Thank you for asking.
Everyone should feel free to express themselves and I always encourage people to contribute. I'd just appreciate if people spent more time thinking about if they actually have something to say that has any sort of value for me as a reader on the topic in return for the time I'm giving them to read their submission / comments, as a basic form of respect.
In my opinion the steady decline of quality in comments and submissions, especially on scientific submissions posted here, is because a growing amount of people are not doing the minimal amount of research it takes to form an educated opinion about a topic.
But getting the science wrong has very real consequences. For example, when a community doesn’t vaccinate children because they’re afraid of “toxins” and think that prayer (or diet, exercise, and “clean living”) is enough to prevent infection, outbreaks happen.
To form a truly educated opinion on a scientific subject, you need to become familiar with current research in that field. And to do that, you have to read the primary research literature.
Reading and understanding research papers is a skill which every single doctor and scientist has had to learn during graduate school. Everyone can learn it, but like any skill it takes patience and practice.
Based on what I read in the comments for this submission, a lot of people do not want or can not spend that time on building an educated opinion on the topic and figuring out if the underlying paper has scientific authority.
That's why I encouraged them to ask the Authors directly, if something is unclear or they are making assumptions that are simply not supported by the paper.
I'd still appreciate if more people learned how to read and interpret scientific work but in a world where most people want instant rewards and have a rather short attention span, a short, polite E-Mail to the Authors is a shortcut to gain valuable insight on the scientific work and your own assumptions about it, so that you don't sound like a complete idiot to people who have actual knowledge about the topic when you say things like "Most people in this study were probably obese and would have died anyway" or "Probably junkies skipping meals".
I could take time to explain this paper in an even lengthier comment, but I'm just Jamesbeam on HN. You have no idea if I'm a nobel prize winner or maybe having an agenda to persuade you into a certain direction, but the authors of this paper are actually scientists published in a reputable journal and they were so kind to even give you the ability to contact them by publishing their E-Mails.
And yes, I think it's a good idea to challenge your assumptions by asking people with actual knowledge about the topic so you don't look like a complete fool on the Internet.