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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

nature.com

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

#151

Post by wolverine876 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #143
wolverine876 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Engineering and CS masters are 100% cash cows that no one cares about. I promise you. I haven't even heard of a Masters in Law (law degrees are doctorates), but I can't imagine it's worth the paper it's printed on. MBAs are worthless unless they're from a few good places, and even then the brand and networking does a lot of the lifting.

> law degrees are doctorates

Law degrees are called Juris Doctor but are professional degrees, like MBAs. You aren't required to publish original research (afaik) and in the US they were formerly Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) and then renamed (as I understand it).

The doctorate is Doctor of Juridical Science (J.S.D.). You can also get a Master of Law (LL.M.).

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

#152

Post by OminousWeapons »

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. People in regulated/unionized industries also don't actually care; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in education, go to borderline diploma mills to get that union-mandated raise at minimal effort.

I don't mean this rudely, but it is attitudes like this which cause the CS interviewing process to be 100X more painful than the interviewing process in any other field: "I don't trust your credential so I demand you prove your competence to me on the spot and let's do 5 rounds of interviews just to be sure."

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

#153

Post by petschge »

pottertheotter wrote: post #138
da39a3ee wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I write papers too and hate finding a new way to say "my X is a Y that does Z". Especially if it is your tenth paper on the topic and you should even sound like the previous nine times.

But about three sentences into the introduction (where you explain all the background) you start going into "there is also Y's that do Z backwards". Which Y's you compare and connect with is important and says alot about how you think about your X. It might even be a new way of looking at it. So telling other people how you think of it can be important.

And another 5 sentences in you start referencing previous work on the topic. At this point you are crediting other and you get to chose whom to credit how much, with the benefit of hindsight. You refer to papers that are useful to people new in the study of capital letters. What you write here helps them much more than a mere list of papers or a google (well google scholar or ADS or pubmed or what ever) result list, because you can provide a good order to read them or which aspect of X's are best explained where. You also name papers that might be useful to practitioners in the field because they have a particular technique or a good explanation of it.

So it is very much worth while of providing the background that others expect at the beginning of your paper. Even if it requires rewriting that first paragraph several times.

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

#154

Post by petschge »

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-…

Yeah in my field the general attitude is that Nature isn't all that great. I have heard the phrase "it was published in Nature but might still be right" more than once.

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

#155

Post by cratermoon »

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…

It's funny when it's done for laughs: https://www.instagram.com/nathanwpylestrangeplanet/?hl=en

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

#156

Post by myself248 »

throwawaygh wrote: post #145
bjt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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.

The name originates as a perforative for small tuition-dependent non-research teaching colleges. Those colleges mostly catered to pastors, teachers, etc. and were located in small towns. The historical reasons that these institutions are now "in the corn fields" provides an interesting topic for historical inquiry. Perhaps many are in old rail-road or factory towns that have since languished, but schools that were si…

> The point is that they are small, inconsequential institutions that are predominately located in rural and semi-rural towns.

Wow, coastal elitism much?

There are surely many degree mills and garbage universities, but to conflate their worth with their location is both injurious to discourse, and incorrect.

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

#157

Post by rowanG077 »

aliswe wrote: post #99
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The paper was not bad but the authors did not know English very well, so it was quite difficult to read. That was its main problem. This seems to confirm my suspicion than these cases are not so much about AI-generated content but rather a result of machine translation.

it's a common technique/first layer of plagiarizing a text to translate it from english to eg. spanish and then from spanish to english, to get rid of the unique words the author used.

What that phrase again? Oh yeah innocent until proven guilty. Whew almost forgot it. Why would you assume bad faith when this could be much more easily be explained by non-english speakers just using a machine translator.

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

#158

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #152
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; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in education, go to borderline diploma mills to get that union-mandated raise at minimal effort. I don't mean this rudely, but it is attitudes like this which cause the CS interviewing process to b…

I've found very limited correlation between credentials and relevant skills. In CS, the actually important skills are often self-taught or gained through experience.

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

#159

Post by thisrod »

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.

> Is there any way the authors could have kept your definition, and somehow credited you, even anonymously?

It's not uncommon for the acknowledgements section of a paper to thank an anonymous reviewer for, e.g., suggesting the authors further investigate a detail that turned out to be important. But in this case, where the authors couldn't write their own explanation of a technical term, maybe it's a bit premature for them to be writing technical papers.

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

#160

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

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…

There used to be bad writing contests for academics. One of the famous winners was Judith Butler's timeless[1]:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

You just can't argue with that.

[1] Ironically.

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