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Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

nature.com

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Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

#311

Post by KennyBlanken »

scifibestfi wrote: post #164
KennyBlanken wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, if Knuth decided to post some utter garbage chances are it would accepted based on his name alone. You mean like Elon Musk? When he came up with that giant box to extract kids from a cave with passages so narrow rescuers couldn't wear their air tanks on them, they had to push them ahead of themselves, reddit and HN and twitter were full of people defending him. There were even people defending him when…

How about Bill Gates, who apparently is an expert in public health, viruses, vaccines, epidemiology, etc? Smart people like Bill, Elon and the CEO of Brave are polymaths and can cross domains quite easily.

Apparently you haven't seen the news coverage of Elon's texts to CEOs and investors

Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

#312

Post by themitigating »

Test0129 wrote: post #298
CodeSgt wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of middle ground between blindly trusting all 'science' and blatantly disregarding everything that rubs you the wrong way. It's possible to both have a generally high amount of faith in 'the science' while still remaining critical of its flaws, or rather, the flaws of the system in which its conducted.

I don't think this is the case. The point of science as one commenter pointed out is a lack of trust (or faith). Hence the need for pages and pages of sources, concerted efforts on reproducibility, etc. In certain fields reproducibility is extremely important and a single scientific article should be taken with extreme skepticism until it's reproduced several times. I think this is the thing that's often skipped. A s…

I want to disagree with a small part of this. Faith is the belief in something that you can't prove. That is, even if you became an expert in a field, read all the papers, etc you couldn't prove the existence of god, hence faith.

Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

#313

Post by erfgh »

WithinReason wrote: post #255
erfgh wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will find it beneficial to learn what a "prior probability distrubution" is.

It's actually you who doesn't understand probabilities. If a woman is twice as likely to make a discovery but women are only 5% of researchers, then it's both true that: 1. most discoveries are made by males 2. it is reasonable to give larger weight to new female-done research contradicting you point.

But you pulled those number out of thin air. The fact of the matter is that if I pick one research paper at random out of all the papers written by men and I pick another research paper at random out of all the papers written by women the former will be of higher average quality.

Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

#314

Post by WithinReason »

erfgh wrote: post #313
WithinReason wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually you who doesn't understand probabilities. If a woman is twice as likely to make a discovery but women are only 5% of researchers, then it's both true that: 1. most discoveries are made by males 2. it is reasonable to give larger weight to new female-done research contradicting you point.

But you pulled those number out of thin air. The fact of the matter is that if I pick one research paper at random out of all the papers written by men and I pick another research paper at random out of all the papers written by women the former will be of higher average quality.

Did you just pull that out of thin air?

Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

#316

Post by chalst »

keithwinstein wrote: post #244
chalst wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double-blinding is not common in PL theory and implementation.

I can't speak to every PL venue, but all four places that csrankings.org lists for PL are double-blind these days (PLDI, POPL, ICFP, and OOPSLA).

Sorry, my comment is based on out-of-date information. The first three of the conferences used to be single-blinded.

Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

#318

Post by mattwilsonn888 »

themitigating wrote: post #282
mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus Christ, the point of science is to REMOVE trust - not be the least worst option. Science that cannot exist without trust is faith.

You are confusing trust and faith. Science is perfect that's why it's the least worst option

> Science is perfect

Science is a process and it is never complete. You are confusing a process with the results of the process, which are by definition imperfect. What makes Science good is that it's results are fundamentally imperfect and tainted, and that it respects that.

When you go around saying 'science is perfect' you disrespect its core principles.

Re: Authors’ names have ‘astonishing’ influence on peer reviewers: study

#319

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

This such a strange headline. It is not the authors' names that have the effect, it is the authors' past work.

For example, having done work in the past that was the subject of a Nobel Prize might have an "astonishing" influence. Having the name "James" would not not likely have an astonishing influence.

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