Live data from Hacker News

How Should We Critique Research? (2019)

gwern.net

11–12 of 12 posts

Re: How Should We Critique Research? (2019)

#11

It seems to me that the most important factor is not being mentioned here. That is money - who funds the research. Its a simple enough problem - eg if you wanted papers to show anything - eg 'that koalas cause forest fires in Australia' (I know that's ridiculous!) - then you simply fund a bunch of papers. If you have 10 papers, and 2 are supportive, 2 are against and the remaining are ambiguous - you have a start! Yo…

Also censorship. Opposite information are suppressed as unscientific, even through they are considered common knowledge. It is why it took 30 years for science to officially recognise asbestos and smoking as dangerous!

Re: How Should We Critique Research? (2019)

#12

Its too bad research papers can't be organized like a git history. We'd see many forks that never end up as pull requests that are merged back to main. And probably forks of forks that stray too far from the founding paper's intent. It would be nice to more easily identify original versus derivative research. Maybe that solves a different problem. I like their suggestion though: "I offer a prag­matic cri­te­rion: wha…

Replies summarized: that already exists
Post reply on HN