Please don't invent hostile motives in my post when none were being offered. I was simply pointing out the impasse expressed in the article. This isn't NASA's internal blog of scientists, so I'd think that possibly dumb speculation could be offered.
The iteration explanation makes some sense, although these seem like very expensive iterations.
FWIW its how your original post comes off. It may not be an accurate representation of your beliefs or intentions, but it is a reasonable interpretation of your words: "Seems like someone in NASA needs to work out this conflict."
You are literally strolling into a subject you know nothing about and putting forward an opinion that amounts to "wow, these guys sure are dumb, huh?" It's a very common way to comment on science stories and it's absolutely infuriating.
Why not this?
"So, I don't understand what's going on here, this seems weird because of X, Y, or Z, can someone explain what's going on?"
Or this?
"Is NASA really so dumb that they would do X, Y, and Z given that A, B, and C seem to be at odds with that?"
Instead we get: "Hah. NASA is so dumb." Even though we live in 2015 and the results of even 15 minutes of effort involving google and wikipedia could clear up a lot of these misconceptions.
Why are people so heavily invested in maintaining their own ignorance? Why do people insist on jumping to the conclusion that thousands of top tier scientists couldn't POSSIBLY have thought of the same things that occurred to them in the few moments spent thinking about it before deciding to make a post?
You're piling on too hard here. It's unfair of you to put things that crusso didn't say in quotation marks. That is guaranteed to produce a defensive reaction that makes the argument worse rather than better. And then you depict a caricature so idiotic, it's surely unfair.
You're correct of course that commenters are too quick to make gotcha criticisms when they ought to pause and realize that there's almost certainly more going on. But this is something most people do, and we should each take care of our own part of it first.
There's another aspect of this too. On HN, the problem is as much created by the upvoters as by the commenter. Sometimes a comment was intended as an offhand observation—the sort of thing you'd throw out to friends, not meant to sound authoritative, let alone pompous. But by the time it gets upvoted to the top comment, it can sound like the criticism of an asshole. HN unfortunately has a number of areas like this, where every individual contribution is positive, or at least well-intended, yet the total they add up to is negative. Let's not make the mistake of blaming individuals for a collective problem that we all contribute to.
Except I didn't say any of the versions of what you paraphrased. I didn't say anyone was dumb. I didn't say "Hah". None of it.
Why are people so heavily invested in maintaining their own ignorance?
More attacks. Why? Look, I took a 10 minute break to read some HN this morning and read the article. I didn't know all the details and I had to get back to work, so just threw out a speculation. Judging from the 35+ upvotes I received, it was something many others reading the article were curious about.
Why do people insist on jumping to the conclusion that thousands of top tier scientists couldn't POSSIBLY have thought of the same things that occurred to them in the few moments spent thinking about it before deciding to make a post?
I guess you could wonder why you jumped to the conclusion of my thought process because you were wrong. NASA isn't just scientists. Often decisions are made for political, bureaucratic, and budgetary reasons that have nothing to do with the science. Sometimes, smart people do lame bone-headed things.
The iteration explanation makes some sense, although these seem like very expensive iterations.