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Comment by porcoda | Hacker News Reader

I really wish sites would stop with the clickbait style headlines. “Mysterious” is unnecessary here since there isn’t much mystery about this. If anything, this kind of wording gives non-experts and non-scientists the wrong message since mysterious often gets read as “scary” or “unexplainable”, which is often misleading.

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Ok, we've made the title less mysterious (and less epic) above.

It's previously unseen and we don't fully understand it, that's good enough for me to call it mysterious. I don't really care what connotations others may or may not attach to the word.

“Epic” stood out more to me than “mysterious” in terms of low-brow clickbaitiness.

exciting is the word you are looking for, porcoda. non-expert lurkas find the unexplainable as stimulating as skimming over the mysteries of SDF or speed reading through LSD & Samagon themed anti-communist feel good novels â læ Hesse (Vilnius Romé or something).

Radiation? Radio! Antenas! Thpooky electro-magnetism at a distance? Is that a thing? Is there a chance?

( Sureley, you understand I'm only half joking here. )

While I agree and generally feel the same way, I think it is worth mentioning that the "war for attention" is an existential issue for most online publications these days. The clickbait headlines are used specifically because it marginally increases readership/views, without which the publication would probably cease to exist.

Definitely, I would however recommend that next time they would instead use something like "mysterious radiation of the forbidden belt clandestinely detected around censored earth after tremendous epic solar that some governments might try to hide, the 42th reason will surprise you" without what I am afraid that the entire staff is going to go through a major life crisis before they even had any child possibly contributing to a quick extinction of human species, warning, danger, how dare you not read the article yet?

Then it must surely be more than just a marginal increase.

[flagged]

It's a super common behavior on social media. Worrying about what the stupid people might think if they see something. It's always some hypothetical group of lower-thinking people that they worry about, even when there's no sign of them existing. I'd say it's sometimes just pretending to be concerned about harm to others to make their position seem more important and right, and sometimes a fear that other people might believe different (thus obviously wrong and even immoral) things to themselves.

You broke the site guidelines badly in this thread, more than once. Not cool.

We ban accounts that do this and we've warned you more than once before. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please fix this, that would be good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree my point would have been better served attacking the message, not the messenger.

I think there are few things less curious and less scientific than objecting to seeing mystery in the physical world.

I dont think it is hyperbolic or fearmongering to use mystery in conjunction is science.

For example, when describing a never before observed proton radiation belt, with unexplained duration. Or when most of that radiation belt is still uncharacterized and out of the detection range of instruments. Or when this never before seen proton belt is expected to last very long time, perhaps over a year, form a single transient storm [1].

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

I dont think it is appropriate to editorialize the titles of submission links to strip out authorial intent to highlight and share this mystery.

That said, The above text would have made a more robust critique that is more in-line with the sight guidelines. I just got fired up reading how much people hate scientists for their passion[2] and their application causal reductionism

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976134

This is a projection of your inner state onto the word and not the word itself. It truly is a mystery. Like most things.

I wonder almost daily why anything at all exists. It’s an absolute mystery.

Why isn’t there just void? So here we are on a tiny planet alone. Alone?

How did we get here? Are we living in a simulation? Maybe we are in Sim Planet game for another entity?

All of our existence is mystery.

Being in a simulation only makes the question more complicated, in a "turtles all the way down" style.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8mJr4c66bs

Nah, what’s the point of living then anyway? It’s sounds smart but if you look past it you realize it’s just nihilistic.

If you've got a better "*istic", you're free to convince people that's the way...

I don’t. But I invite you to answer my question!

Meh, great way of making your problem mine.

The point is: just to enjoy the fleeting moment of consciousnees? Oh no, I bet you won't be satisfied with this answer and you want more...

Actually I think that’s a good answer! I think it’s worth enjoying every moment that we have. And to be focused.

Is it my preferred answer? I guess not :)

In the context of a news headline the decision to use the word "mysterious" and "detected" obviously implies a different kind of significance than the inherent mystery in all things. Other comments in this thread already bring up science fiction movies and other radiation-related disasters, I don't think OP is that much out on a limb here.

I think that is projection too. Mysterious can mean exciting, unknown, and curious.

Why does this bother people? it isn't like the article is inducing mass hysteria.

The article itself vacillates.

> we've seen this phenomenon before

> I said, 'Wow, this is something really new'

> it's unsurprising

> Even so [...] what they saw surprised them.

I mean that's nerdy scientists for you, they get so into their thing it's kind of disgusting. I watched a documentary about volcanos once, it had a husband and wife team, they were just enthusing endlessly about their particular volcano that they were studying and it really turned me off. This was about 20 years ago and as a result I still hate vulcanologists, they totally overdid the sales pitch.

I can only assume you are sarcastic about your hate for scientists that love their work.

Is it projection, or just a matter of media literacy?

We know what the radiation belt is, where it is, and where it came from; so why exactly is this a ‘mystery?’

Great, so we should cancel all scientific research because everything is known. The universe exists: QED. no need to explain or understand phenomenon beyond them having a name

These people are completely unreasonable.

It’s actually getting harder and harder to even play devil’s advocate for the sake of ensuring we aren’t collectively ensnaring ourselves in destructive biases.

They think everything worth knowing is known. Art is “solved” as a problem. Science is absolute (even though science and math all reduce to nil by their own definition).

We’re seeing the steep rise of a new form of dogmatism unlike anything before save for theocracies.

This thread is all bickering about words and context that weren’t even present! It’s painful.

They say as much. They’ve never seen it before, and it’s measurable. So this means they can study it for the first time. It literally is a mystery lol.

So true.

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