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Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

arxiv.org

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Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#61

Post by denton-scratch »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #28
stavros wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were you expecting? I read that as "a bug in the Seaborn graphing library caused wrong conclusions" and don't understand what other interpretations there are.

I'd never heard of the Seaborn library. And since Seaborn is the first word of the title, I assumed it was capitalized for that reason only. So I thought the article would be about some ocean-faring insect or microbe that somehow affected scientists' mental acuity.

This is what I was expecting. And the title of this HN article is not the same as the title of the linked Arxiv report.

Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#62

Post by mglz »

raziel2701 wrote: post #60

Science communication must be at an all-time low. I initially thought the paper was about a sea-borne pathogen being responsible for a decline in disruptiveness in science, which is a crazy statement. Then I thought that it was a paper claiming that a bug in the seaborn plotting library in python was responsible for the decline in disruptiveness in science, which is absurd! Finally I understood, that this is a paper…

> Science communication must be at an all-time low.

It's arxiv, not a press release. :)

Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#63

Post by matthewdgreen »

raziel2701 wrote: post #60

Science communication must be at an all-time low. I initially thought the paper was about a sea-borne pathogen being responsible for a decline in disruptiveness in science, which is a crazy statement. Then I thought that it was a paper claiming that a bug in the seaborn plotting library in python was responsible for the decline in disruptiveness in science, which is absurd! Finally I understood, that this is a paper…

Neither the paper title nor the abstract leads with “Seaborn.” The decision to start the submission with “Seaborn bug…” is purely an HN artifact, and nothing to do with science communication.

ETA: For those who don’t click through, the paper title is “Dataset Artefacts are the Hidden Drivers of the Declining Disruptiveness in Science.” The first few sentences of the abstract are:

“Park et al. [1] reported a decline in the disruptiveness of scientific and technological knowledge over time. Their main finding is based on the computation of CD indices, a measure of disruption in citation networks [2], across almost 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents. Due to a factual plotting mistake, database entries with zero references were omitted in the CD index distributions, hiding a large number of outliers with a maximum CD index of one, while keeping them in the analysis [1].”

Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#64

Post by raziel2701 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #56
mannykannot wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I composed this comment concurrently with yours, so I'm moving it here as a response... This is going off-topic, but Tufte's attempt to cast the problem as fundamentally one of poor data presentation is rather self-servingly tendentious, IMHO, in a way that unfairly attributes a degree of culpability to the engineers who tried to stop the launch. The excellent video you link to, taken as a whole, supports this view,…

That’s an interesting point (and quite on topic; communication is key in STEM, and this ties in with that). Hypothetically, what would be the most fair argument in that situation? It’s quite remarkable that a line engineer was convinced the rocket was going to explode, even to the extent of hopping in his car with his daughter and frying to stop the launch after his company gave the go-ahead. Data presentation seems…

He knew how O-rings behaved, they fail to make a seal at those low temperatures. You don't need to have multiple failed launches to reach the conclusion he reached.

Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#65

Post by sillysaurusx »

raziel2701 wrote: post #64
sillysaurusx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an interesting point (and quite on topic; communication is key in STEM, and this ties in with that). Hypothetically, what would be the most fair argument in that situation? It’s quite remarkable that a line engineer was convinced the rocket was going to explode, even to the extent of hopping in his car with his daughter and frying to stop the launch after his company gave the go-ahead. Data presentation seems…

He knew how O-rings behaved, they fail to make a seal at those low temperatures. You don't need to have multiple failed launches to reach the conclusion he reached.

You do, though. Because although there’s a chance of catastrophic failure, the typical case is that the launch goes fine, and then they notice some unexpected degradation of the O-ring after the shuttle comes back. That’s how they were measuring chance of O-ring difficulties; a shuttle had never exploded, but there had been observable signs that things could have gone badly.

In other words, in most mechanical systems, a certain amount of wear and tear is acceptable. It’s only at extremes (way too cold) that it becomes a disaster. Convincing yourself that you’re certain there will be a disaster this time is a level of scientific and engineering confidence that’s hard to fathom.

In that situation I would have done everything possible to alert management that there was a high chance of an issue, but would I have grabbed my daughter and drove to stop the launch because I was 100% certain it would blow? Probably not.

Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#66

Post by toxik »

RobotToaster wrote: post #51
ironSkillet wrote: post #33

I saw this headline and my first thought was that someone was claiming that a mind impacting virus that evolved in the ocean was causing scientists to do research with less ambition. Which is of course ridiculous lol. But a bug in a visualization library impacting science is also ridiculous.

Given that the majority of scientists seem to be cat owners, and toxoplasmosis has been linked to mental illness, it's not entirely implausible that a (human) bug is slowing scientific advancement.

Got a source on that cat claim, doc?

Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#67

Post by Zetobal »

toxik wrote: post #66
RobotToaster wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the majority of scientists seem to be cat owners, and toxoplasmosis has been linked to mental illness, it's not entirely implausible that a (human) bug is slowing scientific advancement.

Got a source on that cat claim, doc?

His ass.

Re: Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

#68

Post by Aloisius »

daveguy wrote: post #13

Seaborn is a visualization library. No statistical tests should have been done with seaborn as an intermediate processing step. I guess they used some of the convenience functions as part of the data analysis. Seaborn is a final step tool, not a data analysis tool. That's an embarrassing lesson to learn post-publication.

The bulk of the problem was caused by erroneous metadata.

The bug in Seaborn simply meant that the histograms that could have alerted them that something was wrong with their analysis, didn't.

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