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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

Mainstream science: we need to get the public excited about science.

Also mainstream science: no stop talking about us!!

What's the bfd? This isn't IV bleach for COVID... So what if tiktokers are suddenly talking about the quirks of BCS?

Nature is just bitter imo because they passed on an article that the public was fascinated by because as the authors put it "trauma".

They are reacting just like all the publishers who passed on JK Rowling because no one wants to read a fantasy book a girl wrote.

This is like YouTube telling people not to watch Cobra Kai on Netflix because they passed on it.

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Nature is now just whining cuz one arxiv publication got everyone excited. That's what it feels like after reading this poor quality article published by nature

Don't forget it was Nature that published Ranga Dias' fraudulent superconductor papers. LK-99's confirmed properties already infinitely more valuable even if it isn't a superconductor.

It's because people aren't excited about the science. They're excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the potential result. That is literally antithetical to the entire process of proper science, and the exact kind of behavior/mentality that most scientists hate due to how it warps things like funding.

Science is the process. It's taking your time, proving your work, and most importantly, replicating your results.

Is the gossip about LG's involvement and the leaked-ness of the paper and the death bed dying breath parts really taking center stage here? I've come across that stuff but the focus of the excitement really seems to be on "will it replicate".

You don't get to have public interest in science without public interest in science drama and gossip. Humans being what they are, it's unreasonable for you to expect otherwise. There is not a single topic for which the public has an interest in the thing but no interest in the gossip and drama surrounding that thing.

> It's because people aren't excited about the science. They're excited about the speculation, the gossip, and the potential result

I think you could argue that the initial spark of intuition-- the thing that makes you go "huh. Let me look into this more" before gathering evidence and peer review, is one of the most important steps of "the science"

>the exact kind of behavior/mentality that most scientists hate due to how it warps things like funding

I'd be more sympathetic to this had scientists not done such a terrible job of distributing the funding my taxes pay for

Tbf, it’s not scientists who make the funding choices. Those are political decisions made by bureaucrats and functionaries and that whole process is totally opaque/fucked.

> That is literally antithetical to the entire process of proper science, and the exact kind of behavior/mentality that most scientists hate due to how it warps things like funding.

Have you considered that the way we “do science” is actually a broken process made of absolute bollocks?

I sincerely doubt anyone will see this, but this video is basically a perfect breakdown of everything wrong with how this was handled-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl-AgmoZ5mo

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