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Comment by tysam_and | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!)

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.

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