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Comment by chromanoid | Hacker News Reader

I don't like the headline. As if the protein decides to do so. Maybe this sounds a little bit less "active" but probably also less sensational: "Some Proteins Perform Different Jobs By Changing Their Folds"

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One of my pet peeves is science journalism abusing the active voice, often in ways that almost anthropomorphize the process. The absolute worst are phrases like "Nature designed this protein to...", which I have seen otherwise reasonable, rational writers toss about carelessly. (It's like the inverse of the passive voice used to describe police shootings: "the suspect was hit by gunfire", etc.)

A reasonable reader will implicitly understand that the proteins have not, in fact, acquired sentience.

This is what I tell myself every time I read an HN comment written by a collection of proteins.

I don't normally meta-comment on other comments, but this one is superb. It took me a moment to soak it in.

True! Problem is, there are a lot of unreasonable readers too, many of them having strong opinions about natural versus directed processes.

Well, you can't reason with unreasonable people :) That's the actual problem. Also, I strongly disagree with your view that a lot of them are reading scientific articles. The root problem is lack of science education/curiosity which needs to be addressed specifically, rather than forcing the rest of the world to adopt certain phrasing.

Personally I like the romanticism/poetic style, it makes articles seem less bland, which makes me want to read them even more.

Based on my experience with otherwise reasonable readers who are relatively naive when it comes to biology, this is not the case.

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