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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

#21

Post by bsder »

zer00eyz wrote: post #13
paulpauper wrote: post #2

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected This isnt a new thing though. Cantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th... they didnt just reject him, they basically publicly beat him down, and drove him away from math and into depression. David Bohm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential spent years on the outside for having his ideas on this. Geoffrey Hinton: was considered…

Katalin Karikó and her work on mRNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3

Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#24

Post by andrewjf »

stinkbeetle wrote: post #20

[flagged]

That's really root cause in everything, isn't it?

- The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)

- Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings)

- Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right".

Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#26

Post by chromacity »

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.

I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).

Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, but there's plenty of dubious results published every year, simply because it's more profitable to game the system. For example, I'd wager that 50%+ of academic claims related to information security are bogus or useless. Similarly, in the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#27

Post by BobbyTables2 »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

Even in more respected journals, peer review is often done by beleaguered grad students who could be still relatively new to the field. They lack the experience to look at things with a critical eye.

Re: False claims in a widely-cited paper

#30

Post by lotsofpulp »

andrewjf wrote: post #24
stinkbeetle wrote: post #20

[flagged]

That's really root cause in everything, isn't it? - The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions) - Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings) - Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right". Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by p…

>The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)

I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out.

Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete.

The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.

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