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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

I see this author has "12 honorary degrees and is an Officer of the Order of Canada". And CBC is Canada's government-funded national public broadcaster.

But it's hard to take them seriously on any particular details given that their article, up for 8+ months (!), mis-describes H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds as a story of the Earth "invaded by benevolent Martians". [emphasis mine]

It's a seminal work of scifi, which popularized the "alien invasion" genre and term "Martians' (both for literal creatures from Mars and also a metonym for any alien visitors/invaders). It's been adapted to film many times. And the Martians in it - with their disintegrating heat-rays & death-clouds, consuming human blood – are far from 'benevolent'.

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It was obviously meant to read 'malevolent' and got spell checked to death. That sort of thing happens to everyone, and I'm not sure why you mention the authors credentials like they're a bad thing?

Because honorary degrees are not credentials.

But that's obviously not a reason to treat them as a bad thing. It's also not entirely true ... he was awarded those honors because of the quality of his science journalism.

FWIW, I think @mapontosevenths is wrong to say that @gojomo's mention of the honorary degrees and being an OOC was "like they're a bad thing" ... their "But it's hard ..." indicates a conflict between those "credentials" and the typo that gojomo makes way too much a deal of.

So many people here have no idea how things work and are far more interested in virtue signaling over an error (and making spiteful downvotes) than in correcting it, so we get ignorant and intellectually dishonest rubbish like

> I think readers should take this as an illustrative example of how often people/institutions draped in such quasi-credentials are carelessly wrong on basic things.

and

> how many people had to be asleep at the wheel for the truth-reversing error to get published, & persist for months? Does no one at the CBC – with pride in its work & any familiarity with these topics – read CBC's slop?

I, OTOH, sent them a note and they quickly fixed the article. Errors like this "persist for months" simply because no one takes the time for such a simple action when they encounter an error ... I'm the only person among those who commented here who did so. And no, of course no one at the CBC or anywhere else spends their time rereading their months-old articles to see if some error made its way in.

I just wanted to say thanks for actually taking the time to make the situation better for everyone, rather than complaining.

And thank you ... I really appreciate that.

Because I think readers should take this as an illustrative example of how often people/institutions draped in such quasi-credentials are carelessly wrong on basic things.

Even if some typo of 'malevolent' becoming 'benevolent' was how this error initially created – & I have my doubts! – how many people had to be asleep at the wheel for the truth-reversing error to get published, & persist for months? Does no one at the CBC – with pride in its work & any familiarity with these topics – read CBC's slop?

Someone should look into the author and/or editor.

Probability seems high they are martians trying to whitewash fictional history.

I got so caught up in that phrase I went rereading the plot summary of WOTW to check my memory. After than I had no interest in the article, assuming it had been written by AI.

War of the Worlds is culturally-prominent enough I doubt any commercial AI would make this same mistake (or let the error slip through, if they'd asked the AI to fact-check the article).

Maybe the author mixed it up, with another Martin invasion story called "Two Planets" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets), which was released a bit earlier than War of the Worlds and according to Wikipedia, it "is the earliest known example of the theme of a Beneficial alien invasion".

If someone is interested in "historical" science fiction, I can recommend it.

But nonetheless, if the author is interested in Mars and science fiction, he should be able to keep them apart from another. Maybe an editor wasn't?

I can confidently say that nobody has ever confused The War of the Worlds with The Two Planets.

It's hard to take seriously someone who dismisses the (factually correct) content of a popular science article just because of a typo that has no bearing on that content.

Have you independently checked all the other allegedly "factually correct" info in this article, with other sources that are actually diligent in getting the details right? What's the incremental value of a news source where every detail that you don't already know might be very wrong?

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