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Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

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Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#101

Post by caconym_ »

presscast wrote: post #98
rspeer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assign…

>It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. What makes you say this? Citing anybody does little to increase your personal prestige. I think the issue has more to do with 4chan not being peer-reviewed, and the proof being so recent that few papers have yet been written. On the contrary, citing a hot…

Somebody pointed out in the Twitter thread that academics often cite unreviewed papers on arXiv. If true (cannot confirm it myself, not in academia) then the peer-review-as-a-prerequisite-for-citation thing doesn't really hold water.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#102

Post by throwaway27940 »

huntie wrote: post #65
CPLX wrote: post #6

Also lending strong support for the infinite number of monkeys theorem.

Not at all, 4chan has* quite a few very smart people who for various reasons might not have "made it" in life. This type of thing used to be called "weaponized autism" or "autism" on site. This usage of autism really means something closer to "extreme obsession". * or at least had. I think that a lot of people left the site over the last few years as the site changed quite dramatically.

Pretty much all my sort-of-nerd friends and I left the site some time between 2012 and 2015. I think it all went downhill when Obama got his second term and the 'libertarians' became dislodged by full-blown Nazis. There used to be quite a few prominent academics on /sci/'s early days.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#104

Post by TimTheTinker »

syn0byte wrote: post #91
yipbub wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in academia. How is it possible for people to check if the proof is peer reviewed? Do they have to rely on their own verification?

It's a proof. It validates itself or it doesn't.

Not so fast. Yes, many proofs do follow from formal logic and maths, but new proofs often connect things or draw inferences that haven't been done previously, thus requiring human review to verify.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#105

Post by throwawaymath »

syn0byte wrote: post #91
yipbub wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in academia. How is it possible for people to check if the proof is peer reviewed? Do they have to rely on their own verification?

It's a proof. It validates itself or it doesn't.

That's a non-answer. Peer review is a thing in mathematics precisely because it's difficult to verify if a proof is valid. In a sense you can say something like, "A proof is valid or it isn't", but that's vacuous because you still need someone to check it.

There are many examples available of proofs which have been initially accepted but later discredited in the mathematical community. There are also many examples of proofs which have been polarizing from their first publication. Consider the controversy surrounding Mochizuki and his Inter-Universal Teichmuller Theory. Also consider that there have been credible (though ultimately incorrect) proofs published by credible people for several famous problems, such as P = NP. The academic community at large can't just eyeball a proof and know it to be true, and often even fundamentally flawed proofs require more than a week of careful attention to be declared incorrect.

If you want to argue that peer review is an imperfect system then that's one thing. But to say that a proof is demonstrably true or it isn't ignores the entire complexity of actually figuring out whether or not it's true. Some people can rely upon their own ability to do this, but for the most part the mathematical community is so heavily specialized that even most mathematicians cannot find errors in advanced proofs unless it's their particular subfield of research.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#106

Post by OscarCunningham »

jessriedel wrote: post #94
rspeer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assign…

> Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit. Why would a footnote be considered less credit than something in the list of references? It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Indeed, the question of whether prose footnotes are at the bo…

> It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out".

Is your field Quantum Field Theory?

https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/zee/

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#107

Post by JdeBP »

ASipos wrote: post #38

Come on, this is a myth. I work in math and it is not at all unusual to cite informal sources. Also, someone should inform Greg Egan: http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/Superpermutations/Superpermu...

Itself discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271265 .

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#108

Post by jessriedel »

OscarCunningham wrote: post #106
jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit. Why would a footnote be considered less credit than something in the list of references? It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Indeed, the question of whether prose footnotes are at the bo…

> It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Is your field Quantum Field Theory? https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/zee/

No, quantum information, but I always thought Tony Zee had the best whimsical name to use as an example in these situations :)

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#109

Post by hood_syntax »

krustyburger wrote: post #60
mohammedbin wrote: post #59

Something I somehow doubt too many of you would know but 4chan, despite being considered an unsavoury place because of certain subsections of it (which I'm not proud to admit I visit to learn what "the other side" is talking about), has a lot of great communities as well and I usually find the discussion quality there better than reddit. Also, in the context of this thread, 4chan is an ephemeral site so there is no s…

What are some of the worthwhile communities?

If you are a video game enthusiast, particularly of a niche genre, /vg/ can be a good place. I'm really into roguelikes, so I visit the '/rlg/' thread around once a week to see what's going on and potentially get some advice if I'm at a tricky part in a run or need to make a decision about where to take my character.

Standard disclaimer applies about 4chan. If you're thin-skinned, you may find it not worth the trouble. Just don't engage with the trolls and you'll be fine.

Re: Nobody knows how to cite 4chan mathematicians who solved an interesting problem

#110

Post by laretluval »

caconym_ wrote: post #101
presscast wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. What makes you say this? Citing anybody does little to increase your personal prestige. I think the issue has more to do with 4chan not being peer-reviewed, and the proof being so recent that few papers have yet been written. On the contrary, citing a hot…

Somebody pointed out in the Twitter thread that academics often cite unreviewed papers on arXiv. If true (cannot confirm it myself, not in academia) then the peer-review-as-a-prerequisite-for-citation thing doesn't really hold water.

It depends on the field. In fast moving fields like machine learning it is common to cite unreviewed stuff on arXiv. In slower fields it is less common/accepted.
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