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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

#131

Post by stinkbeetle »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #54
stinkbeetle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean when was it again? I don't understand your questions or how they relate to what I wrote.

Sorry for being flippant. My analysis is that the mix of reason or emotions is unchanged over time. Take the case of this management science paper. What is irrational about defending a bad paper you wrote when it brings you all the accolades and benefits Andrew has described? The authors' personal goals aren't aligned with the public's goals of getting good science. That's not a failure of reason. Maybe it's selfish.…

That's great, I'd love to see this analysis of yours.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#132

Post by ycombinete »

fergie wrote: post #104

As somebody who has spent a bit of time in academia, I have often been slightly alarmed by some of the research (and opinon) that comes out of business schools. One thing is that it is often unsubstantiated and just plain wrong, another is that it often seems like the authors kind of know it, almost as if they are intentionally pandering to a lowbrow/midwit audience, and they expect everybody else to be in on the gam…

Business school writing frequently smells like Post hoc rationalisation to me (with some confirmation bias mixed in).

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#133

Post by gus_massa »

anshulbasia27 wrote: post #108

The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...

This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth.

Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know.

In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots.

Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while.

In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source.

Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit.

From the article:

>> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#134

Post by tovej »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #118
tovej wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social sciences definitely are.

No. It's social studies, not science.

Social studies is a school subject, that's irrelevant.

You really think sociology is not a science then? Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. They have to, because physical sciences deal with deterministic objects, while social sciences deal with nondeterministic subjects.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#135

Post by wavemode »

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.

There's plenty of results in math and physics that are true, in the sense that the math checks out, but are useless, in the sense that the authors claim they've made a breakthrough, but actually they've just tweaked a few parameters of an existing unverified theory and constructed a new unverified theory. (If you've ever read a news headline like "physicists now believe reality may actually have 400 dimensions!", they were probably citing one of these papers.)

There are also plenty of physics papers where, the math actually just doesn't check out at all. But those, at least, rarely make it into headlines or reputable journals.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#136

Post by chithanh »

anshulbasia27 wrote: post #108

The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...

> Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide.

Medicine never figured this out. The medical community put Semmelweis in a lunatic asylum, because physicians' ego could not accept the fact that their unclean hands were causing harm to patients. Semmelweis' modern peers continue to let millions of patients die preventable deaths due to errors in medical decisionmaking, and ego plus institutional inertia prevents serious measures against it (most notably fatigue management).

Academia is not any better though. There was the recent high-profile retraction of a publication on opioid exposure via human breastmilk which was widely cited and the basis for many child custody decisions: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/canadian-pediatric-so...

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#137

Post by Aperocky »

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.

Or by trillions - the peer review process will no doubt continue, its continued importance maybe in question.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#138

Post by wavemode »

hnburnsy wrote: post #46
lotsofpulp wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If it doesn't have "science" in the name, it's a science If it has the suffix "logy", it's a semi-science If it has the word "science", it's not

Philosophers rejoice.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#139

Post by modo_mario »

tovej wrote: post #134
SanjayMehta wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's social studies, not science.

Social studies is a school subject, that's irrelevant. You really think sociology is not a science then? Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. They have to, because physical sciences deal with deterministic objects, while social sciences deal with nondeterministic subjects.

>Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do.

Whilst I agree that can be a science the amount of contradicting bs, ideologically driven stuff i've seen come out of one such department and their replication crisis kind of undercut their credibility on that front for me.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#140

Post by graemep »

gus_massa wrote: post #133
anshulbasia27 wrote: post #108

The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...

This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth. Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know. In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. I…

There is a big difference between something that just turns out to be wrong, and something that is dishonestly or negligently wrong.

For example, AFAIK, Wakefield's paper claiming MMR causes autism was eventually retracted by the editors of The Lancet.

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