

Show HN: usefulscience.org – one sentence summaries of journal articles - jaan
http://usefulscience.org

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11001
I really don't want to diss your work, I respect your intentions to bring
scientific discoveries to the masses, but...

This is part of a huge problem in science, the "one sentence summaries", or
simple interpretations. It might be tempting to think that knowing a one
sentence summary is better than not hearing about the research at all, but
it's not so obvious to me.

Most (social science, nutrition, environmental science, economics, psychology
etc.) research is deeply flawed. That includes study design, statistical
analysis and interpretations. Politicians love to through money at scientists
that look for simple straightforward causal relationships between such
incredibly complex systems as human behaviour, brain chemistry, nutrition,
genetics, etc. And that's why there is so little reproducible research. You
won't get a right or wrong answer about whether, say, cannabis is harmful
without taking into account, a person's genetics, daily stress, the use of
coffee, alcohol and other substances, their diet, their level of physical
activity, social life, childhood trauma etc. But that would be too hard to
interpret. Instead we get headlines like "Teenagers smoking pot are (arbitrary
number) more likely to develop schizophrenia" and "Cannabis has been shown to
kill cancer cells", which leads absolutely nowhere, because they just delude
people to thinking the scientists are answering the original question ("is
cannabis harmful?"), which isn't well defined in the first place.

The necessary part of improving the current state of social "sciences" is
acknowledging that simple rules rarely govern complex systems, and therefore
the public should be incredibly skeptical to any headlines that report that
"the scientists proved" some straightforward "law".

Source: I do data analysis for multiple research groups that include
psychology research (hormones, behaviour, depression), nursing research
(breastfeeding, childbirth complication) and psycho-oncology research (quality
of life of cancer patients and their caregivers).

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jaan
Thanks – I agree with your worries about misinterpretation, especially in
regard to flawed study design. We're not trying to be the be-all end-all, but
hopefully a decent starting point for further research into the subtleties of
a specific topic. That's in addition to trying to make the science more
accessible by having it appeal to a wider audience.

We're still narrowing down our content guidelines, so would love your input!
Feel free to ping me.

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11001
Maybe your website will help people see the plethora of inconsistent findings,
so they can start questioning the state of science and think of "better ways"
for themselves ;)

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jaan
Looking for feedback, and we're happy to answer any questions! RSS:
[http://usefulscience.org/rss.xml](http://usefulscience.org/rss.xml)

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illdave
Really _really_ love the design - great work. Could be useful to add a search
function (it'd be interesting to headlines that mention "coffee", for
example).

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jaan
Thanks Dave, appreciate it (design was by Cameron Spencer @ lab43.com). And
search is on our feature list – hopefully it'll be up soon!

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perrincita
Great idea! This is definitely going to be useful in class! Glad to find a
place where I can easily find interesting research papers. Keep up the good
work!

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bhudman
This is fantastic. It is annoying to come across papers that are incredibly
hard to read, but convey _very_ little.

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lcary
A recent study showed that daily doses of usefulscience.org will enlarge the
frontal cortex by 15%.

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jezclaremurugan
Any place where I could sign up to get a digest will be great. Good job on the
website.

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jaan
Thank you! You can sign up for the email digest at
[http://usefulscience.org/about](http://usefulscience.org/about)

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bensonperry
great design! how are the headlines/summaries written?

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jaan
Thanks! We're a team of grad students from various disciplines – we write the
summaries ourselves for now. Hopefully some text mining for automating this in
the future!

