Hacker News Reader

Authors of articles in publications rarely get to write the headlines. However, Hacker News people pay inordinate attention to headlines, so we see statements like this: "trust in the scientific community ... gets eroded" because of headlines. We don't need to pay more attention to the problem of clickbait headlines. We pay too much attention to that already. What matters is the substance and interested people can dive deeper, treating headlines and press releases with appropriate skepticism.

I mean, you're right that the personal adaptation everyone can start making today is to treat headlines and press releases with appropriate skepticism.

But this isn't some fringe HN phenomenon where riled up nerds focus on spurious details and make big complaints about them. Headlines matter. Before social media, headlines are what people read as they walked by the newsstand, what they heard from the crier, what they saw on the overlay on the TV news station in the lobby and at the gym. And now, in the age of social media, headlines are an even louder currency of fact. Almost all social media sites operate as headline + votes + comments. There are stories behind those headlines, a click (and maybe a paywall) away, and the minority of intellectually diligent communities like HN do a a good job of surfacing the details into the comments so that bad headlines are less toxic.

But our behavior here is already the exception and we do need to keep banging on misrepresentative headlines. While also a form of clickbait, they are a different and far more irresponsible class of it than the than harmlessly, wastefully vague click-for-the-mystery headlines that you're tired of hearing complaints about.

In some HN discussions, it seems that half of the comments are from people who only read the headline and are flaming about it, or who read the headline and the article and want to argue about whether they match, or whether the headline is overly sensational and promises something that the article doesn't deliver. Too much meta-discussion, not enough real discussion. And here I am engaging in it too, if only to push back.

It's not that HN folks pay inordinate attention to headlines in isolation. I don't think you meant it that way, but that's how it comes off. The issue is that people often don't read the articles that the headlines are for. We can see this on any social media app. For the purposes of this comment, maybe discussion?, I think that HN, Reddit, Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, etc., are all social media. Some folks might want to squabble over exacts but to make things simple to discuss I chose to define it as such.

For science in particular, I think it gets a bad wrap generally because people don't like it when you tell them something might be true then say it isn't. The general population really doesn't seem to like it when the scientific community says "we may have the answer for x, y, and/or z but we don't know for certain." as that's too complex of a thought to keep. We, generally, love to be told simple truths for complex problems.

We see this in politics broadly, as well. When discussing tickets as a SWE I know we tend to understand this by the time we're intermediate developers and adapt our language appropriately.

HN policy is not to modify the headlines when posting things, which I think exacerbates the issue.

> However, Hacker News people pay inordinate attention to headlines, so we see statements like this: "trust in the scientific community ... gets eroded" because of headlines.

Trust in HN's ability to think critically is eroded every time circumstances force you to remind everyone of this.

It's always interesting to see which groups of people are held responsible for other people misrepresenting them, and which aren't.

This is tremendously unfair, though. The "scientific community" is not responsible for these university press releases and popular science journalism. The papers themselves almost never contain claims that aren't propertly quantified and modest, outside of grifter realms like psychologists selling self-help services.

We're not going to stop the press, and the scientists themselves are usually already doing the right thing. The only real hope I see is for the public to somehow come to better understand the difference between science and the press. When you see this, absolutely point it out, but place the blame where it belongs, on newspapers, magazines, and university PR departments, not on the researchers.

This makes me sad. Now whenever some article with ambitious claims pops up into view, my first reaction is "what's the catch?"; i.e. what elemts of the research are overstated for the sake of virality.

It's even more frustrating when done by what are considered "mature" if not "reputable" publications. "Who am I supposed to trust now?" is a question I never wanted to answer when it comes to scientific research.

> "Who am I supposed to trust now?" is a question I never wanted to answer when it comes to scientific research.

Nullius in verba (Latin for "no one's words" or "take nobody's word for it") is the motto of the Royal Society. John Evelyn and other fellows of the Royal Society chose the motto soon after the Society's founding in 1660.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba

> Nullius in verba (Latin for "no one's words" or "take nobody's word for it")

For the most literal possible translation, "on the word(s) of no one".

Well, sort of. It appears to actually say "onto the words of no one".

Sometimes it turns out that someone has already written a paper on your exact nearly pointless topic!

https://sci-hub.se/https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/b...

So nullius in verba has bizarre grammar because it is an ungrammatical selection of a few words from a longer original Latin sentence with correct grammar. Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri means "To swear [oneself] slave of no master", where in verba attaches grammatically to the verb, iurare, not to the master.

This interpretation isn't possible in the clipping because the only attachment point for nullius is verba. But in the original poetry, nullius is bound to magistri, which is then bound to addictus, not to verba.

It’s really not new. People have been hyping up things for centuries. Old newspapers are full of breathless coverage of the snake oil du jour or the next big thing that turns out to be nothing. Scientists have been at it for a really long time as well.

Maybe you pay more attention to it (or are more sensitive to it) now because you’re not as much of an idealist as when you were younger? More experience and having been fooled a couple of times tend to do that.

I any case, a healthy dose of skepticism is good. You just need to be prepared to change your mind when it turns out that something was actually important after all.

You always needed to do that. It’s why the scientific method even exists. One can only trust what one has tested. And when someone else makes a claim? Verify, test, evaluate, and only then trust.

It’s also why critical thinking is historically such an important part of education.

Get real human beings to stop clicking on eyeball bait. Far easier said than done, when the bait is ultimately being generated not by other individual human beings, but corporations (effectively slow-AIs or Lovecraftian monstrosities) that can bring far more resources to bear on getting us to click.

>Trust in the scientific community (which is approaching crisis) gets eroded every time papers are overstated,

While I detest clickbait with the fury of a million Betelgeuses, I welcome increased skepticism towards science and especially the "scientific community".

Science is fundamentally built upon skepticism, you never implicitly trust anyone or anything. You verify theories and findings as humanly possible and only then trust what remains only as far as you can throw them (which could still be false, depending on our ability to verify).

Science implicitly trusted is no different from blind worship in religion. I have nothing against religion, but science isn't a religion.

"Trust the science." is by far one of the most damaging mindsets that have come about for science.

> Trust in the scientific community (which is approaching crisis) gets eroded every time papers are overstated, like in the headline here.

I mostly agree, but the headline caught my attention and I read the article and learned some things.

> But the headline?

If you search for Theia right now, you get the same headline and story propagated across a number of publications who syndicate their science news.

It appears that it takes one person placed in a position of power (writing headlines) to screw this all up.

The headline here is from a press release, so the culprit here is the university press office.

relevant as ever:

The Science News Cycle

https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Uni PR office at 2 o'clock

They screw up fairly regularly, unfortunately. Vulgarisation and scientific news for normal people are a shit show, between incompetents journalists and hype-chasing universities.

I think it's more accurate to say that the trust the scientific community has for regurgitation of scientific papers erodes. I can't imagine it has much effect on the general populace's perception of the practice.

> The researchers ran a simulation that seems to align with the scarce physical insights

Fwiw, we will probably never be able to directly observe the contents of the mantle. Computer simulation has been a godsend for geology research.

> Fwiw, we will probably never be able to directly observe the contents of the mantle.

Unless this proposal goes forward someday: https://www.nature.com/articles/423239a

Relevant not-xkcd "The Science News Cycle" https://tapas.io/episode/18523

Some 20 seconds in, got a pop-up demanding I install an app. Dismissing the pop-up caused the page to close.

OP posted a link aggregator or something, try going to the original site:

https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174