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Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

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Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#121

Post by ISL »

caconym_ wrote: post #101
presscast wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. What makes you say this? Citing anybody does little to increase your personal prestige. I think the issue has more to do with 4chan not being peer-reviewed, and the proof being so recent that few papers have yet been written. On the contrary, citing a hot…

Somebody pointed out in the Twitter thread that academics often cite unreviewed papers on arXiv. If true (cannot confirm it myself, not in academia) then the peer-review-as-a-prerequisite-for-citation thing doesn't really hold water.

Peer review is no prerequisite for citation.

The first paper I looked at for an example (at the top of today's "Recent" papers in PRD), cites three arXiv entries, out of 91 references. https://journals.aps.org/prd/references/10.1103/PhysRevD.98....

Successful peer review in an upstanding journal is a signal of relative reliability and importance, but it is not the arbiter of usefulness.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#122

Post by internet555 »

maze-le wrote: post #67

This might be a ghost discussion. I have worked in scientific publishing for quite some time and have seen citations in the form of: * personal correspondence * emails * facebook profile pages and my personal highlight * google search queries (I kid you not) All of these citations actually occured in scientific journals. I assume Nicolas Bourbaki was also cited several times, without anyone caring about "academically…

Wow I did this in high school but I got in trouble

Citations:

-Google

-Nicolas Bourbaki

-Rob’s Facebook wall

-My friend in gchat

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#123

Post by rspeer »

jessriedel wrote: post #94
rspeer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assign…

> Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit. Why would a footnote be considered less credit than something in the list of references? It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Indeed, the question of whether prose footnotes are at the bo…

Crediting a web page in a footnote is almost no credit at all. The web page didn't compile the data. A person did. Sometimes the person is inconveniently pseudonymous, but other times they should be credited by name.

I added the Google Books Ngrams example slightly later, but: People _do_ publish papers about their data, and their citation counts are often extremely low, because research users continue to use footnotes instead.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#124

Post by neuromantik8086 »

qubax wrote: post #24
_mtkq wrote: post #7

An "academically correct" solution (i.e., not to taint the prestige of a scholar who cites the solution) would be to cite a real, proxy scholar who checks the solution, but gives all credit to the anonymous 4chan user. Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals".

> Scientists often abhor citing from blogs, forums, and Wikipedia, as those publications "are not peer-reviewed by trustworthy professionals". Which is sad because most peer-reviewed material are not trustworthy either. https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/believe-it-or-not-most-pub... https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... It's worrying that academia is slowly turning into a rigid "appeal to au…

> It's worrying that academia is slowly turning into a rigid "appeal to authority" church

Seeing as how academia literally started out as an accessory to the various Christian denominations for educating priests, I don't see how you really could characterize it as "a space for truth and inquiry". It's only been relatively recently that "appeal to authority" has given way to more secular/scientific ways. Even within the last couple of years, I would wager that academia is no more authoritarian than it has ever been- tenured professors have almost always had a disproportionate amount of influence over their trainees' futures, etc. The head of my father's department when he was getting his PhD in the 70s actually attempted to pull my father's stipend because of an avant garde project that would today be accepted as normal.

I've seen a trend towards the opposite, actually, with graduate students becoming more skeptical of the institution and more proactively addressing its shortcomings through grad student unions and advocacy of open science policies (which neither university administrations nor longstanding tenured professors are fans of in general).

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#125

Post by Izkata »

flyingfences wrote: post #42
flatline wrote: post #23

Isn’t this result in every introductory combinatorics textbook?

You're misunderstanding the problem. It's not a question of the number of permutations. It's a question of the total number of episodes that must be watched to have seen all possible permutations.

Not sure why you're grey; you are correct about why it's not introductory.

Overlap between permutations is why it's not as simple as it first sounds. For example, to borrow the wiki example, "121" includes both "12" and "21" permutations.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#126

Post by wcunning »

ortusdux wrote: post #46

The Haruhi problem reminds me of De Bruijn sequences, aka why I don't trust 5 button keyless car entry systems. Fords keypads do not have return keys, delays, or attempt limits. A 3125 button sequence can guarantee you will unlock the door. It would take about 10-20 minutes for someone who has practiced to break in. Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_s…

If you read down in the comment thread on the Hackaday article, they make it clear that Fords after about 2002~2003 have an attempt limit. I happen to know that my '05 did, at a bare minimum. It's still deeply not secure, but nothing about a car really is... It's intended to make my life convenient and keep the honest people honest.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#127

Post by kipchak »

huntie wrote: post #114
throwaway27940 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all my sort-of-nerd friends and I left the site some time between 2012 and 2015. I think it all went downhill when Obama got his second term and the 'libertarians' became dislodged by full-blown Nazis. There used to be quite a few prominent academics on /sci/'s early days.

Maybe? I've always attributed the fall to a combination of the fappening, Moot's departure, and the 2016 elections. The huge influx of new users combined with a change in moderation absolutely destroyed the site. My memory isn't so good, but I don't think there was much political content outside of /pol/ and /b/ until 2015 or so. Might be dependent on what boards you browsed though. I think you're right about Nazis c…

For what it's worth the increase in traffic from 2010 onward was largely mobile users, with desktop users staying around 50M, while total users grew to a peak of about 133m at the start of 2018.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#128

Post by BowBun »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #69
dijhrykl wrote: post #57

For those not familiar with the series in question, there's a reason why, if you're going to choose a TV series to discuss permutations, you'd choose Haruhi. "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006. Unusually, it broadcast its episodes not in chronological order, but in a mixed order, but for good theatrical reason; the series comprises a main plot arc, and various sel…

> "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006. The first version to be correctly. They later added another 14 episodes, but instead of calling it a new season, they mixed in the new episodes between the old episodes and rebroadcasted it as one complete series. As a special "joke", they also had a timeloop-story spanning multiple episodes, with each episodes telling the sam…

The Endless Eight was widely regarded as a rite of passage in anime spheres. A lot of people would end up skipping the second half after they realized what was going on. Great show, and as far as I know the only one to have attempted something like this.

I personally didn't like it, it just seemed soooooo long. The only redeeming factor (in my opinion) is that Suzumiya Haruhi is outlandish enough for it to be the perfect vessel for such an experiment.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#129

Post by tomjen3 »

tokai wrote: post #73

It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They should maybe contact their research library and get a introduction to citing. All citation styles I know of can handle web citations. Anonymous authors is nothing new either. And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document…

We cited a random persons blog in my masters thesis, supervisor didn't blink an eye (that person had the most clear and concise formulation of the problem we were trying to solve).

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#130

Post by strictnein »

codys wrote: post #111
strictnein wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're worried about someone standing next to your car for 10-20 minutes pushing buttons and not messing up a 3125 number combo on a keypad with almost no tactile feedback?

The comment you're replying to contains: > Someone this year made a bot that did it in about 5 minutes. It's also the case that it's plausible one can interrupt & resume the sequence (at the cost of 4 extra button presses per interruption).

Sure, but it's kind of silly. There are far, far simpler ways to get into a car than bringing a robot with you.
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