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Comment by avsteele | Hacker News Reader

Profanity should not be in the title of scientific articles. Most unprofessional. In addition, titling your article for shock value should be discouraged. The end point will be a degraded discourse.

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I've joined jobs and the first thing people said to me is "ah, you must be the new cunt!"

Different people have different standards for this type of thing. Be a good cunt and accept that there are over 8 billion people on the world, some of whom have very different norms than you have. Don't declare your own standards as somehow authoritative.

We have certain professional communications standards in the scientific community. This isn't a corner bar.

No, you have certain ways you like communication to happen. That's okay, everyone had that. To present this as some sort of objective standard is complete bollocks, as is your claim that it somehow "degrades" discourse.

This applies twentyfold when the topic of the scientific paper is swearing. Like mate, seriously?

Anyway, I tried. Good luck with your life.

I tend to agree. A lot of medical and scientific writing often falls on deaf ears because most people only respond to a conversational tone. That's why you write corporate emails in a conversational tone, it's just what's most effective.

I think, if the subject matters call for it, which clearly this does as they're literally looking at swearing, then it can be fine to swear. It can be more concise and more accurate.

I agree as well, I really dislike the overly formal tone we've tended to adopt in order to signal that the content is important. If you have important stuff to say, it'll be important even if you use simple words to say it.

> I've joined jobs and the first thing people said to me is "ah, you must be the new cunt!"

The reaction to that welcome is highly location dependent.

We tell children to don't use profanity because they have a hard time regulating themselves. Telling adults to do the same is misplaced authoritarian behavior, the kind that may come from people who failed to mature and still obey (and repeat) what they were told as a child but now sound obsequious.

Profanity largely exists to be offensive, and loses power when ubiquitous. It especially loses power when five year olds say it for every little mood swing they have. Nobody wants to hear offensive words from a child because it makes adults realize how childish they sound.

Professionalism is not a virtue; measured irreverence is---an uncensored "Fuck" in this scenario falls into that category.

Silliness has an important and necessary place in research.

NOT in professional communication. If you want to run your lab that way, feel free.

I suspect the use of profanity was to grab people's attention, rather than for shock value. I would consider it as unprofessional, much as I would consider an article titled "Stars that go boom" to be unprofessional. I would suggest that it should be discouraged, mostly because we don't want scientific journals to come off sounding like tabloids. Yet I don't think that it automatically results in degraded discourse.

There is no profanity in that title.

“F**k” could be any number of things. (Shrugging guy emoji)

As a methodically scientific academically academic scientist myself I struggle to arrive at a firm and defensible position on what it could be.

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