
Please read the paper before you comment - azhenley
https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/please-read-the-paper-before-you-comment/
======
cgrealy
Some years ago, Ars Technica ran a story on guns.
[https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-
lot...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2011/04/guns-in-the-home-lots-of-risk-
ambiguity)

About halfway through a one-page article was this quote.

"If you have read this far, please mention Bananas in your comment below.
We're pretty sure 90% of the respondants to this story won't even read it
first."

Sure enough, there were about 3 pages of comments before someone mentioned
bananas.

Read the paper? You're lucky if they read _the article_

~~~
nabla9
I have done several experiments in Reddit. I post a link with a plausible
title and credible looking 404 to credible domain with made up url.

In a big subreddit you easily get 30 top level comments before first comment
says that link does not work or is fake. Discussion goes on and on without
pause. People treat the title as a writing prompt. One of the best writing
prompts is pseudo-philosophical techno-bro life or business advice. Anything
with quantum physics in the title works too.

~~~
akg_67
Readers think of Reddit title as discussion prompts. The combination of
subreddit theme and post title can easily start a discussion on “close enough”
topic. One of the suggestion for increasing engagement is to disable link
posts and only allow text posts.

~~~
levosmetalo
I see HN in the same way. It happens so often that HN discussion is much
better that article itself that I go there first, and RTFA only if the
discussion makes me want to read it.

For this article, I tried to read it after reading a few comments, but got
bored.

~~~
akg_67
The readability of lot of web articles tend to be quite poor as they are
written from viewpoint of SEO rather than readability. I rarely can read
complete web article unless it was published in a paper magazine or newspaper.

HN used to be good. Recently, I have seen groupthink taking hold, hostility
toward dissension, and opinions are not that knowledgable and educated on
controversial topics. The HN quality of discussion is not that different from
themed serious subreddits.

Give Reddit a chance, find subreddits in your area of interest.

~~~
chriszhang
I would have given Reddit a chance if they were not constantly screwing around
with the UI. The new UI is sluggish and really affects the reading experience
negatively.

I love that HN has not made any changes to its UI for a long time and a fast
and convenient reading experience remains top priority on HN. If there are
more HN-like forums, that would be something I would be interested in.

~~~
jeanofthedead
It's frustrating, but utilizing old.reddit.com / Reddit Enhancement Suite
([https://redditenhancementsuite.com/](https://redditenhancementsuite.com/))
goes a long way in making it a more enjoyable experience.

------
PragmaticPulp
The key to cleaning up my Twitter feed was to unfollow people who were too
good at Twitter. That is: People who are working to maximize engagement,
follower count, retweets, and likes.

In my feed, the highest signal to noise ratio comes from people who aren't
commenting on any and every trending topic. Instead, they're busy doing real
work, away from Twitter, only occasionally checking in to share something.
Likewise, that's how I try to structure my own engagement.

When people have 50 Tweets per day or more, it's unlikely that they're taking
time to really think and engage. It's more about rapid fire comments designed
to get the most engagement.

~~~
Covzire
So you're saying we need a platform with both characters/post and post/day
limits?!

I mean... that's beautiful, because I created a second twitter account just so
I can follow a select few people for the pretty much the same reason you gave
without having to worry they're getting lost to the noise.

~~~
Laremere
The social network I honestly want is something akin to the tradition of
Christmas cards: a rare update (at most once a quarter) about how life is
going with the option of attaching a few photos.

No comments section, but instead a "I'd like to get in touch and chat
sometime" button which helps schedule a video chat.

No retweets, shares, engagement metrics.

~~~
rglullis
I like the idea, but how is that different from a personal website/blog with
private access?

~~~
afarrell
The ability to have people on it who don't have the time or background to read
tutorials on Digital Ocean?

------
rendall
Recently there was a brouhaha on the Twitters about 2+2=5 that went viral and,
unfortunately, political. The argument is that post-modernists are trying to
tear down mathematics as a "white supremacist social construct" and trying to
say that "2+2=5" is as valid an answer as "2+2=4". Which sounds pretty bad, so
I looked into it.

The original Tweet thread was a math nerd who jokingly, and not incorrectly,
illustrated how it was _mathematically_ possible for 2+2 to sometimes be 5.
The argument may have been weak, and some people may not have found it
convincing, but it was a mathematical argument, meant as a joke for a small
Twitter audience.

Through the Twitter telephone, many retweets and steps later, the original
argument - considered, funny, valid, perhaps weak - somehow transformed into
"2+2=4 is a mere social construct, and 5 is a valid answer" \- which, yes,
_would_ be a disturbing trend if that were actually the argument. Thus the
unduly passionate took up "2+2 is 4 not 5" as a political rallying cry. People
I otherwise respect as rational began tweeting this.

It became complicated because there are always people who believe dumb things,
like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social construct", and as
always with the unduly passionate, extreme opinions are held up as examples of
dangerously typical. The author of the original thread was bullied by a mob.

It's complicated even further by the existence of an actual replication crisis
in academe, in part driven by post-modern ideological pressures; there is
actual loss of academic freedom even for the tenured.

But the lesson at the end of the day, to my mind, is that articles about
whatever goes on over at Twitter, such as this one, such as this my post here,
are always going to involve mobs of people being shitty, because the nature of
the medium. Maybe they are as inevitable as "mobs of people are gambling in
Las Vegas"

~~~
breakfastduck
Twitter is poison.

It amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its trending
algorithms, aided by the fact that the largest userbase on twitter seems to be
political extremists of both left & right. It's created an environment where
making a comment like "mathematics is merely a white supremacist social
construct" is now somehow acceptable to the left.

The platform literally exists to make things look like they're a bigger deal
worldwide than they really are. It's dangerous.

I quit twitter a while back - when I was on the platform, all my news
consumption revolved around it. I was deeply concerned about the state of the
UK and the US because of the constant stream of political propaganda from both
sides.

Since I quit my brain feels like it's been completely freed of political dogma
and I'm in a significantly better mood generally. I've not missed the trending
page, that's for certain.

The biggest issue is the loss of academic freedom you alluded too, mainly &
ironically being pushed heavily by the 'Twitter Left'. Twitter is like a
heavily left leaning version of /pol/ these days.

I'd like to be clear that I would consider myself on 'the left', to be a
progressive person & I am absolutely aware that the extremist cesspit that is
twitter does not represent the genuine left, much as it doesn't represent
genuine moderates or genuine conservatives.

It's the most extreme weaponized propaganda & rent-a-mob tool thats ever
existed in human history.

~~~
dexen
_> [Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its
trending algorithms_

Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that
_carefully_ measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and
constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different
communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old
style media, etc.).

A more fitting hypothesis would be, "Twitter opened up a couple new paradigms
of influencing people". The paradigms are complex, opaque, and subtly inter-
related; quite hard to grasp for people that aren't fully "in the loop".
That's why there appearance of chaos and, at the same time, we see highly
organized action _emerges_ from this chaos.

~~~
webmaven
_> >[Twitter] amplifies meaningless shit into the stratosphere with its
trending algorithms_

 _> Doubtful, given how popular it is among people and ogranisations that
carefully measure the RoI of their marketing & outreach operations, and
constantly adjust balance of their efforts among 2, 3, 4 different
communication channels (YT, Insta, mail, in-person events, topical forums, old
style media, etc.)._

I'm not sure why you think that the two are incompatible, or opposed.

I don't mean to suggest that marketing is entirely meaningless, but surely the
ROI of any particular marketing effort is largely _independent_ of its
meaningfulness?

------
mherdeg
As a rule of thumb, I try not to quote from media unless I have seen the whole
book/story/article/movie myself and am sure I understand the quotation in
context.

Part of that comes from the kind of frustration Hillel Wayne voices here:

> People will offhand use famous quotes to support their arguments, when the
> context the quote was given in has nothing to do with it.

I spent a lot of hours in high school debate listening to people misattribute
quotes or misconstrue them to mean the opposite. This was frustrating at the
time but in retrospect this was a valuable lesson -- if EVERYONE is gonna say
that Voltaire said that thing about disagreeing with what you say, what else
is everyone wrong about?

I'm also pretty sure I had this idea reinforced by an Asimov book where he
argues that intellectual societies decay as they begin to rely on secondary-
source research (going to the library and reading what people have written
about others' experiences, instead of going out there yourself and looking at
stuff). But I can't find the source now, ha ha.

~~~
chrisdirkis
This is a thing I've been pondering recently, and I don't have the same
takeaway as you. My thought is: The context doesn't always matter, and a
quotation can mean different things in different contexts, and that's not a
bad thing.

For example, with the Knuth quote, both interpretations can be valuable? There
are people who need to be told "don't optimise yet", and there are people who
need to be told "there are critical times and places to optimise, and you
probably shouldn't just breeze past a 12% execution time improvement".

Neither of these lessons are "wrong". The main wrong thing is probably
attributing the intent of the first to Knuth, which uses his status as an
expert to (falsely) back it.

I think Scott Alexander from SSC wrote something about opposite pieces of
advice (eg. telling college nerds to "get out more" and telling college
partygoers to "buckle down and study more", because neither of those can be
universal pieces of advice), but I don't feel like searching for it rn. It's a
good read though.

~~~
kelnos
I guess it depends on the purpose of using a quotation. My belief is that most
people cite a quotation when arguing something as an appeal to authority.
"Knuth says don't optimize at all, so we shouldn't do it either." In that
case, I think understanding the context is key: if you use someone's words to
back up your point, but that's not actually what they meant, then context
_does_ matter.

Yes, it's true that different people might need to hear different things at
different times. If you're trying to tell someone not to micro-optimize ahead
of time before profiling, then quoting Knuth is appropriate. If you're trying
to tell someone not to optimize at all (let's say you have a valid reason for
not optimizing at all), then its disingenuous (or at best ignorant) to use the
Knuth quote.

------
evolve2k
When I first learnt to program the thing that I really enjoyed was learning to
make a terminal app that took in the users input and used it as a conditional.

I’d make all these little toy apps where my family had to type in the right
word to continue. Eg “Who is the leader of the autobots?” => “Well done.
Transform and roll out!!”

It strikes me we could encourage better discourse with one word locked
comments that the writer of the post draws from the article.

“New research and on the impact of race on tenure”

Per the article, what % of tenured professors identify as people of color in
2019?

What do you think of something like this?

Micro quiz questions, one up on ‘are you human’ to ‘prove you read one key
thing’

~~~
burlesona
It’s a reasonable suggestion, but I would predict comment participation to
plunge. Maybe that’s just fine?

~~~
Tossrock
It doesn't need to be one or the other. The quiz could be optional, and
answering correctly would simply give your comments a rating boost - or
inversely, you could put a badge of shame on any comments from people who
hadn't passed the quiz. Then you just let the natural human dynamics play out.

~~~
smichel17
Does it even need to be judgemental? Sometimes I see great comments in which
the author admits they only read the title (and really, are just sharing some
related insight, not responding to the article. I'd be up for just having two
comments sections. The hard part would be getting people to use it correctly;
I'm not sure exactly what incentives would accomplish that.

------
fouc
> I have about as much ignorance of these domains as all the people mocking
> the paper on Twitter. But there’s one big difference between me and them: I
> actually read the paper. All of this information is on the first page. Even
> if you don’t know about sci-hub, you could still read the abstract and check
> out the researcher bios! Nobody read the paper before dunking on it. Nobody
> read the abstract either. About half the people yelling at this paper had
> only read the press release. The other half hadn’t even done that. They had
> only read tweets about the press release.

This is a real problem. I'm guilty of not bothering to read the paper many
times. I instantly look for the easily digestible reviews or comments that
other people made. I'm part of the problem. Damn.

~~~
andykx
Without wishing to downplay the fact that this is a major issue, it’s hard to
read scientific literature from a field you haven’t previously studied. Layman
summaries are a great way to get a sense of what the paper is actually saying,
though summaries made by random commenters are unreliable.

~~~
cxr
Many papers in general are just not well written, even if the subject is
interesting. I wish it were seen as a social requirement that if you publish a
paper, then you accompany it with a blog post—even if it's the only thing on
your blog. With multiple authors, each author would write their own blog post.
I'd rather read three different takes on the same subject, generally, than to
slog through any given paper even once. Sprinkle in the not-minor
accessibility problems around the tendency to publish exclusively in PDF, and
there are good reasons to seek out a digest instead of looking through the
real thing. Heck, most abstracts verge on being almost unreadable, for that
matter.

~~~
mzl
While there are reasonably good reasons that most scientific articles are in
PDF format (way too much work to change), I heartily agree with writing blog
posts on articles. I started doing this: the effort (once you have somewhere
to publish it) is negligible compared with the amount of effort of writing a
paper, and it is also quite fun to be able to write more free-form text on the
subject.

------
yashap
I feel sorry for the postdoc here. You have a seemingly decent paper, but the
press release really doesn’t do it justice. For reference, the Tweet about the
press release
[https://twitter.com/princeton/status/1296779082663964673?s=2...](https://twitter.com/princeton/status/1296779082663964673?s=21)
vs the paper [https://sci-
hub.tw/downloads/2020-08-10/f1/10.1038@s41562-02...](https://sci-
hub.tw/downloads/2020-08-10/f1/10.1038@s41562-020-0924-8.pdf)

The press release DOES have a very “machine learning ‘discovers’ trivial thing
people already knew” vibe. The actual paper doesn’t - it’s not trying to
“rediscover” anything, it’s just building on existing work, there’s none of
the arrogance in the press release that’s triggering everyone on Twitter. The
press release taints the actual research, which is a sadly common pattern, and
I think a fair bit of that lies with the writers of press releases, not just
the readers.

------
hardwaregeek
I've thought about this with respect to sources. I was reading a book which
mentioned Emile Durkheim's work. I have never read any Durkheim. I cannot
speak to Durkheim's points nor whether the author accurately represented them.
What's even worse is that if I did read Durkheim, he'd probably discuss
someone before him. And I wouldn't know if he accurately represented that
person's points. I'm not sure if the author who referenced Durkheim has read
the people who Durkheim cites^[1], so I'm not sure if they know either. We
have this game of telephone where we all cite these sources and people rarely,
if ever check. And this is in academic literature where publishing happens
pretty slowly! In Twitter it's easy to reach a source chain of 5-6 deep in
days, let alone months.

[1]: They probably have but I can't say.

------
drivebycomment
I mean, this applies to many of the discussions on HN too. I've noticed that
there's so many people getting the facts around the topic completely wrong,
and quite a few will push some simplistic narrative or long-standing
grievances, instead of the relevant point which often is subtle and nuanced. I
suppose that's just being human.

~~~
wutwutwutwut
It's not just getting the facts wrong, it's often about them misunderstanding
the topic entirely because they didn't bother to read.

I don't think it's about being human, I think it's because HN is a BBS where
people can get points by chatting, which also happens to link to articles
which you can read if you feel like it. Of course this is how it ends up.

~~~
lmm
People play the game according to the rules they're given. In the early days
when HN was more caustic, you got more points by reading the articles and
posting accurate facts. But in the dang era where comments are required to be
nice and calling people out is discouraged, you get more points by rushing to
post something plausible-sounding and vaguely related to the headline. So
people do that instead, unsurprisingly.

~~~
Kednicma
Indeed, the rules are slanted to give bad-faith word-salad as much of an
advantage as possible. Even the site's layout is hostile to correcting those
posts; in addition to the rules prohibiting us pointing out that the article
doesn't say what they claim (because we cannot directly imply that they did
not read), the formatting of quoted text is messed up and ugly and
distracting.

On this current account, I don't really care about overall karma, just per-
post karma. I try to post simple but defensible points when I get early top-
level timing, and I put effort into upvoting people that I agree with rather
than adding on yeah-me-too posts for more karma. But I'm punished for not
playing by the rules of the game; I can't downvote or vouch or any other
useful features, so (-1, flagged) is a common fate.

In the design circles that I frequent, we often consider Conway's Law for
social communities. The API of HN, including the rules, generates the shape of
the conversations. The shittiness of discourse here is inherently due to the
low-quality rules just as much as the lack of meta-moderation.

------
DoreenMichele
_Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it_

Once upon a time, there were two main characters on Twitter in a single day:
two escaped Llamas and a dress.

And it was actually not a bad thing.

Maybe we could try repeating that occasionally instead of accepting that it's
a lousy world full of lousy people and that's all it will ever be.

------
neiman
This points a difference between Internet public discussions an private
interactions discussions.

In private interactions, either chatting or RL, I quote "facts" without
references, discuss papers I never read, and in general do things just for the
act of communication, knowing I'm often wrong, and knowing the other side
knows to take me with a grain of salt.

However, in public discussions you can't afford this liberty. Stating a wrong
fact in a public discussion may cause a diffusion of false information which
is almost impossible to undo.

I think most people are aware of this difference, and even in the academy the
accuracy required in private conversation is not as harsh as the accuracy
required in a public forum.

The problem is that for many people, Internet discussions feel like a private
conversation. Hence I see even people I highly appreciate throwing the
accuracy standard out of the window, and making public Internet comments as if
it was a pub conversation over a drink with some friends.

------
ColoradoDev
> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more
> corrupted everything gets.

I had to have a conversation with my wife over this yesterday. She ran into
the office in tears because opposing protestors were standing off with guns as
if it was the American revolution.

The reality of the situation is a couple people had paintball guns but that’s
not what she saw.

What she had seen was a tweet about a tweet referencing another tweet that in
turn referenced a video.

While I know this example is extreme, it really opened my eyes to just how far
we have come.

------
thesagan
People read the headline. The small words beneath it are there for the
headline to rest upon. Sometimes a picture also rests on the small text. That
small text is pretty useful.

When I worked at a newspaper a lot of work went into headlines and pictures,
in relation to the rest of the copy. We knew what we were doing, and we also
knew what are readers weren't doing.

------
irjustin
I appreciate the author's rant. It touches on the larger problem of the
'telephone game'[0] in media, news, youtube, twitter. Syndication of
syndications of summaries of abstracts of research.

Any abstraction or simplification runs into the risk of having its underlying
meaning changed. It is our duty as humans to be willing to chase the core of
truths or to change our minds given new evidence pointing to truths.

It was said well in Hamilton - "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story".

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers)

Also, i hate that it's called Chinese Whispers... I digress.

~~~
dgellow
> Also, i hate that it's called Chinese Whispers... I digress.

Small detail: We call it “téléphone arabe” in French, which means Arabic
phone.

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Good luck with that.

For the record, I did read the article, but my life is not significantly
richer (or poorer) for having done so.

A classic technique for reading scientific papers, is to read the abstract,
then the conclusion. If they motivate us to read the rest, then we do so.

What I often do here, is first check the comments, and see if I want to go and
read the OP. If I do that, I’ll generally read it all; unless it’s _really_
painful.

As a prolix author[0] (and commenter[1]), I’m fairly familiar with low reader
engagement, and I’ve learned to do good abstracts/intro sentences that hook
the reader.

I’ve also learned not to lose too much sleep over whether or not people read
my stuff _(spoiler: they don’t)_.

I write for my own satisfaction. It would be nice if others enjoyed it, but I
won’t live or die by the opinions of others.

Don’t get me wrong; I do care what others think of me, but it isn’t a
principal driver of my life.

I have great respect for good tech writers. The world needs more of them.

A lot of what I write is basic information. It needs to be complete, clear and
concise; not great literature. A simple ToC is useful in these cases, and good
information architecture is important.

If I _really_ want others to read my stuff, it’s incumbent upon me to write
short, brutally-edited, articles, with clear, succinct, paragraphs, “hooky”
abstracts, and conclusions that encourage people to go back, and read what
they missed.

Basically, my experience is that it’s _my_ job to write stuff in a way that
encourages reader engagement, and to lead them to the important components of
the document.

[0]
[https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/](https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisMarshallNY](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ChrisMarshallNY)

~~~
bagacrap
Abstract and conclusion are useful for quickly determining what the authors
_want_ the takeaway to be, so they're better than journalism which can
misconstrue even that. But the problem with reading just the abstract and
conclusion is that you don't learn the methods the scientists used. Lots of
science is junk due to bad methodology. Of course laypersons are not likely
able to determine that even if they read the whole thing, which leaves me to
conclude that you should never modify your world view in response to a
scientific publication until many credible sources all say the same thing.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
_> you should never modify your world view in response to a scientific
publication until many credible sources all say the same thing._

I'd say that should be a basic LifeHacker rule; regardless of whether or not
it's scientific.

Completely agree.

------
renewiltord
I used to be upset about this. But now I just use a chrome extension to ban
people who have clearly not read the article. It just kills any comment thread
they start. My HN is much more useful now.

My Twitter is fine because I only follow people who don't do this.

~~~
aeternum
This does not seem possible technically unless you own facebook's ad network.

~~~
saagarjha
Perhaps they just find people who don't read articles and marks them
permanently.

------
nextlevelwizard
This also goes the other way. Someone who people think of as a thought leader
or a science communicator says something that seems reasonable, but is not
actually based on any science gets amplified and soon if you even dare to ask
for evidence you are painted as "the enemy" and "russian bot" for daring to
think on your own and actually request papers on the matter.

Then people will start linking you papers that are only tangentially related
to the question at hand and get offended when you actually go and read the
paper and point out that the paper has (almost) nothing to do with the actual
question at hand.

------
neilwilson
You get the same when people cry "peer-review" without actually understanding
what peer-review actually means.

Once you dig into it, you find it is far from the last word in validation in a
modern world and very often an argumentum ad verecundiam

As explained, in depth, in "Why I don't publish in Peer-Reviewed Journals".

[https://risk-monger.com/2020/07/31/why-i-dont-publish-in-
pee...](https://risk-monger.com/2020/07/31/why-i-dont-publish-in-peer-
reviewed-journals/)

Please read the article before commenting....

~~~
WA
Read it. And read more from the blog. Certainly some truth to this, but the
blog is a great example why peer review actually matters.

The article itself is a bit of a straw man: one example of a bad peer review
dismisses the whole process.

Other articles are similar. For example one talks about how "green parties
want 100% safety", which simply isn’t true.

Some are click bait like "if there is no Corona vaccine, how about we ask
anti-vaxxers how to deal with this?" And gives some generic advice that every
doctor also says while neglecting that the core argument of anti-vaxxers often
goes like "vaccine is bad for you and you actually should contract a virus
because it makes you stronger in a natural way".

Stopped reading after having found too many of these fake arguments in several
posts.

------
halotrope
You don’t need to read anything. Just parse the headline and comment with some
tangential personal anecdote or a vaguely provocative statement about the
likely conclusion of the text.

------
wbobeirne
For anyone who wants to see this in action, refer to this front page post from
a few weeks ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23885684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23885684)

First read the article, then read the comments, and spot who didn't read the
article. You may have to scroll down / go to the more section, as the people
who are way off base didn't get upvoted as much as the ones who actually read
it.

------
JMTQp8lwXL
The problem is people want their internet points. If you take the time to
read, and then comment, your comment won't get enough visibility on all social
media platforms, especially if dozens or hundreds of other comments quickly
begin appearing. You have to 'show up early' to get visibility. Optimizing for
that dopamine hit, users choose to maximize points over thoughtful discussion.

~~~
alex7o
Yes they do that, however sometimes I feel like nobody will read your comment
(opinion) if you post too late. And the competitive thing to do in that case
is to try to be first to comment if possible, and when people who don't read
the article are always first you are kind of forced to comment without reading
the article too.

------
Noos
It's amazing how much the author lacks self-reflection.

If there was no misunderstanding, would he have even bothered to read or even
know about the paper at all? The bad use of the paper was probably his primary
driver of engagement. Otherwise at best you would see the source or original
tweet, think "Oh that's nice" unless you have a serious interest in
linguistics, and move on.

The darkly cynical thing is that as the flood of information grows, the value
of that information lessens as opposed to its ability to create a happening
and drive engagement. You can say the sky is blue all you want, and it's true,
but people will mill about the person who says the sky is green because they
can interact with it, if just to disprove or mock the person and use it as a
"gathering place" like the author himself did.

I mean, this is how flat earthers exist. The idea is rubbish but it creates a
space that people inhabit.

------
aaron695
> Every time a press release gets popular on Twitter or Hacker News or Reddit
> or whatever, nobody actually reads the primary source.

First question are we commenting on the media article or the research paper?

It'd be interesting to have a site were to comment or vote you have to mark if
you read the article and separately if you read the paper.

------
nwsm
Twitter is much worse than HN or Reddit about this. The author hits the nail
on the head that Twitter in any news- or article-sharing context is about
dunking on headlines. Read the headline, tweet a one-liner reply or quote.

I don't think users are entirely to blame; this is what the app incentivizes.
So for Twitter I don't think there's much hope in asking people to read
articles. It's like wondering why people aren't reading your 8 paragraph
Instagram caption- that's not why people use the app, and the app does not
encourage using it in that way.

However I do empathize with authors who dedicate years of their life on
academic work, only to have someone post it to Twitter with a 1 sentence jab
and that be the most common level of familiarity with the work their "readers"
have.

------
rjkennedy98
This is a good article and it would be great if people felt an obligation read
the source papers more, but the nature of sensationalist journalism and
gamified social media means in all practicality they never will. The
journalist gets views by writing stories that fit into an emotional narrative
regardless of the actual facts. Social media gives users reinforcement for
telling people what they want to hear. That echo chamber drowns out everything
else. There is almost no room for nuance anymore.

------
nojvek
> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more
> corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad.
> The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet
> about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical
> context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper
> itself is a primary source. If you want to know what the paper’s about, you
> gotta read the paper!

This a 100%. Applies the same for code.

------
ratel
Expecting people to make meaningful even informed comments in an arena that is
in no way suitable to the information your sending is not a failure of the
receivers or the commenters. It is a failure of the sender.

Asking people to invest their time to actually read extensive information
about what your try to say, with no perceived additional benefits to them is
just hubris.

Pick your audience or tailor your message to your audience. Don't blame the
receiver.

------
Traster
Whilst I sympathize with why this person is ranting, I find it kind of funny.
People act the way they do on social media due to a mix of the design of
social media, and human nature. It's not complete chance that twitter has an
entire underclass of people who just yell vitriol at the blue checkmark
brigade. It's not chance that reddit divides itself into lots of echo-chambers
that are essentially repeating the same handful of opinions in various
different colours (in reddit's defence this can be avoided using extremely
hands-on moderation).

Fundamentally, there aren't too many people who can meaningfully comment on
most papers. The alternative to commenting before reading the paper is almost
certainly reading the paper and then not commenting because you don't really
have much to add. So let's assume some people do start reading the articles?
Well, they're just going to say less. There's a thousand ways to have an easy
and wrong take on a paper. If you want good reasoned discussion about papers
you're better off looking elsewhere - for example, The Weeds podcast from Vox,
where they actually take a white paper, read it, think about it and discuss
its implications. You can disagree with them and talk about how effective they
are at engaging with the topic (or as is often the case you can get
irrationally angry because you don't like their politics), but fundamentally
it's a much better venue for having that sort of nuanced and informed
discussion than 140 characters at a time mixed in with the sewer that is
twitter.

------
jdkee
Here is an example by a professor of history at Harvard misinterpreting 0.1%
of ER visits for young adults as 61%.

[https://copinthehood.com/2020/07/26/history-isnt-bunk-
part-1...](https://copinthehood.com/2020/07/26/history-isnt-bunk-part-1/)

------
necovek
I think a better exercise is to ignore (it's hard, _I_ know) those who haven't
obviously read the paper/article: it's not like they'll read your reply
either.

And sometimes (usually?), people will truly not understand what a paper is
about, and that makes it even harder to figure out which comment is which.

------
IncRnd
The article's page had a terrible viewing experience. With js turned off,
visiting the page shows content split across 12 columns with a single row that
took up just a quarter of the screen's real estate. Given all this, and the
nondescriptive title, I was not about to turn on js.

------
goto11
Tangential I know, but how is the Knuth quote misunderstood? I have only ever
seen it interpreted as you should only optimize for performance when you
_know_ a section of code is performance critical. Which is typically only the
case for small parts of the code (3% according to Knuth).

------
harsh3195
Does it make sense to have a service that checks whether people have read the
article before talking about it in the comments section? Could be done by some
js, I presume.

I mean, it obviously won't work in case people share it on twitter, but could
reduce people from talking bullshit in the comments section.

------
habosa
Is there a way I can see Hacker News comments alongside the article with a
chrome extension or something? I normally click to the comments here first for
tab management purposes (comments contain a link to the article but reverse is
not true) but I know that's a bad pattern.

------
xupybd
This is true of most news. Headlines claim something crazy, the article has
some nuances and clears up the click bait confusion. Then people read the
headline without reading the article. Then they form a world view accordingly.

------
patatino
Most people just want to express their opinions and not really learn anything
or truly discuss it. I accepted that life is a lot easier that way

------
TheUndead96
Didn't read the paper, but I agree completely.

------
master_yoda_1
This is everywhere. I have to deal with lots of jokers at work, who just
suggest to use GPT-3 without understanding what it is :)

------
cmehdy
I wonder how many of the comments here right now have been written/discussed
without having read the article.

------
segmondy
Folks are accustomed to arguing off twitter tweets, why should we expect them
to read articles?

------
fortran77
One of the HN rules, though, is to not accuse someone of not having read the
article. Of course, few people read the articles here. (A lot of the posts are
people complaining that a linked source is subscription only, then going on to
comment based on the title!)

------
timwaagh
From what I hear twitter has become one of the more 'basic' social networks.
the 140 characters force you to write quick sound-bite opinions without any
nuance. Anonymity makes sure your opinions do not follow you around. I quit a
long time ago.

------
peterwwillis
Twitter is a machine for removing intelligence from communication

------
jandrusk
Perhaps they should check the grammar on their article before they post it:

"They also do a literature review of existing work in word meanings, making
_in_ very clear they were building on the existing work in anthropology and
linguistics. "

:)

------
12xo
People are lazy. Our entire economy if based on this fact.

------
vfclists
This sounds like mainstream media vs James Damore

------
bfung
RTFD, ‘nuff said.

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=RTFD](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=RTFD)

------
whereistimbo
sci-hub? are there any other legal way? open access or bust for me.

------
FeepingCreature
Yeah I'm gonna go subscribe to the journal for €100 a year before I comment...
Right.

~~~
breakfastduck
It's actually kind of beautiful to see an organic example of the behavior that
the article quite rightly criticizes happening on the sharing of said article.

Out of interest, how many lines even of the article did you read before you
decided to post this? Because it can't be many.

~~~
FeepingCreature
Oyeah, didn't see the sci-hub reference.

It says something about the sad state of affairs that the universally agreed
answer here seems to be "yeah just pirate it, nobody cares, everyone does it."

------
tssva
From the title this seems to be a violation of HN guidelines. "Please don't
comment on whether someone read an article."

~~~
wittyreference
I wish the addendum to that rule was “because we will just delete their post
anyway.”

The lowest value contributions on HN are inevitably those that use a headline
to air personal grievances vaguely related to the subject of the post (“Apple
releases new cure for diabetes”, top comment: “Let me tell you why I hate the
touchbar.”) the second lowest are those that clearly read the headline and ran
with it, without reading the content that utterly contradicts what they
imagine the article would contain.

Not having read the article / not discussing anything in the darn article
should absolutely be grounds for criticism.

~~~
saagarjha
Hey, can I tell you about how Firefox uses too much of my battery and is made
by Mozilla _Foundation_ who I will never donate to in a million years and why
the person who gave me my last whiteboard interview probably clubs seals? Oh,
you're telling me the article was about performance improvements in IonMonkey
and how in-person interviews overwhelmingly fail to pick African American
applicants?

Drives me mad. Any Hacker News discussion has an extremely strong push towards
the same couple dozen topics that anyone can relate to, and commenters who
drag the conversation in that direction for no good reason are doing the
thread a disservice.

------
baddox
> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more
> corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad.
> The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet
> about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical
> context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper
> itself is a primary source. If you want to know what the paper’s about, you
> gotta read the paper!

And what about this article, which is about the tweets dunking on the tweet
about the press release?

~~~
GavinMcG
It's about discourse, not the paper, so it would likely tell you to _read the
paper_.

