Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtlmtlmtlmtl | Hacker News Reader

Reading this comment I couldn't help but remember the research showing extremophiles replacing phosphorous with arsenic in their DNA backbone. NASA held a big press conference and made a huge deal out of its potential implications for extraterrestrial life. It was later found that the data was inherently flawed(possibly even doctored? My memory fails me) due to arsenic contamination of samples. Retracted.

Things like this do happen, and more frequently than one might expect.

View on HN

Nonetheless, the goal post to pass is the scientific process and journal article review. It’s not “someone made a mistake in a study once before so all science is ruled out” as this would tend toward. We’re not doing ourselves any good carrying around old bad behavior.

If you read my comment as implying all science is ruled out due to one example, that's very much a you problem. I said or implied no such thing.

I also didn't take a stance on this research. I've yet to read the paper, and I don't read "science journalism" like TFA. But it's not like the findings are earth shattering given previous research. Therefore I lean towards optimism.

I am simply saying that scepticism is warranted even if a paper is peer-reviewed and published in Nature. The "scientific process" doesn't magically end at peer review. The process goes on, and it pretty much never ends.

If your post was simply to say, "This paper could have flaws and its conclusions could be incorrect," then yes, almost all of us will agree with you. I'm not sure it's big news, however. I would guess most of us understand that scientific findings are contingent on future experiments and results.

If your post was to point out a specific flaw, e.g., that the sample could have been pre- or post-contaminated, then it falls short of anything substantive and actionable. Nobody can do anything with it. Yes, you are correct. But no, there is not anything anyone can do with the critique. If you're going to point out a flaw, it needs to be something that you, the authors, or other PIs can check, perform, etc.

My post was clearly not pointing out flaws in this specific research. Not sure how you get that impression.

I first replied to a comment implying that just because research is widely publicised it should be accepted at face value, with a counterexample. That was all.

Then someone replied to that with the absurd implication I was somehow trying to denounce all of science based on that one example. I corrected them.

The only thing I said about this specific research was the following:

>>But it's not like the findings are earth shattering given previous research. Therefore I lean towards optimism.

If you inferred any other comment on the research than that, the source of that is your imagination, not anything I wrote.

As I said,

> If your post was simply to say, "This paper could have flaws and its conclusions could be incorrect," then yes, almost all of us will agree with you. I'm not sure it's big news, however.

>But no, there is not anything anyone can do with the critique

Critique doesn't just exist to be actionable.

It can also exist (as in this case) to remind of a possibility. Especially in this case, where the possibility is precluded.

In fact that was the very intended. Pre/post contamination could still have happened, we can't just exclude it because "protocols were followed". Protocols have been followed in other cases where errors got in the way to.

Perhaps you didn't wanted to see a general comment, but somebody spotting a specific error in a specific step of the actual process?

As I said in another comment, you may be reading too much into the statement to the press as opposed to the actual paper. It's more likely that the author quoted as saying that something could be "ruled out" meant, more precisely, that the possibility of contamination is very small, but non-zero, and that the overwhelmingly more likely conclusion is the existence of said compounds.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com