Comment by jbotz
3 years ago
Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive work?
Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.
HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about this and turn it into virtue signaling.
"Look how bad I am at reading people."
"I'm worse than you at..."
"I'm so bad that..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
> Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
Seems a bit harsh to jump right into an accusation of the dreaded virtue signaling!
Would you agree at least that there’s a balance to be made, and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an avalanche of color)?
I don’t want no color, but I agree with others here that many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards fluff these days. Online recipes are a more extreme example -- it’s increasingly hard to find the actual recipe these days.
Titles matter. A title like “A Short History of Nearly Everything” pretty clearly tells you that there’s going to be a lot of storytelling. But if you have a clickbait title like “Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories”, you ought to deliver on those promised myth-busting new facts!
I think it’s interesting to consider a) is this a real change; b) if so, is it driven more by culture or by technology? (i.e. by ads)
Most science articles I've seen, since times immemorial, provide some background for the researchers or the study subjects.
At what point it becomes "too much fluff" or "padding for extra ads", I couldn't tell you, probably sites have article minimum word requirements to account for the second part.
You are not alone. A subset of HN users have an identity marker around having a preference for "explicit material claims and nothing else for color or emotion". They then enjoy signaling this preference to their tribe in the comments. I've found it best to ignore them.
I would agree in principle, but puffed up articles rarely give you the kind of insight you are referring to.
I doubt what colour dog they had and their preference for cornflakes instead of oatmeal at buffets is going to let you enter their scientific mind as such.