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Those correction notices, in full

statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu

31–40 of 42 posts

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes of course. That's the point of my comment, which is being downvoted for some reason that eludes me.

Sometimes I write with "downvotes be damned" in mind and connected with the audience exactly how I intended. But not connecting with the audience is the usual reason. When it happens to me, I take it as feedback on my writing. Maybe I was unclear. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was written for a different audience. In those cases, I just try to improve my writing. Anyway, where can responses to your original comment go?…

Excellent, helpful, and appropriate to the context BTW.

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#32
I really enjoyed this phrasing, from the comments on the post:

> I suspect the careerization of Big Science and Big Academia has a lot to do with [unwillingness to plainly admit error]. Although I have no proof to that effect. And certainly man has been subject to failings since Adam and Eve chomped.

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles. Currently what I'm working on is really "Building on" one pretty pivotal paper from the 90s, and there's a whole constellation of work that has spawned. So much ink is spilled re-defining the problem, and reading any paper requires going through the system model every time because tons of arbitrary decisions may have been done different. It makes it hard to co…

> I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles. I don't think that would be helpful. Scientific development happens in branches, not linearly. The fact that a field is going in one direction does not mean that somebody won't make a breakthrough next year based on a poorly-cited paper from the 1970s, leapfrogging a whole bunch of studies that happened in the meantime. Most of the time, there is simply no "…

Tell that to businesses, and beat it over the heads of marketeers.

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#34

> 1999: It is not clear to us in general how to avoid this sort of false proof, the problem being that the false statement seemed so natural to us that we did not think to look at it carefully. Assuming I understand correctly, this is basically the common issue of being unable to be objective when you’ve lived and breathed a subject matter for long enough. The answer is rigorous peer review, I think.

Peer reviews are (often) also done by people who live and breathe the subject matter.

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#35
The corrections are wonderful. Concise and to the point.

The author is a powerhouse in his field, known by researchers and casual readers. He has nothing to fear from publishing corrections. Nobody is trying to step on him, keep him from promotion, or argue that his research is meaningless.

Other researchers have less privilege, and (imo) therefore will be less forthcoming.

If you only have two papers, admitting one has a fatal flaw instead of giving more talks about it will be career suicide.

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a prominent mark of the Bush era too (and I'm sure many other Democratic/Republican administrations, it's just my example). I was rewatching Fahrenheit 9/11 because of our government's current foreign engagements, and it's striking how even then people were duped, but back then it was by lack of information, now it is by overinformation

What was nuts in the bush era was the bloodthirstiness both generally and in the media. There's were so few voices that were against invading Iraq. It was just this vagueness that terrorists were everywhere and somehow Iraq was involved in 9/11. (And getting ready to nuke everything). I mean, ffs, there was a popular TV show that spent each season detailing how the brave heros would stop the Muslim terrorists using t…

Yes, Moore was extremely hated in America for the film, but his closing quote has essentially defined the modern day America's isolationist movement:

"The people who have the least, who suffer the most, are always the first to stand up to defend that very system. And all they ask us in return is that we never send them in harms way unless it's absolutely necessary. Now, they may never trust us again."

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was nuts in the bush era was the bloodthirstiness both generally and in the media. There's were so few voices that were against invading Iraq. It was just this vagueness that terrorists were everywhere and somehow Iraq was involved in 9/11. (And getting ready to nuke everything). I mean, ffs, there was a popular TV show that spent each season detailing how the brave heros would stop the Muslim terrorists using t…

"Everyone else is an extremist, but I'm totally sane and justified." When you look at "Muslim Extremists" around the world, they are inspired by the same kind of events and influences that "Christian Americans" are. Zealot leaders lying to the people to further their own aims, and the people lapping it up because they see "evidence" of oppression from "the outsiders", are indoctrinated to hate "the outsiders", and ha…

Muslim extremists around the world are far more driven by political and land conflicts than anything else. They are far more similar to the IRA than to any Christian extremists.

ISIS is the one which seems most ideology driven. But Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, the PLF, the ETLO, the various Kashmiri militants, all of these are largely a result of land conflicts, like the IRA

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everyone else is an extremist, but I'm totally sane and justified." When you look at "Muslim Extremists" around the world, they are inspired by the same kind of events and influences that "Christian Americans" are. Zealot leaders lying to the people to further their own aims, and the people lapping it up because they see "evidence" of oppression from "the outsiders", are indoctrinated to hate "the outsiders", and ha…

Heh, funnily, I know I wasn't sane. I bought the "weapons of mass destruction" and "pre-emptive strike" lines and the notion of not letting the terrorists win. What happened, I think, is much more banal. Everyone was pissed at such a large successful terrorist attack. Politicians took that as a strong signal that they must do something. And the easiest solutions were new policing agencies, privacy invasion, and invad…

And unfortunately some countries today are not learning the right lessons from our failures

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#39
post #15

I like that they are very blunt and to the point. It'd be really cool if we can add more social dynamic features to papers / research, and have people correct papers in the open, like twitter community notes, to the point that if you can really disprove it, the paper is now marked "wrong" or something like that on arxiv. Sort of inbetween collaborative science or hunting for patent prior art or bug bounty hunting. Ge…

I too, would like to have what you’re having. Academic publishing doesn’t make the authors money, it costs them money. To publish is a requirement for academic employment, but there’s no incentive to retract, either than revenge, or one’s academic honesty.

> Academic publishing doesn’t make the authors money > there’s no incentive to retract (... other than) or one’s academic honesty

We agree on the problems, maybe you have other wacky potential solutions other than just saying others wouldn't work!

Re: Those correction notices, in full

#40
> This entry was posted in [...] Zombies

I feel like I'm missing a joke or reference somewhere - can anyone help me out? I'm familiar with the concept of p-zombies, but that doesn't seem to be relevant here - and a "Zombie Statistic"[0] is sorta-related in that it refers to the psychological power of incorrect assertions, but I'm still struggling to see the link.

[0] https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2019/11/30/the-power-of-zom...

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