Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know.
In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots.
Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while.
In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source.
Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit.
From the article:
>> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.
For example, AFAIK, Wakefield's paper claiming MMR causes autism was eventually retracted by the editors of The Lancet.
What does that have to do with this situation? I'm honestly trying to figure out your chain of thought. Do you think the future should have an impact on the present somehow? The fraud in the op post happened at the time of publication. Oh and btw. No fraud in the two you cited. Unless you figured out how to apply future to present. In which case they probably would've published much better papers, somehow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel#Mendelian_parado... Apparently the numbers of the second generation are too good to be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's... Apparently the viscosity was wrong, and then everyone else made corrections to get a similar result.
> What does that have to do with this situation?
The problem is how to document error without overwhelming honest authors. Imagine a nightmare with a DMCA like process, where anyone can can fill a retraction request and the authors have a week to reply. [The data is in an obscure folder in a notebook that is dead since 5 years. Most of the processing was done by a guy that is now working in the industry for x10 salary.] [Assuming you didn't work with mice, and you must resurrect them to fill the additional data asked in the retraction request.]
An alternative is let the editors ask a new reviewer to make the decision, but everyone has horror stories of reviewers that made bad reviews in spite the manuscript was correct. Then what? Ask the authors again to defend the paper?
The current method is that anybody can publish a "comment" if they find a journal that agree to publish it.
Sure it's slightly more reviewed than a GitHub repo, but it's not an end all be all.
When you have a volunteer organization, the impact on people's personal lives is one of the main factors driving decisions. You try to avoid getting involved in somebody else's controversies, as the impact is almost always negative.
From that perspective, the policy seems clear. The authors are responsible for their papers. If someone else claims that a paper should be corrected, they are free to write a paper of their own. That way no volunteer has to take responsibility for someone else's claims.
And just as they decided to take responsibility for publishing, they can take responsibility after a similar review for retraction (or issuing an errata or whatever fancy way they want to signal the result of the process).
Medicine never figured this out. The medical community put Semmelweis in a lunatic asylum, because physicians' ego could not accept the fact that their unclean hands were causing harm to patients. Semmelweis' modern peers continue to let millions of patients die preventable deaths due to errors in medical decisionmaking, and ego plus institutional inertia prevents serious measures against it (most notably fatigue management).
Academia is not any better though. There was the recent high-profile retraction of a publication on opioid exposure via human breastmilk which was widely cited and the basis for many child custody decisions: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/canadian-pediatric-so...
(other than being a favorite go-to of numerous quacks and charlatans who insist that modern medicine is similarly persecuting them).
Reports on Thalidomide side effects were ignored, suppressed or dismissed. Distributors sat on such reports for months while continuing to sell the drug. Overall it took several years from the first observed birth defects until the drug was banned in most countries.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/25/distillers-k...
Numerous other examples before and after that (including deliberate ignorance of fatigue and medical errors resulting from it) show how medicine elevates institutional interests and groupthink over people's lives.
The "scholarly" aspect and the standards were comical compared to other fields (even compared to some standards in other fields that I consider pretty suspect).
We all know that "publish or perish" is stupid. The premier example of Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Why can't our highly paid administration understand this?
"Any good measure requires a good person."
For example, a good measure of research is to have an intelligent faculty member or members read it and decide if it's good. Converting it to a mechanical calculation is fundamentally bad.
Say what now?
So the only way to get a correction for a paper is if the author is willing to publicly admit they messed up? Something that an unethical researcher is very unlikely to do.
There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.
I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.
[1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro...
I'm sure it benefitted some people.
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 a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc).
Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972...
Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.
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.
But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.
Nitpick: peer review as we know it is only about fifty years old.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&...
This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true?
In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context.
Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.
In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either.
Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example:
One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in.
[0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...
I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.
That's how scientific consent is normally formed, at least in rigorous disciplines like experimental physics or medicine. A single paper in the end is going to be just a single data point in any such meta-analysis study.
Your point about consensus unfortunately doesn't quite work in cases like this were the people using the paper are not scientists. They're not continuing work in the same area, people are using this paper to support their arguments.
> The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King [...]
If you click on that "Andrew", it takes you to [0] which is clear that it's Gelman.
what? that's nonsense. Not everybody's values are the same, for one thing. Especially as society has become more and more international.
You should be equally skeptical of any result until proper evidence is presented and verified. Values should have no bearing either way on empirical truth-claims.
>we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values
And I'm saying that's silly because you should hold all claims in equal skepticism. Just because something contains an ideological basis does not, in itself, make it more or less correct.
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.
Most scientific research represents about the same amount of improvement over the state of the art as the shitty web app or whatever that you're working on right now. It's not zero, but very few are going to be groundbreaking. And since the rules are that we all have to publish papers[*], the scientific literature (at least in my field, CS) looks less like a carefully curated library of works by geniuses, and more like an Amazon or Etsy marketplace of ideas, where most are crappy.
[* just like software engineers have to write code, even if the product ends up being shitty or ultimately gets canceled]
Neither of us are going to be changing how the system works, so my advice is to deal with it.
I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:
> The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”
I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.
Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.
Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.
Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.
I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)
To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.
There are also plenty of physics papers where, the math actually just doesn't check out at all. But those, at least, rarely make it into headlines or reputable journals.
If it doesn't have "science" in the name, it's a science
If it has the suffix "logy", it's a semi-science
If it has the word "science", it's notI'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."
With this, science will probably lose trust even more in the coming years.
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Gish galloping bad faith trolls aren’t new. LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But now, We Have The Technology, refuting a pile of poo semi-accurately should be cheap (or at least getting cheaper).
I don’t need an LLM on my phone that can do tax law in Georgia the country. But an “AI Assistant” that could highlight logical fallacies, shifting goalposts, non-responsive dialog, rhetorical obfuscations, etc, would be useful online, at the bar, and work (ie when HR tries to “HR” you, but also is lying and obfuscating about it).
We already have models and people that bullshit. Maybe refutation models are the cure… Chinese needle snakes to catch the lizards, Gorillas to catch the snakes…
But does take longer to disprove.
Many such cases of this, it seems.
It was never between the left and the right or any other false dichotomies, but always between the Epstein-class and the actual human beings.
The question now is that do the normal people realize and act on the fact that the elevator to Epstein class was never working. Or even better, they don't want to become the zillionaire class husk of a human.
but all flaws are issues, later reported issues are right next to the paper, heck there could even badges for publication and review status...
a woman may dream...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151
(2 months ago, 374 comments)
The very hypothesis is laughable. It is completely irrelevant if the hypothesis is supported or not.
That paper is like flypaper for anyone seeking affirmation of sustainability policies.
I could write a paper tomorrow claiming that [insert conspiracy theory here] is absolutely true and why Big [insert hated industry here] doesn't want you to know the truth and it would be cited until the earth crashes into the sun.
It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation.
I could write a paper about that but wouldn't hold my breath on getting any cites.
But... that's exactly what Big Academia doesn't want you to know.
It reminds me of something my dad said while watching Generation Kill - a TV show adapted from the written work of an embedded journalist in Iraq. The show, made by Americans, depicts the US armed forces as ramified through with bumbling fools seeking glory with a few competent people in there. So we finish watching the series and my dad says "Only the Americans would make a show like this" and it's somewhat[1] true. I think perhaps that being able to create a machine that tells you the truth is crucial to success and I feel that the US's peak period as unipolar hegemon (Gulf War I to the end of Obama I) this was more the case than it is today, though this is more of a feeling than anything I have verified.
It also reminds me of an old sort of censorship, one which George Orwell talks about in regards to Animal Farm[2] - a book that was criticized because it perhaps harmed the greater cause of communism. There's too much to quote in his essay because I find the whole thing worthy of reading, but here's one bit:
> Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest.
...
> Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ʻYesʼ. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ʻHow about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?ʼ, and the answer more often than not will be ʻNoʼ. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses.
There is even today an orthodoxy of sorts and if you were to contradict it, it is considered sinful to say so. I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people. Could such a thing be published if it were true? People often say "what are you going to do with that information?" and somehow I don't share that view that all science must necessarily immediately deliver applied benefit. Knowing is good for its own sake. Truth is good for its own sake. Or at least that's what I believe.
I suppose I'll only know through the period of my own life whether this belief is adaptive. Who knows, a present or future power might be one formed entirely through inaccurate data and information[3], and we might be as Orks and painting things red might make them faster because we believe it so in sufficient numbers.
0: Obviously there are limits. Eli Lilly benefits from GLP-1RA drugs working well but they do in fact work well.
1: Others obviously also make fun of themselves, but something like In The Loop parodies specific people more than the whole machine and its participants. Generation Kill feels much more real a depiction of large organizations and their incentive mechanisms - especially how they grind forward and get the outcomes they want despite everything else. Perhaps my least favourite parts were the emotional-breakdown bits at the end, which I've since found out that the participants themselves said were invented for TV.
2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm
3: Open societies like ours have the problem that external misdirection leaks into internal data but perhaps with sufficient computerization we can keep separate truth and propaganda within the structure of government
This is an interesting thought experiment.
I'd like to think that if such a thing was discovered, we would investigate why this is the case. I'd like to believe that we wouldn't just accept this as some kind of de-facto truth, and start treating Indians as lesser
I'm an idealist I guess though
Alternatively, what is the most heterodox institute studying management, esp. in the military?
(if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)