Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

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From a quora post by the same author of the tweets:

> Astronomers will think of all the ways to justify Phosphine without life and I welcome that. Please do, because we are at the end of our possibilities to show abiotic processes that can make Phosphine

> there very well could be an abiotic source but that alone would be an amazing discovery. However we must deploy Occam’s Razor and suggest the simplest explanation and the evidence suggests the simple explanation is biological sources, life.

Wouldn't a better announcement be "Phosphine detected in Venus atmosphere". Maybe it's compelling evidence for life, but claiming "Signs of Life Detected" seems a bit premature, no?

And from the link on the author's Twitter bio:

> Over the long, winding arc of his career, Brian has built and run payments and tech businesses, worked in media, including the promotion of top musicians, and explored a variety of other subjects along the way.

Not exactly who I thought would be announcing the discovery of life beyond our planet.

> Wouldn't a better announcement be "Phosphine detected in Venus atmosphere".

Better announcement for whom? For the general public, which largely has no idea what phosphine is but has a decent chance of guessing it is a chemical, that title would not give them any indication that the article might be interesting to them.

For most people the only thing that makes phosphine on Venus interesting is that it might be a sign of life, so you want to have that somewhere in the title.

Did you read the article? There's going to be a paper published tomorrow in Nature and the MIT scientists who wrote it will be doing a press conference. This Brian guy is just amplifying the news - he's not the author of the study.

Yes, I read the article. The discovery does sound compelling. I'm commenting on his amplification strategy ("Signs of Life discovered on Venus") rather than just presenting the facts ("Phosphine detected in Venus atmosphere").

I prefer my science news without a hype man but the author seems to take quite the initiative on Quora: "However we must deploy Occam's Razor and suggest the simplest explanation and the evidence suggests the simple explanation is biological sources, life."

https://www.quora.com/Was-life-discovered-in-the-clouds-of-V...

It's pretty sensationalized and coordinated like a PR campaign.

If you watch the video on his Twitter feed, the scientists themselves seem to focus on the science and don't claim to have "discovered life on Venus", so they do seem well intentioned. And their discovery certainly does sound interesting and potentially significant.

“Signs of life” has more information content than “Phosphine” - I had no idea that Phosphine is a sign of life, and that is a completely objective description of it from my new understanding. A sign of life does not mean life.

> A sign of life does not mean life.

But strongly, strongly implies that. It's misleading marketing.

My understanding is that the presence of it strongly implies life on Venus. Just because people have a prior on that doesn't mean the evidence is inherently weak. If it turns out there is bacterial life on Mars and on Venus (both potentially the case) people who claimed we needed "extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims" will look conservative in retrospect.

> It's pretty sensationalized and coordinated like a PR campaign.

Considering his past Quora contributions, the most recent one above is a drastic theme change which I find quite weird

Good journalism (and any information sharing) is about delivering meaning, not just facts. Facts divorced of context tend to lack meaning to all but those that fully understand their context, because they're prone to misunderstanding.

It's completely appropriate to center a headline around the likely meaning of the phosphine discovery rather than the discovery itself, because almost nobody is an astrobiologist. The scientists who study this stuff are just as compelled by the question of life on other planets as a layperson, because its discovery would be extremely meaningful to us as a species.

The question is not whether headlines should be represented as facts or their meaning, its whether the meaning that is presented is supported by the facts. In this case, it seems warranted.

> Of course science it about presenting empirical findings and forming a hypnosis

This reads like a fifth grade science fair project.

Yeah, reading this guy’s website sets of my bullshit-artist filter pretty hard.

Article might be good but jeez, bad source.

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