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Civic honesty around the globe

(science.sciencemag.org)
209 points ojosilva | 2 comments | 20 Jun 19 19:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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dang ◴[25 Jun 19 03:28 UTC] No.20270932[source]▶
This thread has had a huge influx of comments from new accounts in the last 24 hours—over 250 and counting. They are all, I think, critical of the study. Many have been unsubstantive, but many have had interesting things to say.

Normally we'd consider closing the thread in a case like this, to prevent it from being brigaded. But this is an unusual case and I'm curious to see how far it goes.

In case any of the new commenters happens to read this: I'm the lead moderator of Hacker News. Would you mind sharing with us how you found out about this discussion? It's unusual for us to see so much activity in a thread that is already several days old, and I'm curious to find out what happened.

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1. Sjuliaaaaa ◴[25 Jun 19 04:25 UTC] No.20271166[source]▶
I do hope people calm down. At least write in English. For me I googled the title after I saw the paper from Science online during weekend. I have one major question: why does failing to send email equal to civic dishonest behavior. How the alternative explanation 'passive waiting strategy' is taken into account in their experiment or is it counted as part of civic dishonesty? I found here the author having fair discussions and being active. Then I started my post. Unfortunately I guess after so many opinions being expressed, some of which with strong emotions, it is too overwhelming for the author of the paper to reply.
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2. dang ◴[25 Jun 19 04:33 UTC] No.20271205[source]▶
Thanks for the reply (and welcome to Hacker News)! So if I understand correctly, you ran across the paper because you're a regular reader of Science online, then Googled the title, and Google pointed you to the HN thread? I wonder if that was also the case for the others. My guess was that the HN link either appeared in a media story or started circulating on social media.

The more I look at it, the more I think what happened in the comments below is a remarkable example of cross-cultural communication. Not all of the communication was very high quality, of course, but that was to be expected under the circumstances.

I'd guess that the author is no longer checking the thread, because it's so rare for one of these threads to spark back up again after several days. I doubt that he was overwhelmed, because he was responding openly to criticism earlier, and it would surely be an interesting learning experience.

p.s. Your posts in the thread were very good: thoughtful and substantive, which is what we're looking for here. I hope you'll stick around HN long enough to see if it satisfies your intellectual curiosity. That's the purpose of the site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.