Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science • Hacker News Board

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#121

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

bjt wrote: post #87

throwawaygh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Master's thesis I don't doubt this at all, and I have no doubt that GPT-3 with a bit of human editing can spit out something better than the lower third of masters students at corn row colleges. Masters degrees are cash cows, which is why no one in unregulated industries cares about them. People in regulated/unionized industries also don't actually care; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in…

> ... masters students at corn row colleges. First time I've heard the term "corn row colleges". Google's not bringing up anything that looks relevant. I suggest picking something else. Given that "cornrows" are a predominantly black hairstyle, the term reads like a racial slur.

I (non-American, not a native English speaker) thought it was a pejorative reference to rural universities; ("hick" / "rube") state universities of Midwestern states etc.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#122

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

throwawaygh wrote: post #52

gzer0 wrote: post #35

This is anecdotal evidence at best, but it is worth considering. I know of several individuals who were able to complete their entire Master's thesis utilizing a combination of AI generated content (GPT-3) and a paraphrasing tool. The generated text was well over 50 pages, completely bypassed all known content/plagiarism checks and was even included in the Universities "exemplary examples". To this day, it is still t…

> Master's thesis I don't doubt this at all, and I have no doubt that GPT-3 with a bit of human editing can spit out something better than the lower third of masters students at corn row colleges. Masters degrees are cash cows, which is why no one in unregulated industries cares about them. People in regulated/unionized industries also don't actually care; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in…

> Masters degrees are cash cows, which is why no one in unregulated industries cares about them.

So, uh, is Business Administration a regulated industry?

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#123

Post by Animats » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:10 PM UTC

sampo wrote: post #101

dmos62 wrote: post #18

I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?

> I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. The highest profile journals ( Nature , Science , The Lancet in medicine, ...) have some tendency to go for sensationalism. They want to publish radical, ground-breaking research more than there is actual new ground-breaking results happening. So they also end up publishing mediocre research presented as ground-breaking, and some less-than-…

Um, yes. "Nature" used to have a great reputation. Supposedly it still does in bio. But battery articles in Nature are just awful. They keep blowing up "minor advance in surface chemistry" into "10x better battery that costs 10x less Real Soon Now".

(I'd like to see EV World or something else in that space reprint old articles as "1, 5, and 10 years ago in battery hype".)

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#124

Post by Animats » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

rusk wrote: post #68

In telecoms they call all the backend infrastructure “back haul” and have never read a satisfactory explanation. I’m convinced that somebody once coined “back hall” with the intention of invoking the image of service passages like what you see in the mall, it was misheard (as is often the case in Telecomms given it’s global nature) and the metaphor of the bulldozer tail stuck for ever after

I've heard that term used where an ISP is piggbacking on a larger service. Sonic.net offers some of their services over AT&T infrastructure. Data to and from home DSL lines is "backhauled" to Sonic HQ in Santa Rosa, CA and then goes out over the bulk Internet backbone from there. This is a different path the data would take than if handled entirely by AT&T.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#125

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #58

And the journal involved, Microprocessors and Microsystems , is an Elsevier journal. Huge surprise. I am glad the publisher earns their outrageous fees by careful screening, peer-review, and editing of submitted manuscripts. /s Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.

Elsevirus?

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#126

Post by yissp » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

etempleton wrote: post #92

I often wonder while reading an academic paper how the writing could be as hopelessly bad as it is. This type of manipulation and plagiarism may be partially to blame, but the academic writing style has also gone completely off the rails to the point that half the journal articles being published today read as if written by some kind of paper writing AI robot even when I am quite certain that that isn't the case. And…

Good essay by Orwell that touches on this sort of thing https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... I used to be guilty of writing this way and one of my high school English teachers recommended I read it. I've tried to take the message to heart ever since.

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#127

Post by golemotron » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #62

Some of these tortured phrases are great. My favourites: "flag to clamor" for signal to noise "individual computerized collaborator" for PDA (personal digital assistant) "haze figuring" for cloud computing "information stockroom" for data warehouse "focal preparing unit" for CPU "discourse acknowledgement" for voice recognition "mean square blunder" for MSE (mean square error) "arbitrary right of passage" for random…

There might be a common concept between this, chaff[1] and Steven Pinker's Euphemism Treadmill.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(countermeasure)

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#128

Post by nick__m » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

robwwilliams wrote: post #21

dmos62 wrote: post #18

I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?

Not even those! The impact factor of a journal is a terrible guide to quality. It is more appropriately thought of as a measure of scientific sex appeal. You must read each paper to judge its merits. Lots of junk gets published in top ranked journals.

  Lots of junk gets published in top ranked journals.

A lot more get published in vanity journals, so I use the impact factor as a first pass filter: I avoid papers from journals not listed the JCR¹ or those with a factor below 1.000.

I assume, maybe naively, that if an important finding were to be published in such low quality journal, it would eventually get published in a more legit publication.

1- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342623066_Journal_C...

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#129

Post by jszymborski » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:25 PM UTC

As someone who has had to write technically in a second-language (French, funding agencies in Quebec), this rings particularly true.

Luckily, I'm fluent enough to recognise the particularly egregious examples, but finding good translations for technical words is hard!

One example that comes to mind is when trying to translate the phrase "data feed" which came back as "alimentation données" which ostensibly means "animal feed data".

If you're looking for a lot of English-to-French translations of technical terms, check out the theses any English University in Quebec (McGill, Concordia, etc..). They're made public online [0]. Can't vouch for the quality as I'm sure there are plenty that just use Google Translate, but everyone I know has their abstract edited by a francophone in their field.

A good way to validate translated technical terms is to just give them a quick internet search on e.g. DuckDuckGo or Semanticscholar.

[0] McGill's is https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/

Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

#130

Post by Strilanc » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

raincom wrote: post #106

etempleton wrote: post #92

I often wonder while reading an academic paper how the writing could be as hopelessly bad as it is. This type of manipulation and plagiarism may be partially to blame, but the academic writing style has also gone completely off the rails to the point that half the journal articles being published today read as if written by some kind of paper writing AI robot even when I am quite certain that that isn't the case. And…

A friend submitted a paper to a journal in humanities. The reviewer said "his English is informal". In other words, these reviewers are asking for stilted English.

I also get this feedback on my papers. E.g. saying that it's written "more like a blog post".

Of course, they're not wrong. It is written more like a blog post. Because the writing style used in blog posts is hands down better than the writing style used in scientific papers. Blogs talk about the real reasons you worked on something, they go through simple examples, and they mention where you struggled and what you found confusing and what you tried that didn't work. All of these things are very useful for understanding, and in my experience almost entirely lacking from papers. Or at least, in my experience they're lacking from modern papers. I think in papers from 100 years ago the authors tended to talk more about their worries and their excitement e.g. [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/RZfCqWZ8EAY?t=630