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False claims in a widely-cited paper

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

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Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#11

Post by p-e-w »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #6
OhioMan2943 wrote: post #4

So we're firmly in the era of few people caring about few things now aren't we.

I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.

I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results.

Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#12

Post by Aperocky »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc.

But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#13

Post by zer00eyz »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected

This isnt a new thing though.

Cantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th... they didnt just reject him, they basically publicly beat him down, and drove him away from math and into depression.

David Bohm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential spent years on the outside for having his ideas on this.

Geoffrey Hinton: was considered a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc).

Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972...

Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#14

Post by JoeOfTexas »

Aperocky wrote: post #12
paulpauper wrote: post #2

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc. But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civiliza…

Status quo changes at the speed of snail.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#15

Post by cwillu »

qsi wrote: post #5
sillysaurusx wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true? In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context. Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are…

Ooops, sorry... I cannot edit the URL in the submission. I should have checked.

You can always send a short polite email to hn@ycombinator.com with corrections you can't make yourself

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#16

Post by Georgelemental »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #6
OhioMan2943 wrote: post #4

So we're firmly in the era of few people caring about few things now aren't we.

I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.

Quantum physics, due to its own "difficulty of observing and measuring", has its fair share of nonsense too

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#18

Post by Tostino »

JoeOfTexas wrote: post #14
Aperocky wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc. But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civiliza…

Status quo changes at the speed of snail.

Usually when people die and vacate their seats of power in society.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#19

Post by hansvm »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #3
paulpauper wrote: post #2

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true? In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context. Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are…

> good stuff rejected, are you sure that's true

In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either.

Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example:

One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in.

[0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...

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