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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

In this case, I think the excitement and hopefulness was not dangerous or wrong, but I do see a risk to this kind of preprint hype in other contexts.

During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion, conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing.

Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the impact it will have on society as a whole and on the execution of science in particular. How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?

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I think this kind of excitement followed up with "wasn't anything after all" is both dangerous and wrong.

When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be considered science), which then leads the public to have elevated expectations, only then for science to be done right and disprove and reject the original "findings", public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.

I think you're conflating PR with the science underneath.

PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does.

The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and even then, not necessarily guaranteed! D: ---- -- in some potentially very small part -- whatever sphere is around us, and I feel that that's a collective individual responsibility.

Furthermore, preemptively reacting to expected third-party behaviors is doomed.

Journalists are going to write nonsense, hype-filled science articles. PR flacks are going to hype puff newswire blurbs. Why? Because that's what they're paid to do.

You can curse the existence of bad incentives, if you want annoying ideologues to call you a communist.

Or you can hire your own PR flacks. Because worrying about how people will react to what you're doing is PR, and going up against professionals without your own is like going to court without a lawyer.

Or you can just, you know, do science, accept that people suck sometimes, and get on with your life.

PR stands for public relations. Like, it literally is about controlling what the public does with releases. It's not total absolute control, but PR firms can work wonders. The university press office can take a paper and exaggerate the claims to try to make the university look better, or at least, not highlight that testing was done in mice, for example.

That is technically true, though in practice the definition I believe has expanded to include "general news and press coverage of XYZ", which is how I'm phrasing it here.

Having had some work get incredible attention, and other work not at all, I've experienced a small slice of the volatility of the web. My most popular, for example, tweet chain was a semi-technical vent I wrote over the course of 30 minutes after stewing about some semi-useless technical hype that no one seemed to be addressing the flaws in. I wrote it in a way that was more attention-grabbing somewhat than my more technical posts, put it out there, and shared it in a few places. It was pretty shallow, technically, I think, but I feel like it really had to be stated, since it sorta felt...really pretty obvious?

Two days later or so, my number of Twitter followers had over quadrupled.

I think humanity can be quite finicky sometimes (a more general statement, I don't think one could conclude that from the previous anecdote alone).

PR is a euphemism for propaganda, popularized by Edward Bernays as propaganda to promote the perception of American exceptionalism (propaganda is something the enemies of America do, here in America we do public relations instead!)

public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged

This is just another example of the media’s negative effect on society. Similarly, the media endlessly poring over every detail of the Ukraine war has likely made their job much more difficult because it damages the element of surprise.

The media originally began as something quite negative with what we called “yellow journalism.” Then for a century or so we saw a kind of golden age of journalism where newspapers had strong reputations to uphold but were fairly rewarded for it through ads and classifieds.

Now the media is back to yellow journalism (clickbait) and eroding the institutions of society.

I don’t think you can blame the media for this one. I heard very little to nothing about LK-99 from the news or the regular people in my life. But I heard a ton about it from my “tech” friends that spend a lot of time on Twitter, and HN.

The issue mostly comes from the current yellow journalism state of science news sites. It's a game of telephone where the further you get from the paper, the more details are missing and hyped. Often times losing the very essence of what was discovered.

I don't know why you're implying that laymen are beneath discussing/speculating on scientific research, since during COVID plenty of bullshit was spread by the supposed experts too, which is what fueled distrust in the first place. It should be a lesson that people now take "Science" far too seriously, it has clearly turned into a religion for many with a hierarchy of authorities that must not be questioned (something like government propagandists > mainstream journal editors > scientists >>> the lowly sinful masses). I guess that's why the blunders of our health authorities are being conveniently forgotten or handwaved with paltry excuses today; they're above criticism, while it's "dangerous" if the proles commit the same mistakes.

> How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?

Ask L Ron Hubbard?

The willingness of the crowd to believe in counterfactual things is not constrained to science, and whatever damage/risk is posed by that is not new - as Galileo can attest.

Have we been so throughly baked into anti-intellectualism that people who can read, and use that advanced skill on Wikipedia, along with the other skill of critical thinking, are to be denigrated as "armchair X-ologists"? I know our country's rallying cry is "Math is hard, let's go shopping", but not all of us have bought into that anti-science, anti-knowledge, anti-being-smart-at-all attitude. Thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of very clever and motivated people, we have humanity's knowledge at our fingertips, and we're supposed to not use it? Just proudly stand up and say "I refuse to learn new things!"

How many worse decisions are made by people who can't read and won't learn about the nuances of a topic?

You're attacking a very elaborate straw man constructed around a single phrase in my comment. I didn't say what you think I said.

Strawmen attacks meet the minimum requirement of coherence, there's a connection to the statement being attacked. So like be grateful.

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