're vulnerable," it would be seen as a violation of privacy and professional ethics. You'd be in serious legal jeopardy.

When I was young and foolish I did similar things, and I regard them as mistakes. On one occasion I accidentally endangered an untold number of people, likely thousands, and I'll never know what the consequences were; they could be nothing, or I could've gotten someone killed, and I'll never know. (Please note that I have grown & matured, and don't engage in similar behavior anymore.)

The same goes for spreading bullshit. It's not proving a point about a potential harm, it is knowingly perpetrating that harm. And you have no way of knowing what the consequences are; what people do with the bullshit you've fed them.

You don't need to create bullshit to illustrate this point, there's plenty out there in the wild to choose from and write about.

This definitely resembles black-hat much more than white-hat hacking. At the end of the day, the author is still spreading fake news, getting people trying to lose weight to eat more chocolate, and giving tabloids more advertising dollars. A white hat hacker doesn't cause any harm.

No, we don't need more ugliness in the world to point out ugliness. Let them spend their time and effort by shaming those who mislead, or gently correct bad interpretations of science, as the case may be. Those who are lazy or mislead must pay a price in society, through social and financial disincentives. Otherwise we have the Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson and the dictatorial politicians of the world run riot.

That's what they did.

If you're a science journalist and you can't tell a science paper like this is bullshit in in less than 15 minutes you should be fired.

Of course you never will be because the point of news isn't to inform but to get you to watch adds.

Then the scientists should spend their time naming and shaming other articles that those very journalists and papers have written, not contribute more bilge that others have to factcheck. This is not equivalent to ethical white hacking.

We need more people like Ben Goldacre ("Bad Science").

Bad Science was published in 2008. Whatever strategy it advocated has clearly failed to gain traction, as the problem is even worse than when it was published. Might be time to be open to some other, more bombastic, strategies. You seem to be saying the ends did not justify the means in this case -- I'm not so sure of that. We're living in a world where some of the most educated people among us put signs in their front yard that say "in this house we believe... science is real". Yikes!

This debunkint of fake news didn't go viral. Fake news goes viral. Now what? Planting more fake news as a troll doesn't help. 4chan style "spam lies for lulz" makes everything worse, not better.

You live in the world 4chan made and don't even realize it.

In the general case, I agree. In this case, science research/publication, there should be no trust necessary. The issue here isn't that your average Joe reading an article was fooled. The issue is that the news journalists reporting on this were fooled into writing about bad science. These are the people/organizations whose job it is to curate what to report, and who's trust is lost.

I agree that journalists _should_ do due diligence. But society is full of lazy and evil people, who will not do it, or worse, manufacture a false trail of though unsupported by evidence.

But "scientists" like this who think of themselves as doing the public a service shouldn't have to pile on more shit on the world. If they want to do good, they should do exposés on lazy journalism.

In both cases they should pay for their misdeeds, at the very least by being shamed in public, or losing govt funding for some time, etc depending on the scale.

I don’t think that’s fair at all; he’s pointing out a critical flaw — the trust being given out today is given blindly; he’s just pointing out how trivially anyone can participate in that abuse, and with such a low barrier to entry, we should assume there are many malicious actors already executing on it.

Fine, he hasn’t given a solution beyond find better experts, but you’re basically just blaming the messenger; the trust has already been broken, you just don’t know it yet. And the trust-breakers are those experts and verification systems, that don’t actually do any verification. Your advisors aren’t doing their jobs.

And you’re cursing him for showing it to you? Or because the sham should continue uninterrupted? We don’t have a system of trust but verify; we just pretend to.

No, he's not a messenger. He's the source of a fresh new mistruth. I don't need more ugliness to know that there is ugliness in the world, so yes, I am cursing him. Bild does enough trashy journalism that it doesn't need help.

I think if it were obvious to all onlookers that the bild can’t be trusted anyways, then him acting as new source would be completely a non-issue; no one trusts the bild anyways. He’s not really a source of mistruth any more than a raving lunatic babbling away in the outskirts of town.

If that’s not the case, and people do trust the bild, then acting as source is problematic; but it seems to me that exposing the lack of trustworthiness is then important and unambiguously a net positive — at least if it reaches the same people who’ve been tricked in the first place.

> exposing the lack of trustworthiness

There not happening. Th people who spread fake news (on purpose or ignorantly as A/B automatons) have no interest in publishing proof that they are misbehaving.

“… no one trusts the bild anyways.”

They might not say they trust it, but they sure do unironically read it all over rural Bavaria and in every little Gasthaus, even in the cities.

A little while back someone posted in a thread that people who couldn’t identify “obvious fake” currency deserved to be defrauded. I am frequently appalled at the lack of compassion that some have for their fellow humans.

I can only guess that it’s a sort of survivors-bias, where “it hasn’t happened to me, so I must be doing what is right”

It seems to be a prevailing theme in the financial sector to blame people you con for being stupid and deserve nothing better.

I think the mindset stems from short term stocktrading, where you offload at the top to some sucker, or buy from some sucker at the bottom. There is no cooperation just zero sum.

And this mindset spreads from there to other areas where it is not very nice thing to do.

Before I checked the article, I agreed, but this is a bit more about calling out institutions (science reporters) who really ought to be doing at least the least amount of legwork before publishing.

Like, sample size 15. You can check that before you publish. You do have some responsibility to if you are a reporter, no?

I dunno compare it with someone releasing "left-pad-2", with the code actually printing that you should really audit you deps.

So yes, I agree, and might have hoped the plug was pulled a little faster, and the author really rides the newspapers into writing redactions, as it's really testing in prod. But like please, gatekeepers, publishers, trust the fad diet stuff a little less.

Bizarre that this is the top comment on this thread right now. I agree they've done some damage, but you seem to have dismissed their justifications without any explanation. Do you really believe we should trust random tabloids just because "trust is a beautiful thing"? I was already plenty aware of fake news and p-hacking, but this article still proved useful to me by demonstrating exactly how far you can go with it and which sources to not trust.

I can offer you a thousand examples of "How far can fake news travel". Pizzagate, anti-vax, moon conspiracies ...

"_Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it_" (Jonathan Swift, 1710)

Not only don't I want anyone to add to a pile of mistruths, I want purveyors of misinformation to face social and financial disincentives.

> Do you really believe we should trust random tabloids

Of course not. "Tabloid" === trashy journalism, so no, no trust. Those of us who believe in being good and not misleading people should join efforts to make sure that misinformation does not get out of hand; at the very least we should not be manufacturing trash of our own to prove to others how badly it can go.

I see this more like a security researcher identifying a vulnerability in a system, executing a proof of concept, and then disclosing it.

This vulnerability is being exploited by worse actors. Exposing the vulnerability publicly may bring about change to make the system less vulnerable.

The world could do without uninformed blind trust right about now. Anything that helps people leave a little room for doubt is a good thing.

Trust is a wonderful thing... in a world where most people are trustworthy.

In a world where the replication crisis is a thing and a third of psychology studies replicate?

In a world where the vast majority of "science" stories published in news sites are grossly misleading or wrong?

It's important to destroy that trust.

Though I do have one problem with this article. It implies the main problem in the reality->public pipeline is the scientists themselves, when it's actually journalists, university PR teams and the general public in that order. (Though blaming the last is in poor taste as they're time poor comparing to the others and have no training in how PR teams and journalists mislead)

I saw this specific instance as somewhat differently. These were all people with inside knowledge of a system that they saw as broken, and wanted an effective way to communicate that fact to the world. They accomplished their goal.

So in a slight twist on your example, it'd be like if Tucker Carlson had actually been spending the past few decades putting together a documentary about how Fox News and the Republican party sold out democracy in exchange for political power and money.

You certainly might not be a fan, but it would absolutely change how you look at him.

> So in a slight twist on your example, it'd be like if Tucker Carlson had actually been spending the past few decades putting together a documentary about how Fox News and the Republican party sold out democracy in exchange for political power and money. > You certainly might not be a fan, but it would absolutely change how you look at him

Um, no. You are hundred percent wrong. I'd be white-hot with rage at the destruction of society that his large-scale deceit had wrought in the time he was conducting his experiment.

I agree with you. I can’t stand people like this, but it’s only slightly above people who create comment systems like Reddit or this site.

These scumbags do it once, social media does it at scale.

Yeah, so without trust this research would take a long time.

First of all, you'd need to know what to learn, which is pretty hard.

In this case that would be what? At least basic and some advanced understanding of human anatomy, metabolic processes, neurotransmitters maybe, some pharmacology, nutrition, that's too much for most people.

It would be easier to just learn how to tell honest people from scammers/liars/propagandists and then trust some of them.

If they had falsified the design or results of the study, this would just be a hoax. But the design of the study was obviously flawed in a way that does not require specialized knowledge to detect. What knowledge it does require should be a basic requirement of the job of science journalist.

Why is the job of a journalist, but not the job of a scientist or journal or reader?

> Trust is a beautiful thing. Let the trust-breakers not get a free ride.

Trust has to be earned. If you trust anything by default, you are just being a fool.

One of the first things that an elderly friend of mine noticed when he visited me in the US is that all the currency notes were of uniform size. He said, 'that's the sign of a trusting/trustworthy society. Visually impaired people trust others to not cheat them".

There are countless things that you trust by default. Think of all the Bayesian priors. It is too tiring to be distrusting and cynical all the time.

It's actually a sign than Americans are bad at policy.

> There are countless things that you trust by default

Nope, there are just things I would be more or less surprised if they were untrustworthy.

The trust-breakers are already getting a free ride by way of people not knowing. The point is that "trust-breakers are in much greater supply than one might think, so think/learn critically instead of simply trusting". Or, one can continue basking their head in sand.

I am thankful for this study. I haven't trusted diet news articles about studies for at least a decade, and since the "Venus has life", I am very sceptical of any paper claiming "novel" things (I am a researcher myself).

So what do you do when someone who breaks that trust for money/control/nefarious purposes? Like say hiding the fact that sugar is killing more people today than cigarettes ever did?

The total truth is they didn't prove anything.

Dark chocolate could still be a great weight loss product, and this "study" has tarnished that line of research.

They didn’t do anything to make the journalists “report” the nonsense findings.

This is a media problem through and through. Journalism is in trouble.

What do you mean? It's hilarious. Anyone with a bit of common sense knows you're gonna gain weight eating a chocolate bar a day

Oh really? Is it only the chocolate bar or that's in addition to everything else?

Where I live, a chocolate bar is ~600Cal. I would definitely lose weight living on 600Cal a day (it won't be healthy/sustainable but the weight is going to be lost for sure).

Donate the lost money to the charity of your choice.

I agree, but on HN, expect middle-brow contradiction for its own sake . . .

Oh, lookie, there it is already!

It's simple supply and demand. The modern NPC requires constant firmware updates, the content of which is immaterial. If the NPC goes for too long on the same firmware version, s/he runs the risk of "having a think" and corrupting the execution.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we have to ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing this.

It's fine not to use your real name on HN but it's not fine to break the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com