Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Debunking Princeton

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 150 posts

Re: Debunking Princeton

#121

Post by crm416 »

As a Princeton student, it's been pretty frustrating to watch this devolve into (drawing from comments on this page) a "sham study by Princeton", with this response being a criticism of "Princeton's methodology", and that "Princeton was deserving of a response like this".

It's been pointed out by a few other HNers, but this type of logic does a massive injustice and disservice to all the institution's undergraduate and graduate students, as well as its professors, who work hard to produce some of the highest-quality research in the world.

To say that this is a "Princeton study" is to present this as if it were endorsed or produced by the administration or some department or even a tenured professor. Instead, let's remind ourselves that this was a pre-peer reviewed paper posted on _arXiv_ by two PhD students (who have likely been at the university for a few years, tops). To paint this as the Princeton community getting together as a collective and putting forth their best attempt to "debunk" Facebook is just hilariously unfair.

Look, there's a thick anti-higher education slant on HN. People love referencing the higher education bubble and the 'demise' of the current university system or whatnot. But it'd be nice if we could keep things in perspective here and at least do better than the media, who can't wait to pounce on a Princeton vs. Facebook feud.

Re: Debunking Princeton

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #114
TeMPOraL wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Lab coats are there to bounde ideas off each other and sometimes write stupid things that will get corrected by other lab coats. Consequences should be there for the people who find such articles and take them for a media spin. It's not the paper that is doing the damage, it's the news articles, like the Guardian story. It is the responsibility o…

That would be even more dangerous. The power to impose consequences on irresponsible journalists gets abused every time.

Could you provide an example? I haven't seen a single case of the thing I was meaning by my comment, so either we misunderstood each other, or I haven't checked hard enough.

Re: Debunking Princeton

#123

Post by tripzilch »

hooande wrote: post #13

I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture. There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anythi…

I don't really see the problem, according to TFA, Princeton is going to disappear anyway. The problem solves itself.

Re: Debunking Princeton

#124

Post by tripzilch »

Fomite wrote: post #94
CGamesPlay wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The students also published it online before it was peer-reviewed. I think the grandparent is more referring to the typical corporate cop-out of "the actions of a few employees", even though the damage is done regardless of who did it--and the employees (or students) did it under the name of the organization.

These students did absolutely nothing wrong. They submitted their paper to a well known, well regarded preprint service (arXiv), which is pretty normal for a number of fields. Then, presumably, the paper would go to peer review. Where one would hope the reviewers would point out a few glaring flaws (like that an SIR model without either the creation of new susceptibles or waning immunity must go to 0 and they are 'do…

> These students did absolutely nothing wrong.

> The paper would get rejected, or heavily revised, and the world would keep spinning.

Which means they did something wrong. Sure it might have been just a mistake, not quite the cardinal sin the GP makes it out to be, but you don't have to publish papers with flawed arguments on ArXiv.

It's one thing to write up a silly LaTeX PDF with wild speculations, put it on your webpage, but you don't need to submit every brainfart to ArXiv either, or do you?

Re: Debunking Princeton

#125

Post by logicallee »

If they weren't being satirical, this response would be a logical error, this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque (The logical error is that it could very well be true that Princeton is declining, and proving this would not affect the results of the Princeton study that Facebook is declining.)

However, the fact that they did so satirically sounds like when a politician says, "that's preposterous" instead of "that's false."

In addition, the data they use is pretty weak. The first chart shows that Princeton "crashed" or died between 2010 and 2011, since that's when that graph tanked. Since that data isn't good to make their Tu Quoque argument (that Princeton "will die") they are being satirical and ignore it. The second graph shows that more and more Non-Princeton articles are published. But this is due to more and more non-Princeton publications. Princeton has a fairly static amount of output, as the world's universities started outputing scholarly articles in English, you would expect Princeton's share to drop.

More interesting would be if its share of what it is trying to go for, Nobel Prize Laureates, publication in Science and Nature, whatever - were on the decline. This isn't addressed, just a global proportion of all scholarly articles: not Princeton's aim.

However, Facebook's goal is to get a majority of daily active users.

The second to last graph actually shows a pretty good case that larger institutions (by enrolment) correlate with search relevancy. But that is not a case study of an institution whose enrolment fell, which is what it would take to make a parallel case with the Princeton paper. They would have to pick an institution whose enrollment fell with its relevancy, and then show that Princeton is on the same track.

As it stands, it is not "longitudinal" but just a static cross-section of enrollment and mentions. Perhaps enrolment is static at all major institutions, regardless of search relevancy, and their enrollment remains full even if they become irrelevant?

This small switcheroo is a major one, and shows why the article has to be satirical.

Of course they did respond quickly :) It seems to indicate that Facebook did some research, but then found their results too weak to publish straight.

Re: Debunking Princeton

#126

Post by OverlordXenu »

hooande wrote: post #13

I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture. There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anythi…

Was the science that terrible? Or rather, was the methodology so terrible or was it the data, or was it truly both?

Studies are only ever useful in aggregate, anyway. It's about metaanalysis, not just what any singular study says.

Re: Debunking Princeton

#127

Post by OverlordXenu »

hrjet wrote: post #102
wsxcde wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Should there be consequences for people who publish buggy code on github? Because that situation is completely equivalent to what these phd students did. ArXiv isn't a repository of peer-reviewed accepted papers, it's just a repository of papers, just like how github is repository of code. The people to blame here aren't the students themselves.…

What matters is the effect. If someone puts up code on GitHub which purports to compute the Fibonacci series, but mistakenly does a `rm -r ~/*` then surely there should be a way to flag that code or author ("consequences").

This is just kind of ridiculously fallacious. Surely a slightly inaccurate paper is not comparable to malicious code. That's not a fair comparison to make.

Re: Debunking Princeton

#128

Post by OverlordXenu »

tripzilch wrote: post #124
Fomite wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These students did absolutely nothing wrong. They submitted their paper to a well known, well regarded preprint service (arXiv), which is pretty normal for a number of fields. Then, presumably, the paper would go to peer review. Where one would hope the reviewers would point out a few glaring flaws (like that an SIR model without either the creation of new susceptibles or waning immunity must go to 0 and they are 'do…

> These students did absolutely nothing wrong. > The paper would get rejected, or heavily revised, and the world would keep spinning. Which means they did something wrong. Sure it might have been just a mistake, not quite the cardinal sin the GP makes it out to be, but you don't have to publish papers with flawed arguments on ArXiv. It's one thing to write up a silly LaTeX PDF with wild speculations, put it on your w…

Scientific papers are rarely perfect. Papers are often sent back for revision.

Re: Debunking Princeton

#130

Post by hrjet »

OverlordXenu wrote: post #127
hrjet wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters is the effect. If someone puts up code on GitHub which purports to compute the Fibonacci series, but mistakenly does a `rm -r ~/*` then surely there should be a way to flag that code or author ("consequences").

This is just kind of ridiculously fallacious. Surely a slightly inaccurate paper is not comparable to malicious code. That's not a fair comparison to make.

I wasn't comparing that particular paper with malicious code. Inaccurate papers in other fields (like biology) might have a more significant impact.

If we were to continue the GitHub analogy, it would be great if ArXiv had a public "issue" list.

Post reply on HN