There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Debunking Princeton
141–150 of 150 posts
Re: Debunking Princeton
#142I 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…
> 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.…
Arxiv is an invitation-only preprint-server. Authors who post junk are abusing their invitation and hurting the reputation of all Arxiv contributors.
In HN-speak, Arxiv is like a Svtle blog.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#143Good fun reading that, but.. an R^2 of 0.54? Not a convincing fit.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#144As 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 a…
Let's try a thought experiment. What if two Princeton students published an un-peer-reviewed paper on arXiv that said something useful, like revealing the origins of life, or the perfect cookie recipe? Would you argue quite as hard about how unfair it all is to call it a "Princeton study?" Or would you smile and take the reflected credit? Note that all the press now is about how "Facebook" responded to the study. It…
Mike is employed by Facebook as an audience researcher, which makes him more of an official representative of his institution (in regard to the topic at hand) than a mechanical engineering student is of theirs.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#145What drove Cannarella and Spechler, two mechanical engineering Ph.D. students, to prerelease a paper about network theory and epidemiology, without coauthoring/consulting with epidemiologists or people experienced in viral communications theories, is beyond me. But the title "Debunking Princeton" seems to suggest this should be considered representative of all of the quality of research Princeton outputs, which is ce…
It is comforting to see that Princeton's reputation as the most uptight Ivy was not mere prejudiced bigotry, but it borne out. ;-)
Re: Debunking Princeton
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI, half the people with the name "throwaway" aren't throwaways. :P
So we have a culture of social insecurity at HN. #masks
Nostalgia for anonymity. And also, sometimes you make a throwaway and then need to respond to a response and then you respond to something else while logged in and then you have 50 karma points and well, why not?
Re: Debunking Princeton
#147My guess is that the real research is the response to the paper and not the conclusion presented in the paper. Kind of a shoot in the air to see which way people run. The information gained by observing Facebook's response could prove useful to other big companies that take a hit in today's media driven society(internet). What works and doesn't work in their PR response. They could also be tracking other data, such as stock prices of other social media companies. It's what makes research so much fun.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#148Earlier 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").
What matters is the effect, but the person responsible for the effect should be the person deploying the code. Not all code on github is close to "done". If you take my alpha Fibonacci-sequence code and choose to run it on your nuclear power plant, I'm responsible for the mess - you are.
Looks like I forgot a "not"... I'm not responsible for the mess.
Re: Debunking Princeton
#149Earlier 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.…
Arxiv is an invitation-only preprint-server. Authors who post junk are abusing their invitation and hurting the reputation of all Arxiv contributors. In HN-speak, Arxiv is like a Svtle blog.
The arXiv is not invitation-only. Anyone can sign up for an account: https://arxiv.org/edit-user/?tapir_dest=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv....
Re: Debunking Princeton
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arxiv is an invitation-only preprint-server. Authors who post junk are abusing their invitation and hurting the reputation of all Arxiv contributors. In HN-speak, Arxiv is like a Svtle blog.
The arXiv is not invitation-only. Anyone can sign up for an account: https://arxiv.org/edit-user/?tapir_dest=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv....
You need to be endorsed by an active user in order to submit papers: https://arxiv.org/help/endorsement