211–220 of 363 posts
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> the academic system, which is bad in many countries. I suppose GP intended it to compound - as in the guy was sketchy per se, and from a sketchy place. is it good here? is here considered less sketchy?
Evidently it’s not perfect here but yes, it’s less sketchy, because there’s far worse out there.
In graduate school, in my lab there was a grad student who was kind of an unlikely "professor's pet". He was tall and had surfer's long hair with a bit of a hippie aesthetic. Anyways, he was also really completely clueless about how to do science correctly, but also, I guess, really good about playing politics (there was a time when he asked me to put some bacterial plasmid DNA on my mammalian cells. I told him "it d…
Also describes medical research. Only it's even worse. Problem is, you have no choice if you want to work in a university hospital. The system essentially tells you "you'll be doing shit science... or you'll leave!". Been at it for more than 10y, and no hint of change in sight. This is going to be really, really hard to change unfortunately.
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> any such effort would be less trustworthy than the original publication. The idea that scrutiny would be less reliable than blind trust is absurd. The question in the OP, for example, could have been in the comments sections of these papers.
I understood that this was about scrutinising papers in academic journals - the academic journal's value is quite literally its trustworthiness. (The journal exists and is employed to do the scrutiny) A comment from any random person (in general) holds a lower level of trustworthiness.
“Any random person” includes many researchers, including phd holders or just random people with time on their hands, but whose commentary could be judged on its own merits, not by some credentials or stamp of approval from journals that don’t even examine the data used by studies they publish. This does not mean that comments should go completely unmoderated.
As far as I’ve seen, no journal does a thorough examination of data referenced by studies it publishes.
Credentials, papers, citations, and studies do little to increase the levels of trustworthiness precisely because papers like these are not publicly scrutinized.
The article mentions Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.” It's the first time I've heard it, but it's a very appropriate observation in today's world where misinformation travels faster and wider than correct information. If you're just making stuff up, it's much faster than looking up sources.
Information travels very quickly through a medium that wishes it to be true. You will find that the ability of the human mind to be critical, to refute with very salient arguments is suddenly acute when the mind doesn't wish it to be true, and this definitely also applies to H.N. comments. That H.N. in this case is so accepting to this one side of the story suggests to me that this is the side it seems to want to be…
No one here is trying to argue that it happens all the time or more often than not, I'm wondering if that's what you think we're reading.
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Math has a different problem. Because of the wide breadth of the field, and highly specialized nature of problems, it can take a very long time for anyone to actually verify a result with confidence. If ever. Unless you’re doing something famous like P!=NP, there might not be many people capable of checking your work in a reasonable amount of time. The story of Fermat’s Last is a great example, what would have happen…
I agree, even proofs are wrong more often than you’d think, but I’m not sure whether math is actually so uniquely broad that other fields don’t suffer from this problem.
Of course this happens to some extent in math too, but a lot of subfields aren't killed or born due to outside technological changes. Number theory remains number theory, and still builds directly on centuries of work, even if computer verification has helped in some cases (disclaimer: I'm not a number theorist).
For most subfields of mathematics, you have a lot of depth to cover before you get to the forefront of research. That isn't to say that it's by any means easy to get to the forefront of more high-level physical sciences, but there are certainly subfields in biology or medicine that didn't exist a mere 40 years ago (also true in math, but in general far more rare there).
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Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It’s a secondary source that aggregates knowledge from primary sources. For all the problems wikipedia does have, this isn’t one of them. It’s not their job to second guess published research.
> Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia An encyclopaedia with rather low standards that many people sadly treat as an absolute source of truth. You're right that this isn't really a wikipedia problem though. It's a matter of education because an overwhelming majority of the population isn't competent enough to fact-check memes on facebook, let alone wikipedia, and if wikipedia doesn't do it either, then that responsibility i…
... that somehow manages to have articles on proeminent subjects that are more in depth and factual than any competing encyclopedic endeavor, while, at the same time, far surpassing them by orders of magnitude on breadth for obscure and less academic topics.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia in the traditional sense, and can't be judged on the same standards. It is simply in a league of its own, it fails in different ways than traditional editor-controlled projects and is a fantastic repository of human knowledge and educational resource.
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Every now and then I go through some of wikipedias sources on certain social topics because I don't trust them at all. The amount of BS I've found in papers, even though I don't eve have any research background at all is impressive. My favourite was probably this one paper where the author essentially made a reddit-post asking a community about themselves, then cherry-picked (the post is still up, with timestamps and…
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It’s a secondary source that aggregates knowledge from primary sources. For all the problems wikipedia does have, this isn’t one of them. It’s not their job to second guess published research.
The article mentions Brandolini’s Law: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.” It's the first time I've heard it, but it's a very appropriate observation in today's world where misinformation travels faster and wider than correct information. If you're just making stuff up, it's much faster than looking up sources.
Information travels very quickly through a medium that wishes it to be true. You will find that the ability of the human mind to be critical, to refute with very salient arguments is suddenly acute when the mind doesn't wish it to be true, and this definitely also applies to H.N. comments. That H.N. in this case is so accepting to this one side of the story suggests to me that this is the side it seems to want to be…
Chinese researcher is full of shit and fabricates results, news at 11. For the haters, this is not racism but nationalism, China super incentivizes bullshit research at a high level these days, and it's gotten bad enough that we're starting to distrust any "work" that comes out of it. I don't know what the solution is, other than to subject Chinese submissions to more stringent and specifically non-Chinese review. Th…
>China super incentivizes bullshit research at a high level these days Just as you'd expect from a "Chinese researcher", you're going to have to qualify this statement for your point to hold any weight.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. It’s a secondary source that aggregates knowledge from primary sources. For all the problems wikipedia does have, this isn’t one of them. It’s not their job to second guess published research.
> Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia An encyclopaedia with rather low standards that many people sadly treat as an absolute source of truth. You're right that this isn't really a wikipedia problem though. It's a matter of education because an overwhelming majority of the population isn't competent enough to fact-check memes on facebook, let alone wikipedia, and if wikipedia doesn't do it either, then that responsibility i…
It seems to me like a lot of the articles are accurate, and some of the check marked or featured articles are downright great.