Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradley13 | Hacker News Reader

Sort of like p-hacking: If you choose small colonies, all located in a small area known for instable ice conditions, in some years, those colonies have problems. The ice in that area is subject to severe weather conditions, and in some years it breaks up and floats away.

Those problems didn't apply to the rest of Antarctica, but by omitting that information, the article makes good clickbait...

View on HN

"Record low 2022 Antarctic sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins"

"This is the first recorded incident of a widespread breeding failure of emperor penguins that is clearly linked with large-scale contractions in sea ice extent."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00927-x

Published and peer-reviewed. But according to you it is clickbait?

Yes? Title has no mention about specific regions. Abstract mentions specific regions. Even your comment is clickbait: you only include the title and a sentence that does not mention specific regions, despite you being aware of it, since you presumably read the abstract.

Let's stop pretending "peer-reviewed" means anything, please.

Means a lot more than a comment on Hacker News.

your comment has been peer-reviewed.

it was found to be subjective and unsupported.

Peer review raises the bar, but that bar is quite low, and not high enough to ensure anything like scientific truth.

I will leave it here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/19/stanford-pre...

I guess someone "peer reviewed" all his papers

This is a bad faith and ignorant take. As with anything at the edge of our knowledge, it’s not bulletproof, but peer review certainly does mean plenty. It is one of the most rigorous standards we have for the validity of observation and theories.

I think reproducibility is the gold standard. It’s hard to call peer review as practiced today “rigorous” when it comes to discerning truth.

Is it? If I'm not mistaken this is exactly what journal editors, and reviewers, claim each and every time a new scandal blows up.

Yes, a comment on a website that just says “no” is way more truthy and should be taken at face value. Anything published and peer reviewed can just be assumed to be false.

Great call. Thanks for really bringing up the level of discourse.

Nature is not immune and has been leveraging clickbait articles as of not so late.

A significant portion of peer reviewed papers are biased, poorly backed claims making junk.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

This article highlights some (known) deficiencies, but doesn't seem to remotely support your assertion of “significant portion” being junk.

It also seems extremely likely that such things vary wildly by field, journal, etc.

Which is to say that throwing the whole thing out in preference to a completely unsourced and anonymous comment on HN seems, frankly, idiotic.

They do vary wildly yes.

Even within the same publication.

Nature has historically proven to be one of the top journal. Not taking that away from them. But being published by nature and peer reviewed does not mean such article cannot use a clickbait title and/or be non scientific.

So you concede that saying a “significant portion” was an outright lie with no basis in reality?

No I wouldn't concede that.

I took some precaution and made sure to not mention an estimate of what that portion represents. I think it fair to call it significant given it isn't breaking news.

Blame me for not providing references proving it is based on some interpretation of reality not only I, have.

Can you explain which of the article's claims you believe are unsubstantiated?

I was not referring to the article claims but to the argument that it was "peer reviewed"

As if that meant nature or the title couldn't be a clickbait, or the conclusion/claims dubious. They can be, that's all I called out.

The thing is: all five colonies are close together, on the peninsula. So "widespread" is false, incorrect, a lie, pick your favorite term.

So, yes, clickbait.

Article says there are 600–3000 penguins per colony. Charitably, let’s say the authors studied 15,000 penguins. Total penguin population estimate: 600,000. So this survey counted at most 2.5% of all penguins by reasonable estimates.

“Not a single emperor penguin chick survived” seems unsupported.

"Recent efforts to predict emperor penguin population trends from forecasts of sea ice loss have painted a bleak picture, showing that if present rates of warming persist over 90% of emperor colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of this century"

It's a very real problem, we are only seeing the start of it.

Is that a wild guess to “reinforce” your point or do you actually have knowledge that this is common and zero survivors happens freqently?

Either that or it sounds like you are blaming the penguins for nesting somewhere historically stable..

What is their point?

Careful readers will see the qualifier “parts” stick out like a sore thumb, look further, and find out this represents 4% of breeding pairs’ chicks.[1]

Sensationalized headlines ruin the conversation. How many people in this post alone are talking about the quality of this coverage rather than how rapid increase in temperature causes extinctions and kicking the can down the road makes are problems larger and more expensive than sensibly addressing them now.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/emperor-penguins-aba...

Not a single human survived in parts of NYC is technically true.

Everyone is a billionaire in parts of SF.

I feel silly for asking, however, this comment has 'whooshed' right over my head. Can you please elaborate and explain this to me?

The point is you can always pick a "part" of some place small enough to make any statement of that sort true. Pick a couple of square meter where someone died: "everyone died in parts of X". Pick the area around a couple of billionaire neighbors in SF: everyone is a billionaire in parts of SF. Etc.

Taken a step further, it's not science when the conclusion is based on cherry picked data; and it's not journalism when you ignore the fact the "science" isn't actually science.

This is why mathematicians are so meticulous with their "if and only if", "everywhere except a countable number of points", infinimum/supremum[1] and so on, and of course equations to really nail things down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infimum_and_supremum

It's related to the cherry picking fallacy. It's like saying, "everybody speaks French in parts of Europe", making it seem like that is the dominant language. While technically true that people speak French in Europe, the statement also completely omits a crucial detail that 92 % rest of Europe doesn't.

Yes it sort of plays on “parts” as an ambiguous quantity. To the reader, they may assume parts to be “the entire north” rather than “half a culdesac”

> Not a single human survived in parts of NYC is technically true.

It is technically true. But, if we're analysing excess mortality to observe extraordinary circumstances, we shouldn't let that truism disregard the observation that not a single human survived in the top 10 floors of a given skyscraperbof NYC on a particular Tuesday.

Isn’t the point that Antarctic sea ice is at a record low extent?

How about, instead of hoping for the best, we start assuming the worst. And for once act accordingly. It baffles me that people are willing to ignore a potential threat until the threat and impact have been proven completely, utterly and without even a shadow of a doubt.

"factual but not truthful"

thats a nice play on words, but fact and truth are synonymous. I think you're looking for the phrase: "factual but not informative"

I guess there is a reason they settled on the phrase "The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth".

This article is truth, but not the whole truth.

Knowing some facts and knowing the truth are different things. I'd say "factual but not truthful" is rigorous enough for a quip.

Fact and truth aren't synonymous. The connotation in English is different. A fact implies a verifiable statement with no grey area."A man died from falling". The truth implies you have the full picture and relevant context. "A man was murdered by being pushed off a building". Murder of course can't be 100% proven, it's a legal concept that involves intent and pre-planning and your location etc. Our fictional friend may be able to get a technicality that makes purposely pushing a man off a building not legally murder. But the truth would still be he murdered him.

"A man died from falling" is still truthful, though?

This is why courts have you commit not just to tell the truth, but the whole truth.

“The man did not die from the fall” is another example here. (He died from the impact, not the fall.)

I think that one is false, though? All of the following can be true:

* The man died from massive internal bleeding

* The man died from hitting the ground really hard

* The man died from falling off a building

* The man died from being pushed off a building

Perhaps intentionally misleading?

> "factual but not truthful"

Synonym for "talking points" ?

Meta: well, not sure if it was your goal, but reading your dismissal made me think, "Oh, this HN commenter's pointed out the article is full of crap, so, no need to attribute this to climate change, then.".. luckily another part of my brain said, "Wait a minute, why are you defaulting to thinking that HN commenter knows what he's talking about?!".

For me, once I realize that an article has specifically intended to deceive me (whether by exaggeration or misdirection), I don’t spend time further evaluating or even consuming what they were trying to say.

You could have a solid argument underlying your exaggeration and I just don’t care. Once you’ve intentionally deceived, I stop paying attention to you. You don’t lose just the detected deceitful part of your argument; you lose it all.

In that regard, whether or not the HN commenter knows anything about the underlying issue doesn’t matter. If they correctly clue me in to the deception, I don’t read the article.

That’s a shame. The writers of articles usually are not the writers of headlines. Yet you implicate the writer in the deception of the copywriter.

The writers of articles have far more per-capita influence over headlines than the readers do. If they want to maximize the reach and value of their work, they should exercise that influence.

Meanwhile, I'm doing my best by exercising the only influence that I have in the situation: hitting the X.

On the contrary, they have identical per capita influence: 0. At least as far as I understand how newspapers, magazines, etc. work. Blog writers? Sure.

Writers work for publishers. If a publisher writes misleading headlines, causing your work to be devalued, don’t work with them. If you keep working with them, you’re financially benefiting from and thereby complicit in their deceit.

I mean, that’s about as facile a claim as can be made. Sounds great in theory but in reality people working in print media don’t exactly have an expanding field full of opportunities for work.

Which brings us back to them being part of a system which is deceiving readers for financial gain. Hardly something that I feel a compulsion or obligation to support, even if only half of the partnership is directly involved in lying.

Yeah. So, if you were actually consistent in this stance, I don’t see how you could participate in really any piece of the modern economy. But I suspect you’re not consistent in this stance. I suspect it just bothers you more in this domain than others. But then, it’s normal for us humans to dress up our emotional responses in principled justifications.

Now why are those ice conditions instable?

Very little in the Sydney Morning Herald is true or factual. It's a player in politics of lies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com