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Comment by bcjdjsndon | Hacker News Reader

Does make me worry about the competence of scientists that they make that mistake.

Given that this was the scientific consensus, "the competence of scientists that they make that mistake" compared to whom? Laymen? I'd still bet on the scientists.

If there's a real concern is not about "the competence of scientists that they make that mistake", but about the certainty of our grasp of the scientific facts in general.

It's not that those scientists were incompetent.

It's more like "science in general doesn't know as much as solidly as we'd like to think" about the matter.

Compared to competent scientists

"the competence of scientists compared to competent scientists" is incoherent and, well, incompetent at multiple levels in this context.

Indeed, reading comprehension at some level is required for the competence to emerge! The competence of one group of scientists is compared to that of the another group of scientists. Feel free to point at your next stumbling block

Yet more incompetence (and quite a case of projection) in the response ... as the GP made clear, the context isn't about a comparison between different groups of scientists. The GGP made a sweeping generalization about the entire community of scientists -- as the GP said, this was the scientific consensus. There wasn't some separate group of "competent scientists" who believed that "junk DNA" wasn't junk, as there was no evidence that it wasn't. One is not competent merely by virtue of making a baseless claim. The fact is that the scientists who subscribed to the consensus were generally competent, as scientists generally are ... far more competent, certainly, than bozos making absurdly ignorant and cognitively inept claims that lack of knowledge of the function of "junk DNA" was an indication of scientific incompetence as opposed to some other group of people who were competent scientists.

I won't respond further to such cluelessness.

Calling it a "mistake" vs just a lack of knowledge is a weird way of framing it. There was much discussion of "junk DNA" (now referred to as non-coding DNA) for years/decades - everyone realized it was an anomaly to be explained, but no-one knew the explanation. This comprises the vast majority (98%) of DNA - so clearly it was there for some reason.

> but no-one knew the explanation.

They called it junk DNA and said it had no purpose, not that they weren't sure. This is the crux of my argument

Worry more about the financial incentives built into every nook and cranny of our economic system to the point it permeates scientific funding, that make it an asymmetric bet to say anything even if it is proven wrong later, than to spend a lot and say in the present, "I got nothing". Modern science is more an industrial complex where errors and overstatements are often the rational outcome of perverse economic incentives. More commonly known as publication bias or the file drawer problem.

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