How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough? • Hacker News Board

Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?

#21

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Jun 09, 2014, 7:13 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #12

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much that translates to 'don't be an average joe; study to be an actual scientist'? The emphasis on putting discoveries in the correct orthodox format is unsettling; would a real discovery be ignored if the report was mis-formatted? Something is wrong then.

I don't understand your comment. Nothing I said requires someone to "study to be an actual scientist" nor did I emphasize an orthodox style. How did you infer that? For that matter, how do you define "actual scientist" any different from "average joe who makes a breakthrough discovery"? There is certainly a required style - a paper needs an abstract, it needs a body, and it needs a references section. This is because…

My point was the one you just made - "Editors are human, and if they see something that looks nothing like a scientific paper, it's much more likely to trigger the "crank" flag than to be seen as a breakthrough paper."

The format is the message to some degree. Lazy editors help perpetuate this as you suggest.

Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?

#22

Post by dalke » Tue, Jun 10, 2014, 10:27 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #21

dalke wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your comment. Nothing I said requires someone to "study to be an actual scientist" nor did I emphasize an orthodox style. How did you infer that? For that matter, how do you define "actual scientist" any different from "average joe who makes a breakthrough discovery"? There is certainly a required style - a paper needs an abstract, it needs a body, and it needs a references section. This is because…

My point was the one you just made - "Editors are human, and if they see something that looks nothing like a scientific paper, it's much more likely to trigger the "crank" flag than to be seen as a breakthrough paper." The format is the message to some degree. Lazy editors help perpetuate this as you suggest.

It's been 50 years since McLuhan's "The medium is the message". It's not really an aspect of laziness, but intrinsic to all communications.

If you are an editor and you receive a 100 page treatise which starts out with 50 pages on the numerology of the Great Seal of the US, 25 pages on the quality of the author's boogers, and 24 pages tracking the lineage of David Hasselhoff back to Adam, then are you really "lazy" if you missed the elegant 1 page proof of Fermat's Last Theorem on page 78?

Odds are most editors would reject that paper after reading the first page or two and leafing through the rest to double-check that it was more of the same dreck. Yes, I would place the fault more on the author than the editor for this case. Wouldn't you?

Re: How can an average joe publish a scientific breakthrough?

#23

Post by JoeAltmaier » Mon, Jun 16, 2014, 10:58 PM UTC

dalke wrote: post #22

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was the one you just made - "Editors are human, and if they see something that looks nothing like a scientific paper, it's much more likely to trigger the "crank" flag than to be seen as a breakthrough paper." The format is the message to some degree. Lazy editors help perpetuate this as you suggest.

It's been 50 years since McLuhan's "The medium is the message". It's not really an aspect of laziness, but intrinsic to all communications. If you are an editor and you receive a 100 page treatise which starts out with 50 pages on the numerology of the Great Seal of the US, 25 pages on the quality of the author's boogers, and 24 pages tracking the lineage of David Hasselhoff back to Adam, then are you really "lazy" i…

Strawman. Instead suppose you received the letter Tomas Hardy received from a crank called Ramanujan a century ago. Today mightn't it be dismissed out of hand? And missed one of the stellar minds of the millennia.