Live data from Hacker News

Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science

nature.com

251–260 of 263 posts

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

#251
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are Masters students.

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

#252
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how confident you sound about the Bolivian language. I guess you meant spanish, or maybe aymara/quechua. > This will be familiar to most people who've studied abroad It wasn't to me until now but this explains a lot!

I chose Bolivia because I know next to nothing about it and it seemed neutral; I should have used a notional country, like the Republic of United Swiss Emirates. You've never had to do that before? Maybe I run into it a lot due to the nature of the conferences I attend. I know just enough of the language for functional conversation, but as soon as a complex idea is put forward, I need to be able to contextualize the…

> You've never had to do that before?

Not really, but I came across some teammates in college who didn't seem to be able to follow a conversation yet they seemed to have quite good writing skills. This might be the reason why ;)

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

#253
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a native English speaker, but not an academic researcher, I would have naively done the same. To preface: I am speaking in ignorance of the mechanisms of credit and advancement in your field, so I'm undoubtedly overly harsh. I'm not even trying to be fair, because I admittedly don't have the knowledge to do so. I know academia is a different world from private sector industry, but I would think if the point of a c…

> I would think if the point of a confidential review is for you to do anonymous work to improve someone else's credited work This is one outcome of peer review, and is an explicit goal of (good) peer reviewers. But it's definitely not the main goal of peer review. The main goal of peer review is assessment. Improvement is something that you can strive for as a secondary outcome, but it's not the main point. This is…

Thanks for the detailed reply.

I guess I don't understand what kind of "confidentiality" was violated. To me a violation of confidentiality would be revealing your name and your role in the process, or publishing sensitive information they got via the process, maybe publishing some idea or data you shared with them that you intended to publish yourself later. But they didn't use your name, and you didn't share any sensitive information with them, so I don't get it.

Plagiarism I guess I can see, though the cynic in me says if it was so obvious that their native language wasn't English, it was in the best interest of readers for them not to do the dance of paraphrasing away the plagiarism.

> I don't know anyone who has a passing familiarity with Academia and doesn't realize that it is incredibly competitive.

Yeah, my family who are in academia talk all the time about how petty and cutthroat it is, and I'm sure that played a role in scaring me away from trying it myself, but I can tell they think business must somehow be worse. I get the feeling that deep down they believe they’re seeing a version of human behavior somewhat elevated by the ideals of academia, and however bad it is inside academia, outside, in environments ruled by cruder values, it must be worse.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your statement, if true, would mean that most dictionaries would use exactly the same words to describe a given, well-specified scientific concept, yes? No, it definitely doesn't unless you significantly extend what I said in a very uncharitable way to reach that point. > Most definitions are not as simple as "cosine similarity". But plenty are. As I said previously, you are going to be hard pressed to constate pla…

Then I don't know what you mean by "definition". I showed several examples of definitions for frame dragging, including ones where re-use would, IMO, constitute "a minor form of plagiarism". Is your view that re-use of those definitions cannot be plagiarism? If so, why not?

> Is your view that re-use of those definitions cannot be plagiarism? If so, why not?

Could you stop pretending you are not understanding my point considering your first example nicely underline it and you yourself admitted it would be laughable to call that plagiarism?

I never was arguing there that the copying of everything you might defined even tenuously as a definition never ever constitute plagiarism. That's a complete strawman. I'm going to stop wasting my time here.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I don't know what you mean by "definition". I showed several examples of definitions for frame dragging, including ones where re-use would, IMO, constitute "a minor form of plagiarism". Is your view that re-use of those definitions cannot be plagiarism? If so, why not?

> Is your view that re-use of those definitions cannot be plagiarism? If so, why not? Could you stop pretending you are not understanding my point considering your first example nicely underline it and you yourself admitted it would be laughable to call that plagiarism? I never was arguing there that the copying of everything you might defined even tenuously as a definition never ever constitute plagiarism. That's a…

You and sunshineforever didn't understand how one can plagiarize a definition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28111656 .

That's a universal statement.

I've been trying to argue that definitions can be plagiarized, with examples which are not "tenuous" but ones which are drawn directly from publications.

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

#256

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…

But why did you call them for plagiarizing a private note, a confidential review? I mean... In the end they just used your wording to improve their paper, for a concept they already mastered. And you said the paper was good, otherwise. IMHO they acted ethically.

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

#257
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…

Thanks for pulling those out. I enjoyed them. It does remind me that even before AI we had this kind of tortured phrases just in product descriptions of, for example, Chinese products. Like as a child I had been given a clone Rubik's cube labelled the Turrible Tetrahedron.

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

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoyed finding "counterfeit consciousness" for artificial intelligence. To me it evokes a kind of science fiction that's shown up occasionally on HN[1]. [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I searched github for "counterfeit consciousness" and stumbled into quite the rabbit hole https://github.com/search?q=counterfeit+consciousness

I see nothing today?

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

#259
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exact process has been used by spammers for a long time now. It's called spinning, and it is basically the kind of thesaurus replacement you're describing here. When I read the OP, my impression was that these authors were running plagiarized portions of their articles through a similar kind of spinner.

NB: The paper itself describing this problem talks about the use of spinbot.com at the end.

spinbot Tortured Phrases -> "tormented expressions"

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

#260

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.

No, I did not suggest the definition and explanation as content for them to use. I was trying to explain a concept that they discussed incorrectly multiple times in the paper. It is an advanced concept that might not even appear in graduate-level courses on the subject, so I can understand why they did not understand it fully. That said, I did not give them permission to copy my words there. If there are any particul…

Acknowledging anonymous reviewers is common in my (erstwhile) field. “An anonymous reviewer suggests the following definition of…” I have to say that it seems odd to me to regard this as plagiarism.
Post reply on HN