Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

It annoys me when people try to look intelligent by inserting literary references without actually knowing what they are talking about, either by not remembering nor bothering to look it up, or never having read it in the first place, simply guessing and make stuff up. Any one of them are by themselves indicators of poor journalistic practice. What else did the article’s author not check or simply make up?

> Alice Liddell first encounters the Red Queen in Chapter 2 of Through the Looking Glass. Alice tries to catch her, but although they each run faster and faster, neither of them ever gets anywhere.

Although the writer of the article specifically references chapter 2, they obviously did not read it, nor even glance at the illustrations.

1. The character in the book is only ever named as “Alice”. The real person which the author knew, and on which the character “Alice” is based, was indeed named “Alice Liddell”, but they are not one and the same.

2. Alice does not try to “catch” the Red Queen. In fact, Alice and the Queen are running hand in hand, and it is the Red Queen which urges Alice to go “Faster! Faster!”. The accompanying illustration shows the Red Queen running and holding Alice’s hand, dragging her behind her since Alice has trouble keeping up.

> It annoys me when people try to look intelligent by inserting literary references

Besides the old middlebrow dismissal question you should be asking yourself before posting ("is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article?"[1]), let me ask you this: is the distinction you're making here at all material to the article?

Did you consider the possibility that the author hasn't read Through the Looking-Glass in a while (a "Ph.D. in Cell Biology and Genetics" means you have to put off a good bit of recreational reading for a number of years) and thought that the explanation was close enough as background information about why a 40-year-old, fairly famous evolutionary theory is named the way it was?

And again I'll ask: do either of the author's two mortal sins you've pointed out in any way change the aptness of the metaphor or give the audience an incorrect impression of why it was named the way it was? Because I'm pretty sure they don't.

Sorry if I'm a little heated, but you might say it annoys me when people try to look intelligent by dismissing interesting things by nitpicking irrelevant details. Or maybe we shouldn't assume people's motives ("try to look intelligent"? seriously?), grant a little principle of charity, leave a correction for the author, and then engage in actually interesting conversation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4693920

I think it's a fair criticism to point out a fault in an author's literary reference, when that reference is used as a metaphor for something else in the article.

For example, if I were to use a sour grapes analogy to explain how compression optimizations beyond a certain point are not worth the effort, because the gains decrease as the difficulty increases exponentially, that would ignore the point of the fable, which doesn't tell a story of a fox that realizes the grapes higher up are not as good as the ones lower on the tree; rather, he decides the grapes he can't reach must be sour.

Misremembering the story you are using to help explain a concept can serve to confuse people who use that association as a 'hook' to remember how that concept works later.

It's not the author's analogy. The article is referencing a concept named the Red Queen hypothesis[1], and the only thing that's material to the explanation is the phrase "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place" as that's literally the only Carroll in the original paper[2].

Nor is it being used to explain a concept. Not only is the entire rest of article being used to explain this particular instance of the concept, the very next sentence gives a simplified explanation of the Red Queen hypothesis without analogy. The "literary reference" is not a literary reference at all. It's pointing out that Van Valen was making a literary reference by choosing that name.

And it's still not misleading. The difference between "Alice Liddell" vs "Alice" and "catch" vs not caching might be correct vs incorrect, but it still has nothing to do with the reason the hypothesis is named as it is. "They must run and run just to stay where they are." is right in there.

Finally, on a meta note, this is exactly the kind of thread asking oneself "is that the most interesting thing one can say about this article?" can avoid, because it isn't. Luckily there are some biologists in the article's comments on Ars to save the day (though you have to wade through some noise first), if anyone's interested in more.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis

[2] http://ebme.marine.rutgers.edu/HistoryEarthSystems/HistEarth...

I agree with everything you say here. I just want to point out that there is the opportunity for confusion based on the explanation provided that is fairly insignificant, but present nonetheless.

Namely, the author characterizes the relationship between the two as competitive, or predator-prey. In other words, the two entities described herein (the bacterial and human genomes) are competing just to maintain the same relationship with one another. While this is an accurate description, the actual Carroll story is characteristic of a cooperative relationship; Alice and the Queen are holding hands and running, only to stay in the same place.

I realize this is a very minor gripe, and the author of this article is in fact misstating the story in a way that is really truer to the Red Queen hypothesis than it is to the story after which that hypothesis is named. While perhaps not the most interesting discussion point of this article, I do think it was an interesting enough distinction that it was worth pointing out.

I would not have written this if this lack of fact-checking was not indicative of poor journalistic practice, which was my real point. If they’re this fast and loose with the facts on this detail which I know about, how accurate is the rest of the article, or anything else they have written? Getting the details right is important.

(The “try to look intelligent” bit was not meant as a snark, it seemed like a reasonable assumption on my part. I’d remove it if I could, since it does not change any point I was trying to make.)

Your point was pedantic. The mistake did not fundamentally change the explanation of how the evolutionary theory got its flippant name. The author did make an error, but people often do. Principle of charity and all that.

Let me know when you start writing only bug-free code (if someone has had a bug in their code, how can we trust anything else they have written? Getting the details right is important, after all)

If I write a piece of code and ignore the manual and simply guess the names of functions and arguments without either knowing or checking, then you can blame me for the same thing – when programming, either you are very sure of the calling conventions, or you check the manual. In journalism, either you are dead sure of your facts, or you look it up. It’s a few minutes, at most.

A more technical error is in

> [...] that transferrin has undergone positive evolutionary selection in a manner often seen in molecular arms races between mammals and viruses.

but all the discussion is about bacteria. Bacteria and virus are very different, so the strategies against them are very different too. (I'm not a biologist, but this strategy to sequester iron while in transit looks like unuseful against virus, because the virus is only active inside the infected cells. IANAB.)

I took it that the point was that evolutionary races might leave similar evolutionary histories whether they races against bacteria or viruses, not that the same iron mechanism had anything to do with viruses.

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