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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

I dislike the article's declaration that the discrepancy between theoretical prediction and measurements was "embarrassing".

Being wrong is just as much part of science as being right. ...all part of the process.

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That's a word that has very different connotations in professional physics research. We understand the process of science pretty well, and are more used to being wrong than most people.

It's used in the very old sense of "perplexing", not "to make someone feel awkward".

1b, not 1a: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/embarrass

Ah, its not a term commonly used in neuroscience literatures...probably because what we don't know far outweighs what we do know that its a given that needs no utterance.

The inability to compatibly resolve the two most important and basic theories (relativity and quantum throry) means we know either gravitation or quantum mechanics, or most likely both, are wrong, or at least incomplete, in the same way Newtonian mechanics was only partially right.

And that's been an embarrassment well-known for the last century. The word has a metaphorical use of the sore spot, that which sticks out, which is ugly, which is confusing or awkward. "This code is embarrassing" doesn't necessarily mean the author should literally feel embarrassment. It's just messy. (Yes, really. It's in the dictionary as a sense of the word.)

This feels like calling someone a "moron" and then when they get offended saying "You shouldn't be offended, literally everyone is a moron because nobody is competent in everything".

What is the gain exactly in using language (like "embarrassing") that discourages mistakes and makes people feel worse about being wrong (even if they technically shouldn't). Plenty of better words exist.

Side note, I would definitely feel embarrassed if someone publicly called my code "embarrassing". Even if I shouldn't.

Physics is very grandiose in its goals I wouldn't compare it to your code. Embarrassment just means something to strive for in the physics colloquial.

This work has nothing whatsoever to do with gravitation.

characterizing it as an "embarrassment" is silly. Maybe if there was a group of alien civilizations that had all figured it out early on while we didn't then sure.

He’s explicitly saying that it is not embarrassing in this sense and that it is rather that the discrepancy is ‘awkward’

"An embarassment of riches", John Ozell, 1738

There are different ways to come to the wrong conclusion and the more naively and publicly you do that, the more people think scientists waste our time with poorly designed experiments.

To be fair, I don't know in this particular case but science "journalism" tends to be the source of most naive information resulting in the public believing scientist are clowns randomly asserting stuff.

I suppose "how to talk to journalists" should be a major skill of scientists, but really: no matter what they say, you know journalists will turn it into "Scientists Now Claim Parallel Universe Full Of Aliens".

Most of the time when you hear a result in science news that 'seems obvious why research that?' is because of poor reporting.

Or because nobody listens to the times we research an "obvious" thing and it is anything but! Remember, disease spreading in polluted water wasn't obvious at one point, and physicians washing their hands before doing surgery was so "unobvious" that what was considered obvious at the time was that a physicians hands are of course clean.

"Common sense" isn't merely a myth, but also often is propaganda, that everything we know is obvious and easily understood by a layman from first principles that you can reason through, rather than having to rely on extremely specialized people to do real tests of things we think we "know" to find out what reality is.

Remember that next time someone wants to push "Common Sense" regulation on anything. Humans are explicitly ANTI-rational creatures, and the ONLY defense against that is to verify everything we can against reality's judgement.

At no point could anyone have just "thought about it harder" to get from aristolean physics to Newtonian physics. Rhetoric cannot provide answers or new information, it can only convince.

Finding agreements is incremental work. Finding discrepancies is paradigm-shifting work. It's all part of the process called "science".

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