“In the last year, problems in reproducing academic research have drawn a lot of public attention, particularly in the context of translating research into medical advances. Recent studies indicate that up to 70% of research from academic labs cannot be reproduced, representing an enormous waste of money and effort,” said Dr. Elizabeth Iorns, Science Exchange’s co-founder and CEO. “In my experience as a researcher, I found that the problem lay primarily in the lack of incentives and opportunities for validation—the Reproducibility Initiative directly tackles these missing pieces.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
"Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias."
but I didn't really need to add that to make my comment any better.
I think it's pretty shallow still, even with that, because it's just a generic dismissal. Most readers are already familiar enough with this phenomenon that your comment amounts to a knee-jerk reaction—literally the most obvious thing one might say in the closest generic category. That's a marker of a bad HN comment, because it points to shallower, more generic discussion.
I mean, I could have made the point that this is basically just the base rate fallacy: because 90% of papers are wrong, finding wrong papers is easy. You can just say all papers are wrong, with 90% accuracy.
Or, I could have made the point that social sciences as a whole are woefully non-quantitative and the real lesson is: ignore just about anything you hear about psychology studies in the media, because most of them come from innumeracy and invalid experimental techniques.
Another great point: when somebody, say an "average Nick", finds that a paper does contain an invalidating flaw, it can be challenging to get the attention of the establishment. Sometimes that's because you're an average Nick with no cred in the field, sometimes it's that the journal doesn't want to admit that one of their board has been publishing total crap for the last 20 years in said journal.
Instead, I summed up all those points in a single comment which was in no way shallow, but rather, from decades of experience with our broken scientific system.
If you have decades of experience with the scientific system that's wonderful—but for a HN good comment you need to show that, not tell it—and you certainly need to make comments that are distinguishable from obvious internet dismissals. If a comment pattern-matches to that (as yours did), people are certain to interpret them that way, and not just moderators.
People with significant knowledge in their heads often assume that when they communicate a short message M, the message is substantive even if it doesn't include much information. In one's head, this is precisely true: M automatically connects with the things you already know and thus has a lot of depth to it. But all that is lost when sending M to other people—especially in stateless internet comments.
The rest of us don't have your experience and knowledge, and don't have access to what's in your head. All we see is the information you explicitly put into M. In this way, the same M can be both substantive (to the sender) and unsubstantive (to the receiver), because the sender has all the implicit information and the receiver only has the explicit. The 'received M' matters much more than the 'sent M', though, first because there are millions of receivers, and second because it's the received M that determines how people react.
I was all for writing long comments sharing my experience but the prevailing attitude on HN is "experts don't matter" and "covid vaccines don't work". No amount of additional contextual knowledge or explication will help those users (and I am exceptionally concerned by the latter).
I often extrapolate but sometimes, all that needs to be said is a single sentence, because it achieves my goal.
Ok, but for good posts, your goal needs to also take readers into account.
I'd be careful about any generalizations concerning the "prevailing attitude on HN". People routinely (I would almost say invariably) fall prey to false feelings of generality about this, because the annoying responses one encounters inflict a much greater impression on one's memory than anything else one encounters. I've written about this a lot, which may (or may not) be useful.
I think you must certainly have fallen prey to this bias, because "covid vaccines don't work" is extremely far from a prevailing attitude on HN. Such comments do appear, though, even though they're a tiny minority, and these no doubt make an outsize impression.
“In the last year, problems in reproducing academic research have drawn a lot of public attention, particularly in the context of translating research into medical advances. Recent studies indicate that up to 70% of research from academic labs cannot be reproduced, representing an enormous waste of money and effort,” said Dr. Elizabeth Iorns, Science Exchange’s co-founder and CEO. “In my experience as a researcher, I found that the problem lay primarily in the lack of incentives and opportunities for validation—the Reproducibility Initiative directly tackles these missing pieces.”
https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... "Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias."
but I didn't really need to add that to make my comment any better.