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

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

#131

Post by laurent92 » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:30 PM UTC

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…

> I know of several individuals who were able to complete their Master’s thesis utilizing…

Doesn’t it stay published forever? Might be a shame for the someone during their career.

On the other hand, even a chapter of Mein Kampf was accepted in 20 journals, after replacing the old word with newer versions. Human reviews are hard. Maybe we should put computers in charge of reviewing papers, they’d recognize the work of AI quicker?

https://www.foxnews.com/us/academic-journal-accepts-feminist...

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

#132

Post by synquid » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:31 PM UTC

slowmovintarget wrote: post #86

Freak_NL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also “haze figuring” for cloud computing. It sounds like something you'd find in 30s, 40s, 50s sci-fi for sure! Like “visiplate” (E.E. “Doc” Smith, Heinlein) for a computer display screen. (Along with ticker tape printouts and tape reels in the far future of course.)

Makes me want to put smog-hosting in my CV.

The smog is just the Chinese cloud.

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

#133

Post by mdp2021 » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

I cannot understand: those articles should have been carefully examined before publishing - I understand they are in the set of those "Under the Warranty of the Publications' Authority". But if anyone read them, the rubbish involved would have emerged.

What am I missing?

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

#134

Post by atrettel » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

MikeUt wrote: post #83

atrettel wrote: post #60

I have encountered something similar to this for a submission that I reviewed for a scientific journal. I will not list any names or give much detail past those generalities, but I pointed out that the authors were misusing a particular technical term. In my review I defined the term and explained it briefly. I asked the authors to revise their submission accordingly. The paper was not bad but the authors did not kno…

> the authors plagiarized my definition and explanation almost word for word (from my confidential review). Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously? Because rephrasing definitions is the pinnacle of wasted effort, and leads to confusion - you are asking them to say what you said, but without using your words.

That is a good question that I do not have a good answer for, unfortunately. The review process for this journal is supposed to be blind, so crediting me would only reveal me as a reviewer. An anonymous acknowledgment is better than nothing, if the authors only copied a short definition without my permission, but they copied an entire paragraph from my review without my permission. That's just inexcusable. I can understand to some degree why they did not understand the concept well, since you may not encounter it even in a graduate-level course on the subject, but what they did was just inexcusable and really poor judgment.

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

#135

Post by pottertheotter » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

adaml_623 wrote: post #113

turnersr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your review, did you suggest the definition and explanation that they used? In this situation, would have an acknowledgment at the end have been enough? In my mind, it seems like you all had a conversation and the authors took up your suggestions as the reviewer.

Not 100% sure but I believe the word confidential implies that the review should only have been read by the editor(s) and not passed on to the authors.

A review is the written feedback authors receive from the journal reviewer. The reviewer can recommend that the authors revise and resubmit, based on the review comments. Usually the review is not published with the final piece, which is what was meant by “confidential review”.

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

#136

Post by derefr » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 10:06 PM UTC

thebooktocome wrote: post #85

throwawaygh wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. University of Phoenix awards doctorates that take 3-4 years (HUGE red flag -- the best and brightest phd students might get out in 4 years if everything goes perfectly; an "expected time to graduation" of anything less than 5 years is almost certainly a worthless degree). Those doctorates don't require much more than taking some coursework and paying a boatload in tuition. Basically an expensive and length o…

NB: I'm only speaking about the math doctorate as it currently stands in the United States. Due to the current market saturation of math doctorates, any pure mathematics PhD worth the paper its printed on will also probably come with a non-trivial publication record. The exceptions I can think of are high-risk high-reward areas like cutting-edge number theory (I had a friend go eight years without publishing, which,…

> certify new candidates by saying: "You're a doctor of mathematics when you get five professors to sign off on 3-5 papers you've had published."

Or one big one.

Basically, take the "honorary doctorates" some Universities give out to people retrospectively to people who have made major contributions to their fields; do it more often; and then make it the only path to getting a doctorate, such that they're no longer "honorary" at all.

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

#137

Post by fighterpilot » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #115

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 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... People don't care about masters degrees engineering, law, business, art, etc. etc.? Try applying for many jobs without one, or with one from lower-ranking colleges. The Chronicle of Higher Education article recently on the HN front page said that masters…

In engineering and financial services, my experience is that they don't care. Some weight is given to a PhD but not a Masters.

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

#138

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

da39a3ee wrote: post #116

MikeUt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the authors plagiarized my definition and explanation almost word for word (from my confidential review). Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously? Because rephrasing definitions is the pinnacle of wasted effort, and leads to confusion - you are asking them to say what you said, but without using your words.

I agree with this. You sound expert and provided a definition. I don't think we should expect serious professionals to mess around altering the words to make it look like it didn't come from the source that it did come from. In fact wouldn't that itself be plagiarism? The usual approach here is to use a phrase like "as suggested by one of our reviewers".

I think this is the cause of some of these weird terms that this HN post is discussing. I have a PhD and found it incredibly frustrating to write research papers because there was an expectation in my field to add a ton of background. That meant I had to spend a lot of time to rephrase bits and pieces of other papers where the authors had worked hard to word something very well. The professors didn’t like me quoting from other papers. I had to come up with my own way to say something very specific.

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

#139

Post by abecedarius » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 10:14 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…

Reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

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

#140

Post by pottertheotter » Sun, Aug 08, 2021, 10:16 PM UTC

dash2 wrote: post #97

bjourne wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really doubt you can computer generate a Master's thesis. Completing a Master's thesis at an accredited institution is a heck of a lot of work and even a cursory reading of a thesis by an examiner, supervisor, opponent, or other interested party would give the generated content away. Maybe if you get your degree from a diploma mill you could get away with it, but then your degree wouldn't be worth toilet paper anyw…

Oh my sweet summer child. I regularly get dissertations with any or all of: barely readable English, useless empirics, half-baked research questions.

How are dissertations getting to you like that? When I did my PhD, no one would have allowed a PhD student to start writing a dissertation without first having sufficient research questions and then completing appropriate statistical analyses.