Online comments hurt science understanding, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Online comments hurt science understanding, study finds

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44 pointsabsconditus27 comments

I've often wondered how most people read comments. There's something funny you see in voting patterns if you make a comment, and then someone replies with refutation, and then the refutation is refuted, and so on.

Fist, you see your comment get upvoted. But, if someone replies with a refutation that uses the word because[1], or is otherwise convincing, and calls you an idiot, you'll start to get downvoted (downvotes are rarer if there's no invective). That happens even if the 'refutation' consists purely of blatant logical fallacies. I tend not to reply to those, because it seems like a waste of time, so I'll often get downvoted to or below 0 before someone replies to the reply, at which point my comment score will start climbing upwards again.

This is the only site I regularly comment on, because I don't know of any public forum that has a similarly high level of discussion. I'm not sure the level of reading is the same, though. Skimming is dangerous. I do it, too, unfortunately.

There's actually been a set of studies that have shown that people are more likely to be convinced by nonsense they've read if they're distracted. The dangerous part here is that once you've been convinced by something, you don't tag that information as being unreliable because you didn't think critically about it when you first saw it. I'll sometimes catch myself, in a friendly debate, repeating something I've read, and then immediately saying "nevermind; that doesn't make any sense", because I'd absorbed the information unconsciously without thinking about it, but the act of saying it reveals that it's not logically sound.

[1] http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2009/01/would-you-gi...

>...people are more likely to be convinced by nonsense they've read if they're distracted.

This reminded me of a thought Albert Camus wrote in The Fall (in its context, it holds a deeper, more revealing meaning and meta commentary on human nature):

"Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object."

I often read the comments on Hacker News even before reading the article.

>There's something funny you see in voting patterns if you make a comment, and then someone replies with refutation, and then the refutation is refuted, and so on.

I've noticed that sometimes, if someone makes a post agreeing with a comment but not explicitly saying so, it'll get interpreted as a disagreement simply because folk have fallen into the back-and-forth rhythm.

I hate that. I dont think it requires an existing back-and-forth either. If you say something different than the person you're replying to, they assume you mean the opposite of what they believe, presumably because that's easier than untangling the web of agreements and disagreements, errors and truths and unknowns, that exist between any two real people...

If you're reading this, for the love of all that is sane, next time you make a comment, reply to what the other person actually says, not what you think they mean. If you feel the need to respond to something unsaid, make it explicit.

Everything seems to deteriorate to a fight between parties. Rational argumentation that contributes to the presented subject becomes rare. Instead you see the pro/con, fanboy/hateboy 'debates' with low signal to noise ratio. I guess the political system (government vs. opposition, left vs. right, ...) has had a negative influence on public discussion in general. People increasingly think that public discussion means the clash of parties that fight against each other until there is a winner and a loser. The popular TV debates are based on that format.

Well, that's also a part of communication. Snapping into the back and forth mindset isn't constructive, but there are plenty of times when someone replies to me and I can't quite parse whether they're explicitly agreeing with me and/or adding context or arguing with me without spelling that out. I tend to take those as learning examples of how to improve my clarity of speech.

I'll sometimes catch myself, in a friendly debate, repeating something I've read, and then immediately saying "nevermind; that doesn't make any sense"

I'm nearly 40 and I find I'm still "defragging" my childhood. I still come across things I've "known" for decades but haven't explicitly thought about in as long turning out to be useless garbage as soon as I try to load them back into "working" memory. Its rather disorienting. I'm afraid my subconscious might actually be using some of the stuff I haven't fixed yet.

Well, at least you know you are normal.

This has nothing to do with comments. The emphasis on comments is little more than an attempt to get on the "social media is harmful" bandwagon.

As the principal researcher herself acknowledges:

> Brossard admitted she was "bothered" by the study results but not particularly surprised. "In a discussion, when you see people frowning, it influences how you feel about the discussion," she said. "So how does that translate to the online community?"

Imagine that you were introduced to a product while visiting a web page that was full of blinking text and full-page Flash ads. Compare that to a product you were introduced to while visiting a clean and well-formatted web page. Which product do you think will leave you with a favorable impression of it? It's a matter of basic human psychology. We respond to the whole experience, not just the propositional content of an article.

Rude comments ruin your first impression of a technology. Huh, nothing surprising about it. You could probably achieve the same result by replacing those manufactured comments with super annoying ads, horrible web design, or any of the million other ways in which you can spoil a person's browsing experience. But as it happens, complaining about the harmful effect of pop-up ads on news sites is much less sexy than complaining about the purportedly ill effects of participatory online discussion.

> This has nothing to do with comments. The emphasis on comments is little more than an attempt to get on the "social media is harmful" bandwagon.

I don't agree.

First of all, this study was about comments, and as such we now have data about how comments affect the reader. There may be studies about annoying ads and the like, but this study is useful because it provides data about comments on a page. I agree with your premise that

> We respond to the whole experience, not just the propositional content of an article.

however this article and study are most certainly about the specific effect of comments.

Secondly, comments are significantly different enough from the other elements you outlined (such as design and advertisements) to warrant individual research and reporting. For example, comments are community-generated vs "site-generated" (for want of a better term) things like design and ad content. Comments are a user engagement tool, and in light of this research this tool evokes a number of questions.

* Good design is for our intents a solved problem; find a good designer and give them money. How does one cultivate "good" comments?

* We agree that having malware advertisements on your site is bad practice; is it bad practice to have unmoderated comments on a science blog?

* Are authors justified in disabling comments completely?

I don't agree that this is just "complaining about the purportedly ill effects of participatory online discussion", nor do I even agree that this is what was being done in the first place (it's not how I read the article). This article is providing reporting about a study that has given us data about how comments effect consumers of science reporting, and should cause us to question the role and implementation of comments in the future.

As an aside, my favourite comment from the article, posted after a long series of rants about reporters with agendas:

> Ouch, right in the irony.

I agree that it depends on the community. It's not science related, but I recently moved to Los Angeles and started using Yelp. The LA Yelp Talk forums are filled with the most horrific comments and interactions I've ever seen. I was so taken aback that I went to my hometown's Yelp Talk to see if all of it was like that, and the difference was night and day. In fact, my hometown's Yelp Talk forum talked about what frightening and unbelievably rude people participated in Yelp Talk LA. This particular community has no sense of netiquette and it is basically a free-for-all. In my experience, it is interesting how this is very indicative of the popular/mainstream culture in Los Angeles, as well.

The comments on the article itself are especially interesting when considered in the context of the article.

I initially thought they were sarcastic, but I quickly decided that was unlikely. Amusing from the outside looking in I guess.

Any serious news source should have something like a professional "comment moderator" and division of "top comments" selected by the editor and the general discussion only below. "Crowd wisdom" only works for groups of knowledgeable people that are also skilled in online communication - take HN or SO. It doesn't work with things like science popularization articles because 99% of readers lack not only scientific/technical education (and this is ok, because the articles are written for them to understand) but also basic reasoning skills and common sense factual communication skills (eg. most people are taught to make themselves heard and promote their opinion and not to STFU when they have no idea of the topic). And then you automatically have the ones distorting the facts to promote their interests - and these people are actively drawn to "science for the public" kind of places!

This is what I enjoy about reading HackerNews. The comments are insightful and usually contribute to the discussion, often in a meritorious fashion that spawns interesting conversation. A strong community which makes informed comments clearly can be effective at helping scientific understanding. Good job on everyone here for that.

Gak!

Reaching the conclusion that the article-writer wants you to reach should not count as "Science understanding". What should count is a knowledge of math, science foundations and statistics sufficient to critically evaluate articles and comments.

Uh, and an article about "nanotechnology"? This is science that barely exists. What is a "balanced" article on this??

> realizing how potent online comments can be in undermining a factual report may help publications to better manage comments on their websites

I think this is the wrong thing to take away from this. If you are indeed writing a 'factual report', nothing should be disputable. The problem comes with dumbed-down or poorly written news reports where the 'facts' aren't presented, or are heavily mixed with opinion...

The solution is less to 'manage comments' as the article says and more to write better articles, and encourage a good culture of news where readers and commenters are critical and contribute to the conversation (like HN does - sometimes).

> If you are indeed writing a 'factual report', nothing should be disputable.

The world is just not that simple.

>The solution is less to 'manage comments' as the article says and more to write better articles, and encourage a good culture of news where readers and commenters are critical and contribute to the conversation

I think it would be very rare to find articles so well written as to prevent jibber jabber from occurring in comments. HN is a very different kind of community from these others as well. Also, HN isn't immune to this. :) On HN, I have found the problem to be more with groupthink opinions rather than outright misinformation ... well that occurs too, especially on articles relating to higher education.

I think that's why these guys are trying something different - http://blog.functionspace.org/news/2013/1/3/making-more-sens...

What a strange and strategic conclusion. Obviously it depends on the community.

When I went into the comment section of the article, all I can see is namecalling of liberals, conservatives, scientists and newspaper writers.

I am not really sure if the comments are meant as irony or not.

My brain is melting.

If there's "science" in the title, I can guarantee that there are going to be sincere pseudoscientists drawn in to state "WHAT DOES SCIENCE KNOW ANYWAY" no matter what the topic is.

Isn't science reporting misleading in general? Fact is hiding the actual science behind journal pay walls makes it even worse. Of course if you gather a bunch of people in the room and make an announcement, individuals will be affected by the reaction of the other people in the room. Thus opinion setting agendas become funded.

Total garbage, never heard anything more stupid in my life.

</experiment>

It would have been a lot more interesting had you not added "/experiment>" as a loin cloth. Which makes it impossible for a thinker to play. Am I voting you up or down on the "cleverness", your actual "experiment", or what I perceive as humour? What if every one reading is so clever they simply don't vote either way?

For this, a "blown mind" button is required!!

What can I say, I guess I am a karma whore after all. Couldn't face the risk of accumulating a lot of downvotes.

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