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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

Look at it this way. The link to the article appeared on HN 15:59:54. braaannigan's comment appeared on 17:07:56. Thus, it took this HN user not more than 60 minutes to conclude that this article is of low quality and should not have been published in Nature. Nature's editors, the article's authors, and its peer reviewers disagree. braaannigan is anonymous and do not put their reputation on the line. Nature's editors and the article's authors do. If appeal to authority is a valid argument then I believe one side wins this debate in a landslide.

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The article was posted to arxiv in April. Believe it or not, >99% of the time I see a paper from my field on HN I've read it months before it's posted, and sometimes been aware of the research for up to a year before it's posted.

Also, the criticism is primarily a comment on methods (stats vs physical models) which can be based on lots of consideration and experience outside the context of any particular paper.

E.g. I can tell you that you've probably used the wrong optimization algorithm for particular task without spending much more than an hour glancing through your problem formulation and results. Doing that without the benefit of decades of experience would require weeks or months, but with experience I can make that determination quite quickly given a detailed write-up.

(FWIW: I think dynamical physics-based models are probably over-emphasized in climate science consensus, but I'm admittedly a complete novice whose opinion you shouldn't trust.)

> If appeal to authority is a valid argument

Well, thankfully it is not.

There's no need for one side or the other to "win," especially at this point. Instead, likely, debate will continue until a more-nuanced view is better understood and accurately disseminated.

(Not necessarily a view "in the middle." Sometimes one side is just Right, Full Stop. But a more-nuanced view when there's strong disagreement on both sides is usually helpful for more people to understand _why_ there's disagreement.)

Appeal to authority is only a fallacy where the authority is not actually an authority.

Mother nature decides such things ultimately, including whether the actions your and your Experts take are enough to carry the day.

Maybe best not to put all your eggs in one basket, or bet your future on one strategy!

Liam may be anonymous to you but he's not to me, he's also not anonymous on HN (he posts under a very close and obvious variation of his real name here) but apparently doesn't go out of his way to 'build a brand' or 'attract a following'. He really is what he says he is. Maybe tone it down a bit, especially because you are anonymous and apparently believe that is important?

To reemphasize: this is Nature Communications, not Nature. Editorially completely independent, much lower impact factor.

Well, If the model is correct, we for sure will feel a huge impact.

And this is the only factor that will really matter.

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