It's not that HN folks pay inordinate attention to headlines in isolation. I don't think you meant it that way, but that's how it comes off. The issue is that people often don't read the articles that the headlines are for. We can see this on any social media app. For the purposes of this comment, maybe discussion?, I think that HN, Reddit, Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, etc., are all social media. Some folks might want to squabble over exacts but to make things simple to discuss I chose to define it as such.
For science in particular, I think it gets a bad wrap generally because people don't like it when you tell them something might be true then say it isn't. The general population really doesn't seem to like it when the scientific community says "we may have the answer for x, y, and/or z but we don't know for certain." as that's too complex of a thought to keep. We, generally, love to be told simple truths for complex problems.
We see this in politics broadly, as well. When discussing tickets as a SWE I know we tend to understand this by the time we're intermediate developers and adapt our language appropriately.
For science in particular, I think it gets a bad wrap generally because people don't like it when you tell them something might be true then say it isn't. The general population really doesn't seem to like it when the scientific community says "we may have the answer for x, y, and/or z but we don't know for certain." as that's too complex of a thought to keep. We, generally, love to be told simple truths for complex problems.
We see this in politics broadly, as well. When discussing tickets as a SWE I know we tend to understand this by the time we're intermediate developers and adapt our language appropriately.