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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

Why is science reporting such irredeemable clickbaity trash? Not just from the mainstream media with commercial motive, from whom I naturally expect trash, but also from nonprofit universities of all places.

Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down? Anybody who reads the article will roll their eyes at the headline, and the publisher isn't even getting ad revenue from this shit. Why are they pandering to the most base idiots like this?

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> Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline? People who only read the headline and think "Woweee science is amazing!" before scrolling down?

That's a bigger fraction of the population than we might like to think...and probably the majority of the eventual readers of that headline (as it trickles through to other publications). I'd bet your sarcasm is actually correct there.

So, I have some competing thoughts on this. On the one hand, science is tedious and boring but people often pursue it as a career because it is in some way inspirational or aspirational. Students in science programs aren't just yearning for the mines. Also, science is highly repetitive and yet all grant money is scoped as pursuing something new and innovative.

When I worked at a research lab, the communications folks would often ask me, can we call it AI? They were almost begging to put that label on it, I suppose they new that would be high quality bait. But no, sorry it's just statistics and computational methods.

This is a way to show off someone's mathematical work to a non-mathematical audience and to promote the college. Would you prefer "Our scientists wrote a paper about some math they did called 'An Improved Calendar Ring Hole-Count for the Antikythera Mechanism'", you should read it." ?

That doesn't seem as likely to grab the attention of people who watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

The antikythera mechanism is a (bad) predictor of planetary locations. People have recreated it in its entirety using legos. There isn't much mystery about what it does.

However, a new high resolution X-ray of the device inspired some scientists to do some neat math on it. I read the paper, it's good work. I'd love to a chance to get an article published about one of my papers, even more if regular people had even the slightest chance to understand it.

Precision matters, and legos only have a certain amount of precision.

Besides that, things like the number of holes in the calendar ring matter.

Check out Clickspring on youtube, he's one of the people who narrowed the hole count down to 2 numbers, and this paper argues hard for one of those.

He's building a replica of the mechanism using period tools, and it's amazingly precise so far.

Making a technically true statement that you know will be misinterpreted by its intended audience is not meaningfully distinct from lying to that audience.

I don't understand what you mean, I think the headline must have changed?

It is currently (4:50 PM EST) "GRAVITATIONAL WAVE RESEARCHERS CAST NEW LIGHT ON ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM MYSTERY" both in the article, and on the HN item.

If it didn't change, I guess my confusions stems from this is an extremely straightforward way to state it.

Two gravitational wave researchers wrote the paper, and the paper gave us more certainty about whether the Antikythera mechanism represents 354 or 365 days.

I can't envision how to make it less sensationalist.

That's clickbait. I suppose you think it isn't clickbait because it isn't lying but I classify it as such because it seems intended to give wild impressions which are contrary to truth, namely that the mechanism had anything to do with gravitational waves. Clickbaiting without lying is a common technique among science reporters, almost as common as clickbaiting with lies.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as combative, I'm legitimately, genuinely, confused: what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers.

Poking around this:

I have a test for myself before I rant about science journalism: "would it be confusing without the thing my rant is angry about?"

Answer here is yes, I'm very familiar with this sort of thing from the astrophysics people in my physics department 18 years ago (monte carlo, bayesian), but it would be bizarre from archaeologists.

Poking around this, again:

If that isn't convincing: the unwashed masses who we are worried being betrayed by clickbait don't know what "gravitational waves" are, there's no reason for them to be unduly attracted to it.

"it seems intended to give wild impressions which are contrary to truth, namely that the mechanism had anything to do with gravitational waves"

It's not technically lying but it will nonetheless induce people to think something which isn't true. If this confuses you, consider this article/example:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171114-the-disturbing-a...

> "A classic example might be if your mum asks if you've finished your homework and you respond: "I've written an essay on Tennessee Williams for my English class." This may be true, but it doesn't actually answer the question about whether your homework was done. That essay could have been written long ago and you have misled your poor mother with a truthful statement. You might not have even started your homework yet."

When you say something which is true but say it in a way or context which you know will cause somebody else to believe something which isn't true, that's a form of lying.

Running through this in my head again and again, and editing 500 times along the way, apologies. I'm done now:

You believe that it is narrowly true gravitational wave researchers did this, like a kid saying they "wrote their essay" in response to whether they "did [completed] their homework"

I believe it is wholly true.

I believe we agree on the narrow truth that they are gravitational wave researchers.

I believe we disagree on the wider truth.

I believe you believe its a wider lie, in that it indicates they used gravitational wave-style techniques in this endeavor.

I believe it is widely true, because they're using the specific techniques that I saw astrophysicists use in grad school.

Is it possible you saw "Bayesian", assumed that was the extent of their expertise applied, then noted that it has no relation to their expertise, since that's entry-level stats, not physics?

The goal of the authors of the PR is to promote a narrative. In this case, the PR intends to increase funding for gravity wave research by imputing its utility in another field.

From The ELements of Style, Strunk and White, omit needless words. Dropping "Gravitational waves" from the title conveys the same information.

The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White: Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

The authors used the LIGO Scientific Collaboration's (open source) Bilby package to do the nested sampling analysis. So this was a drop-in use of this GW software to analyse the antikythera data. There is quite a close analogy between the 22-dimensional antikythera analysis, with its intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, and the ~15 dimensional spinning binary black hole analyses done in the GW world, again with intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. That's the GW connection, and it may not be so clear from the reports.

Yeah, so after collecting enough opinions from enough people, I'm 100% confident saying there isn't truly anything specific to GW here. When I use the ROOT library from CERN to analyze my molecular dynamics data, I'm not doing particle physics, I'm using ROOT as a general purpose library.

It doesn't really matter. The work is not exceptional, it doesn't shed new light on anything, and really only got the coverage it did due to clever use of key words and hype by the press release authors. In other words, like 90% of popular science.

Someone I once considered a friend, handed out invitations to a christmas party he was holding. While nothing he told us about the plans were strictly false, it turned out it was a direct marketing campaign. And there were no sales conducted at the event, instead he called everyone who showed up a week later to see if we were interested in anything we saw. He deliberately crafted a hook to be misleading to his target audience, even though nothing he said was false. I now consider him deeply untrustworthy and have severely limited my contact with him.

I believe the author of the title deliberately crafted a title that would be misconstrued by his target audience into believing something false, even though it was technically true.

I believe this isn't lying, but I also believe it's not meaningfully distinct from lying.

The "Gravitational Wave" part is clickbait. It could have said "Researchers cast new light...". Also the first paragraph is clickbait

"Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer."

it elaborates further down: "Professor Woan used a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, to calculate the likely number of holes in the mechanism using the positions of the surviving holes and the placement of the ring’s surviving six fragments."

Bayesian analysis has nothing to do with gravitational waves, it's a statistics paradigm. It was not "developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime". The whole gravitational angle is totally superfluous and is only there to get more clicks.

It's not just Bayesian analysis. I'm beginning to get a distinct impression people saw "Bayesian" and did a quick scan of the paper. To this graduate school physics dropout, this is an astrophysics-style paper on an archaeological artifact.

> what part is clickbait? They are gravitational wave researchers.

They are physicists who are in practice data scientists. They are both male, presumably have experienced no amputations, and look like they were born in the 20th century. Their “day job” is in gravitation. They both likely speak English.

The only part of which which has even the slightest bearing on their work is that they are of late de facto data scientists, among their (presumable) other skills.

This is a NPC reply. Yeah, in our profession, people using those tools have "data scientist" on the paycheck. Doesn't mean they wanna be called that or that their actual job is that.

I have to echo what others have said - this is absolutely clickbait. The fact that they also happen to do gravitational field research has nothing to do with the discoveries involving the Antikythera mechanism. It was included to make the reader of the headline wonder if the designers of the Antikythera mechanism knew something of gravitational waves. The only way to get the answer is to then click into the article to find out.

Unfortunately, this is the state of media today. It would be very helpful if the admins of HN could implement a way that users with enough karma could identify and vote to delete articles that have disingenuous headlines. Yes, we can flag articles, but maybe if we could choose WHY we're flagging to make others aware of what the problem is. If we don't protect the integrity of this site as an elevated place to have intellectual discourse, we will eventually lose it to the tidal wave of garbage content that seems to be getting worse by the day.

You shouldn’t be so surprised, university PR depts are notorious for clickbait like this. These types of articles are all over HN. They are just incentivized to get their name in the press by whatever means necessary.

Science is not magically immune to the same pressures that corrupt every other news and information source.

The intended recipients of these press releases are mainly the people who make decisions for funding agencies. Due to the highly competitive nature of funding, people working in fairly esoteric (if interesting) fields like gravity waves need to demonstrate some sort of applicability to adjacent areas of science.

In USA biology, there is a similar problem- it's known as the "Make Senators Believe Your Funding Will Cure Their Disease Problem" whereby even the simplest basic discoveries get pumped up to sound like they've cured cancer to induce future funding.

I’ve heard recently that a lot of the research funding for looking for the Loch Ness Monster is to marine biologists, who study the life in the lake (and also look for a monster a little bit, as a treat).

Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?

University science-by-press-release drives me crazy, too. My guess has been that the intended audience is alums that might be enticed to donate more.

Because reporters are not trained to respect science or to believe that they could understand it, and University press offices employ a lot of reporters who can’t make it at a real newspaper.

Propaganda is popular because it works...and the best kind of propaganda is genuine (truly and sincerely believed).

> Seriously, who is the intended audience of this headline?

The headline seems fine to me. You might mean the synopsis after it?

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