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?
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.
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...
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.
> The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King [...]
I'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."
Many such cases of this, it seems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151
(2 months ago, 374 comments)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
(if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)
