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Comment by striking | Hacker News Reader

I hate to quote the article so directly, but to make the headline a little less click-baity:

> Put it this way: The neurons that represented the smell of an apple in May and those that represented the same smell in June were as different from each other as those that represent the smells of apples and grass at any one time.

> This is, of course, just one study, of one brain region, in mice. But other scientists have shown that the same phenomenon, called representational drift, occurs in a variety of brain regions besides the piriform cortex. Its existence is clear; everything else is a mystery.

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These are the only two paragraphs worth reading in that article

I personally feel similarly about a large percentage of articles in magazines like these. You can replace the whole article with 2 - 3 paragraphs usually located within the first third of the article, roughly.

It almost feels like writers are just writing for their own benefit. Like so they can point to this stuff and talk about how great of a writer they are. But no, they're actively doing a bad job. Maybe these kinds of magazines are just trying to entertain and the actual information is basically secondary. It feels like a lot of these are science themed writing, not writing where science is the goal.

not a [neuro]scientist, but is there such a thing as “the smell of an apple”? one would think that sensory input != actual representation and also that representation is context specific.

On top of that layer the fact that the brain constantly tries to predict what is going to happen (based on a model of the world). So the experience of smelling an apple the first time is different from smelling it subsequently. Also smelling an apple is heavily influenced by visual input.

So, I don’t find their “findings” odd at all. I also think the whole we have neurons for X is an old theory that maybe we should move away from.

How to write an article these days:

- Find a newly published paper

- Assume it’s true

- Build clickbait title

- Write 2,000 words, make sure to include references to old Greek philosophers

- Publish

Honestly, “[Anything-s]cientists have discovered a phenomenon that they can’t explain” is like the least clickbaity title ever. It’s basically equivalent to “Scientists have had a good day at work”.

actually, it's "Scientists have a bad day at work." Scientists explaining a phenomenon is a good day at work.

but you're right, it's not clickbaity, except for the elephant in the room, there are way more things neuroscientists can't explain than there are things they can explain.

Well, kind of, finding things you can’t explain (but still feel you should be able to) can be difficult, so I’d say that “skimmng papers all day and walking away feeling you haven’t changed the contents of your brain much” is the bad day. But yes, actively reducing humanity’s or even your own personal ignorance is a much better day, of course.

> actually, it's "Scientists have a bad day at work."

I have read/watched quite a few occasions where scientists (mostly physicists) show child like excitement describing a newly encountered phenomenon that they can't fit in the current model. My grasp of contemporary physics is next to nothing but my guess is the scientists get excited because it opens up an unchartered path. It's an opportunity to expand the envelop of knowledge.

yes, and people often laugh after a faceplant, but successfully executing a flip is better.

This is more like tripping yourself over by moving your arm through your torso and knocking your leg out of position. A failure in a sense, but you just did something nobody else knew people could do.

"Scientists can't explain mechanism behind neurological representational drift" allows for individuals that understand the terminology to skip reading the article.

That's not a good headline, i'm not a journalist -- but the concept of withholding information crucial to the story while using hyperbole in a generic enough way to still be factually accurate to attract both experts and laymen alike to read an article (and more importantly to generate ad-revenue, who cares about readership!?) is the definition of clickbait.

Here's my own rule of thumb : If I have to read an article to understand the broad premise, the headline failed it's job journalistically; even if it gets all the hits and ad revenue in the world.

I think that’s the disconnect here: I don’t see the original headline as attractive at all (or hyperbolic, but that’s irrelevant here). It is not only uninformative (no argument about that), it’s uninformative enough that my reflexive reaction is to shrug and move on. (And I’m not immune to clickbait, but it does have to be enticing.)

No it's not. That it textbook click bait. "You won't believe this secret that is short enough to put in the headline, but we won't do that"

It seems that the point of my comment failed to get across (I did try to make it more explicit initially, but the result sounded disparaging and I didn’t like it).

I get that the headline is constructed as and meant to be clickbait. But it somehow manages to fit that clickbait mold while being completely bland and boring. Something like “You won’t believe this weird thing neuroscientists can’t explain” (which wouldn’t have made it past the Atlantic editors, hopefully) at least makes an effort to convince you the article is interesting by outright telling you it is.

this can also be an algorithm for an AI news writer.

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