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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

There probably is some reasonable etiquette that needs to be established. I'd probably feel blindsided if someone criticized my work in public w/o first talking to me about it. The counterargument is that -- it's a public paper, we should be able to criticize it in any venue we like. But in that world it's very easy for those with the loudest microphone to effectively kill research they don't (or the research of people they don't like).

In a small enough community, it seems reasonable to go to the researcher and say, "we're going to make this statement about that research -- do you have a comment". Almost like a newspaper -- both mediums are trying to present truth, rather than create a narrative, so that's probably why it's so similar.

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> I'd probably feel blindsided if someone criticized my work in public w/o first talking to me about it.

Why, though? If you present your work in front of audience, it is extremely reasonable to expect the audience offer questions or criticism. If the mere fact of people criticizing your work after your presentation makes you feel blindsided, it’s simply a matter of adjusting expectations: you simply should expect criticism.

Then, if you expect criticism, but feel blindsided by the contents of the criticism, this means that you failed your job as a researcher. If someone can come up with a point after listening to your presentation for a few minutes, that you didn’t have thought of in advance and prepared answer for it, it means that you’re doing bad job, and should do better. You should actually thank the critic for bringing the issue to your attention, because in doing so, he helped you.

> You should actually thank the critic for bringing the issue to your attention, because in doing so, he helped you.

Heckling is not "helping." Nobody wants to be humiliated by public criticism they weren't prepared for, which may or may not itself be valid-- but a poor response from the presenter makes one look incompetent in front of their peers nonetheless.

Callouts are sadistic and unprofessional. That anyone should thank someone for punching them in the face as criticism for not seeing it coming is ludicrous. It's bully logic.

You very quickly went from "criticism" in the parent post to "heckling", "humiliated", "callouts", "sadistic", "punching them in the face", "bully". Criticism doesn't have to be any of those things.

I’ll go further and say that criticism is _none_ of those things and that conflating is tantamount to scaremongering with a straw man.

An academic must be prepared to defend his research. An academic must be willing to change their mind when information warrants it. A researcher must expect and even welcome queries, challenges, and deep questions. A member of the academic community must politely but rigorously criticise presented research or theories because science is based on cordial mutual doubt, that’s why we insist on independent replication and verification.

Play fair but don’t be deferential. And don’t tarry every critic with the epithets of heckling. It’s called academic debate, without it you have progress, just polite mutually-reinforcing deference that advances human knowledge and technology one iota.

I agree with you completely. What makes me sad, however, is that you describe the ideal of academia I had in my mind when I was entering academia, which simply no longer exists, if it ever had. Academia is not focused on the pursuit of the truth anymore, and we get to watch its value and reputation decay and die in front of our eyes.

To be clear, I wasn’t talking about during a presentation. I was thinking after, for example on Twitter or in a magazine editorial.

The one place I’d be more OK with it is in another paper. But even then if the criticism is rather scathing, I think there is a courtesy to them reaching out and saying — “we’re planning on showing how your method was wrong and your results misleading for this reason in our forthcoming paper”.

Because once the argument goes public people tend to dig in their heels and true progress is not likely to be made.

Progress is not made because one person was defensive about using the wrong method? Wouldn’t the other 99% just ignore the person who “digs in their heels”?

The other 99% probably can’t tell who is who. And now rather than the researchers working together, they’ve both dug in to a public dispute rather than doing science. It’s human nature.

Doesn't praising people create the same issue?

It's easy for those with the loudest microphone to promote the work of the researchers they like or are connected to, or research that confirms their preexisting beliefs. This risks making the field insular by excluding new voices with new perspectives and without such preexisting interpersonal ties.

I think that you need criticism to be able to overcome this issue: to allow disinterested parties to push back on praise given by biased sources, and to ensure that current researchers aren't always elevated above newer ones.

It doesn’t create quite the same issue because being criticized can make the outside voices not only unheard, but people may want to actively avoid even association.

One environment discourages research in certain fields while the other encourages it in certain fields. It’s similar, but not the same. And I think the former is worse.

Praise tends to cause people to seek association with those being praised, and those who are praised the most tend to be insiders with lots of friends in the field. This effectively does the same thing, causing people to shun outsiders and instead try to attach themselves to those who are already the most prominent members of the field.

I don't think that it really encourages research to create an environment that makes people uncomfortable voicing criticism of those with the greatest power and influence.

They won’t be shunned. That’s the point. In the other model they would be. But in this model people will actively seek out breakthroughs to get praise.

Everyone says they want constructive feedback. But most people actively avoid it. If I told you as a young scientist you can go into a field where you will never get praised, just criticized or Vice versa where do you think even most of the top young scientists would go?

No one wants to have their career be “I think I did good work, but pretty much everyone just found issues so it never really made traction”.

If I asked someone whether they wanted to go into a field where they would never feel able to criticize people, do you think they would want to join?

Suppose, for instance, that somebody in HCI proposed a new system that would be horribly inaccessible to people with disabilities, to the point that widespread adoption would cause actual harm. Wouldn't it be best for society if the rest of the field felt empowered to criticize their work?

Furthermore, people often feel pressured to praise the works of their friends and colleagues; in doing so, they elevate the most connected members of the field above those doing breakthrough research.

The etiquette is if someone catches you in a real mistake, you should thank them (yes it can be hard, etiquette isn't always the same as reacting naturally). After all they could have ignored your existence but bothered to read your work.

If you think they are wrong you are expected and encouraged to respond publicly with why. Perhaps many people misread your work just same as that person so would benefit from the debate.

EDIT: and by the way, if you think they are wrong you should thank them for the same reason.

Mistakes are common in doing any non-trivial work. On HN coding is a great example. We have code reviews and it is standard practice to have issues raised there. It’s less common for someone to find and issue at CR and send it to the CEO to call an all hands to have him point out your bug to the company. In fact it would seem absurd to even raise this as a hypothetical. That is more the equivalent of what we’re discussing here.

Would you thank your colleague for raising your bug to the CEO or posting a LinkedIn article about your bug before talking to you about it?

Coding is not a great example. It can be fixed silently and the error disappears, unlike published claims. And I'd say you're making an analogy that is extreme. The corrections we are talking about are shared in the same forum the error was shared. If you had presented the mistake to the CEO or on linkedin then it would be appropriate for the error to be pointed out there too. Otherwise the audience will remain misled.

If it's some minor code bug from a typo or something, your embarrassment should be correspondingly tiny. And still the right thing to do is say "thanks" or "nice catch".

My biggest learning opportunities in science have come from watching two intellectual heavyweights engaged in robust debates. Unfortunately, it seems increasingly common for people to infer mental or emotional states of their fellow debater, which derails good debate.

Reasonable etiquette in science is critiquing the expressed ideas and methods rather than the person (or what has been inferred).

I definitely agree this is an etiquette rules discussion - and that maybe this change has to do with how loud the loudest microphones can get. Maybe pre-internet, the only people who would see criticism would be other experts in the field. But now maybe even things offline are more public. I've heard many academics use twitter - which means a critique in public could easily become a tweet, and then viral in the community, etc.

I do really like that newspaper comparison, especially because it could prevent misunderstanding what an author was trying to say.

Twitter is poison for academic debate. It is already impossible to discuss a complex matter over email—most nuance gets lost. Twitter is much worse, a) because of the character limit, b) because of the crossfire that is a wild mix of relevant and irrelevant comments, plus pure trolling.

It’s got to the point where if I find myself in cordial debate with so,embody whose thesis I disagree with (in 280 character chunks at the time) I thank them for the debate.

And that’s the thing: if you go into a conversation only to ‘right’ the other person’s views and are unwilling to revise/question yours then you’re not debating, you’re preaching… and there’s way too much of that already. Furthermore some of people are very ‘polite’ (in that they let you expound your views) but I’ve noticed many just wait for an option to lunch into their monologue. That isn’t debate either. It’s socially less jarring but in a way intellectually dishonest.

On the other hand, perhaps we could sit through half a book of refutation of refutation (cf. Conjectures and Refutations, literally the entire second half of the book), sometimes with not quite an impersonal tone.

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