[aluren]

While I agree there are plenty of issues in academia among which too much emphasis on IF is certainly a thing, it does provide a helpful filter (or prior, if you will) to quickly assess whether some material is worth your time. In this case, stuff in low-IF journals that are virtually unknown in the community (e.g. there are a few journals like Bioinformatics that are also fairly low-IF but very well respected), whose conclusions can't help but provide ammunition for a political point, all accompanied with commenters hinting that there's some grand omerta in the community (lol, as if we didn't already have problems pushing the obvious stuff like climate change first), all of that adds up to something rather suspicious.

Please don't regurgitate common talking points about academia issues if you're just trying to score points in support of a fringe political position, that's not at all the direction we (as scientists that are critical of academia) want to go.

[xamuel]

I'm not trying to score points in favor of a political position (please follow HN etiquette of giving posters the benefit of the doubt).

The filtering you refer to may be useful[1] when looking at bulk lists of papers (e.g. when sitting on a hiring committee), but this is an example where the article has already been curated for our attention, namely: by being upvoted on Hacker News. You can still choose to filter it out, but it's silly to write comments attacking the paper based on the journal's impact factor. Better to grapple with the paper's actual scientific content.

[1] (Useful in the same tragedy-of-the-commons way that it's "useful" to leave a picnic ground without cleaning up after yourself.)

[aluren]

Alright, I wasn't talking about you specifically, sorry if you took it that way.

On HN curation: while I certainly look up to this community when it comes to coding, technology and latest new software tools in general, I'm sorry to say the standards are not even remotely up to par when it comes to genomics. I assume it's because neither the mod team nor the majority of the community has a relevant background, and it's perfectly understandable. It does mean however that I, more often than not, encounter some pretty egregious stuff on here, especially when some dreaded words like "evolution" or "heritability" get mentioned. I sometimes try to chime in (and keep in mind I'm no authority beyond being a rando who happens to work in the field and knows plenty of people more qualified than me) but sometimes the disconnect between HN discussions and actual scientific community discussions is unreal.

On the paper itself: I didn't only mention its IF and voiced other concerns further in the thread. Ultimately there's a limited amount of time one may allocate to reading papers when there are literally millions of the damn things.

[_liww]

[flagged]

[dang]

Hey, would you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? It's quite against the spirit of the site and its rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The idea here is to exchange information thoughtfully and to treat others kindly even when they are ignorant or wrong. If you know more, share some of what you know in a way that the rest of us can learn from. Don't post comments to put others down or bash their views.

We don't have these rules for ethical reasons or because we think it's good to be wrong. It's just that we want this place to stay interesting, and when internet users flame each other, that destroys the forum and causes smart people to leave. We want to avoid that scorched-earth outcome.