I think skepticism is warranted, but dismissiveness is not. Honestly it's a little offensive.
Also, in this case their findings aren't even counter intuitive or that surprising. They are just measuring something that most of use believe already (judging by the rest of these comment threads).
The fact that most of us already believe it is reason for increased skepticism. We have a bias towards accepting things that mesh with our existing beliefs.
That doesn't mean their results are untrue. We just have to be careful not to overestimate the strength of this evidence.
Being a little offensive is fine. The question and argument should be whether it's a corre t assessment about the field, not whether it will hurt their feelings to read this. If it's false, argue that. It can be offensive to priests to say there's no god. It doesn't by itself make it false.
That’s fair. But you are just proving my point. This research was dismissed out of hand, it wasn’t actually engaged with to see if it’s a correct assessment or not. That seems to happen whenever any sort of soft science research is posted here. There is a contingent of folks that seems to believe soft science is an oxymoron and therefore shouldn’t even be tried.
It's not necessarily bad habit to kind of purge HN of these random "paper announcements". Wait until there's a meta-analysis and let's submit that and talk about that.
Regarding the folks who are militantly ignorant about the science of soft science, alas I have to agree, they are a bit of a problem.
Also, in this case their findings aren't even counter intuitive or that surprising. They are just measuring something that most of use believe already (judging by the rest of these comment threads).