[HN Gopher] Why is there no semantic ontology of sentiment in ac...
___________________________________________________________________
Why is there no semantic ontology of sentiment in academic
citations?
Author : edent
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-07-10 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shkspr.mobi)
(TXT) w3m dump (shkspr.mobi)
| salty_biscuits wrote:
| I think if you did parse the sentiment of citations you would get
| something quite bland, like 90% are very neutral (i.e. the effect
| of X on Y has been investigated in A, B, and C). The cynic in me
| would say that this is because a lot of these type of citations
| are a defence against getting A, B, or C as a reviewer, or even
| worse the citation was inserted on review to make A, B or C happy
| because they were the reviewer and went shamelessly fishing for
| citations.
| epgui wrote:
| Something similar to this already exists for citations in court
| decisions, where you can see if a citing decision has a positive,
| neutral or negative treatment. It's not unfeasible.
| petschge wrote:
| How would you treat something like "They had the right idea,
| but their simulation was in 2d only, and we know now that this
| makes the simulation results garbage. They just happened to get
| lucky and got garbage that matches the real thing in 3d" with
| that?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Negative
| concinds wrote:
| Such papers would probably make it explicit that a given
| methodology was inadequate (and explain why) so while it may
| be challenging, it's still a solvable NLP problem.
| edent wrote:
| That sounds interesting. Do you have a link? Or more details?
| Ta.
| jameshart wrote:
| Legal citations have specific 'introductory signals' to
| specify the way in which a case is being cited. Eg 'see' or
| 'contra' or 'but cf'.
|
| Found a summary of one of the standards here:
| https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/bluebook-legal-
| citation/intro...
| MWil wrote:
| It's what LexisNexis / WestLaw have built their foundational
| businesses on - lots of $$$$. The new tech-infused player in
| this area is Casetext (YC13) which moved from a centralized
| employer-based sentiment model to a more social/open model.
|
| edit: feel free to take a look at my oldest submissions.
| jltsiren wrote:
| This is probably something that varies by the field, but I
| don't think most citations can be meaningfully placed on a
| positive / neutral / negative axis. When I cite something, it
| usually falls into one or more of the following categories:
|
| - background reading
|
| - related work
|
| - source for a specific claim / result
|
| - credit for software / data / other resource used in this
| work.
|
| I don't evaluate the work when I cite it. Instead, I try to
| provide useful information to the reader and to give credit
| when academic courtesy requires it.
| epgui wrote:
| That's a neutral treatment then. (I'm a biochemist, and I see
| no reason why a similar system couldn't apply to my field.)
| davidgay wrote:
| The thing you are missing here is that citations are often
| intentionally ambiguous as to whether they are neutral or
| negative.
|
| Or, phrased differently, there is essentially no possible
| benefit for a researcher to say "this piece of related work is
| junk". Let the readers decide or infer instead.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I think that's important to consider. It's kinda presumptuous
| to explicitly say someone is wrong. Safer to let the data
| speak for itself.
| mattkrause wrote:
| It's more nuanced than that: it may not even be obvious
| _if_ someone is actually wrong.
|
| Most citations discuss related work, rather than direct
| replications; the latter are incredibly rare in most
| fields. As a result, the authors are piecing together a
| theory using data from many groups, each using different
| species, different techniques, and different conditions.
| Some of these might reflect legitimate differences between
| perfectly conducted, reasonably interpreted experiments.
| Keysh wrote:
| In Anthony Grafton's _The Footnote: A Curious History_ , he
| claims that citations practices in the field of _history_ have
| the tendency to use "cf." -- which normally means something like
| "compare with this reference" -- to mean "compare with this
| reference (which is actually wrong and stupid)".
|
| So you have to watch out for the possibility of ironic or
| sarcastic references, which may vary from field to field.
| humanistbot wrote:
| There already is a project trying to use NLP to detect the
| sentiment of scientific citations: https://scite.ai/
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, using NLP (DL) techniques makes more sense than to require
| every author to annotate their work.
| unixhero wrote:
| I agree, Natural Language Processing is the right tool and
| field for this. What is the purpose of language, if you as an
| author must add an extra layer of metadata to it to convey
| meaning. Or maybe academic authors should just bute the
| billet and start using smileys to convey sentiment. These
| would be easy to work with.
| andrepd wrote:
| Running some superficial "sentiment analysis" neural net over
| scholarly work and basing any sort of analysis on that is a
| terrible idea for obvious reasons.
|
| It is already a terrible idea for content moderation /
| sorting reviews / etc, and the stakes are lower.
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Don't understand why this keeps being downvoted. NLP is
| still in its infancy when it comes to detecting nuances of
| human communication. These are valid objections.
| notahacker wrote:
| Moreover, scientific citations are amongst the worst
| candidates for sentiment analysis since authors often
| express no sentiment about cited papers at all, and often
| prefer to use dry, neutral tones when describing a
| paper's shortcomings.
|
| You might need both general intelligence _and_ a deep
| knowledge of the field to conclude an author noting that
| X discovered Y on the assumption of Z is not a neutral
| description but a stark emphasis of their differences, or
| possibly even straw-manning the original paper.
| make3 wrote:
| the goal is ease of use though, not serious analysis
| Topolomancer wrote:
| This seems to be very hard to pull off, though, given the way
| people regularly cite work in some scientific domains. For
| instance, unless specifically comparing to an approach,
| researchers in ML rarely endorse or disavow a specific approach
| (just my observation in graph learning).
| ttpphd wrote:
| This exists.
|
| Welcome to Scite.
|
| https://scite.ai/
| friesfreeze wrote:
| Legal writing has something like this.
|
| If you look at the - sometimes dreaded - Bluebook, "signals" play
| a large role in indicating the relevance of the cited source to
| the argument.
|
| See generally Peter W. Martin, Introduction to Basic Legal
| Citation: SS 6-300 Signals, Legal Information Institute (last
| visited July 10, 2022),
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/6-300.
| exmadscientist wrote:
| Tangent:
|
| > Most academics can't even be bothered to write alt-text for
| their images, so any extra labour is likely to be resisted.
|
| Isn't this the role of the figure caption? At least, every paper
| I've ever written has fully captioned figures and duplicating
| that in "alt-text" seems completely pointless.
| TheMightyLlama wrote:
| Because those are big words with big concepts behind them. All of
| which require an educations and an individual with drive to
| breach a new topic, study it and bring home data. Which is a rare
| thing.
| 1shooner wrote:
| When I was an undergrad first learning about Semantic Web, this
| idea was so obvious it was frustrating that it didn't already
| exist. It would make current citation seem primitive. Different
| fields would perhaps follow different citation ontologies,
| analogous to citation/bibliography formats today.
|
| Imagine what it would do to literature review to draw from a
| 'tree of knowledge' of all the supporting texts of a work, or to
| see all the work that claims to derive particular meaning from
| some seminal work.
|
| >Most academics can't even be bothered to write alt-text for
| their images, so any extra labour is likely to be resisted.
|
| This is probably true, and it will ultimately mean authors
| sacrificing their agency over the semantic understanding of their
| writing; allowing e.g. Google Scholar to decide the meaning of
| their works' relationship to the literature.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Imagine what it would do to literature review to draw from a
| 'tree of knowledge' of all the supporting texts of a work, or
| to see all the work that claims to derive particular meaning
| from some seminal work.
|
| You can visualize all of these things using Scholia
| https://scholia.toolforge.org . Built on free and open citation
| data, no need for Google Scholar or anything proprietary.
| fl0id wrote:
| I've tried a few of these, kind of cool to play with, but for
| my work so far irrelevant.
| blep_ wrote:
| It's worse. Most academics don't even make their citations
| _links_ , even though this is probably the most obvious use
| case ever for links. Instead, we get PDFs that really want to
| pretend they're paper journals, and citation formats that try
| to just infodump enough for you to go find the paper yourself.
| im3w1l wrote:
| The issue with links is that they break. Infodumping, by not
| specifying the exact location, may be more robust.
| fl0id wrote:
| Links make the paper harder to read, and often you will not
| be able to use the links to directly access the source
| anyway.
| [deleted]
| Smithalicious wrote:
| > Links make the paper harder to read
|
| Do they? There is no law that mandates that links are blue
| and underlined.
|
| > often you will not be able to use the links to directly
| access the source anyway.
|
| This is true and I consider it a tragedy.
| fl0id wrote:
| They make a whole footnote much longer. Even when not
| blue and underlined.
| blep_ wrote:
| The link text doesn't have to be the whole URL.
|
| <a href="http://example.com/very-long-id?garbage-
| amount=2KB">J. Scienceperson, 2022</a> or the equivalent
| in your document format will do.
| bee_rider wrote:
| What footnote? This seems very format-specific.
| tomrod wrote:
| I disagree. Links in the bibliography do not make the paper
| harder to read.
|
| The rents from locking away research under foolhardy
| copyright must be removed, I agree on that point.
|
| Zotero solves the first problem way better than Endnote, as
| an aside.
| fl0id wrote:
| And only having biliography/endnotes is annoying. If I
| want to check sth, I do not want to scroll all the way to
| the end first, so footnotes ftw. And for those, having
| long extra things in them like links is annoying. Though
| admittedly of course this depends on personal preferences
| and discipline.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| C'mon... It's not that hard. Link the text to the
| references section with the full citation, and include a
| link in the reference to look it up by the arxiv or by doi.
| If the link doesn't work, the citation should be enough to
| recover the text, assuming that the civilization hasn't
| collapsed.
| fl0id wrote:
| Citations take a lot of time already as it is. Any extra
| metadata would take a ton of time and for what? Just so some
| data nerds that wouldn't read the paper anyway can play with
| it?
| 1shooner wrote:
| My undergrad semweb zealot self would say that it would
| ultimately replace the need for a lot of verbiage that only
| really does the work that the semantic connection would.
|
| Today, I would say that your writing is getting coded with
| significant additional meaning, do you want to do it or do
| you want someones AI to do it after you publish it?
| fl0id wrote:
| Well in many fields, you will have to write that
| "unnecessary verbiage" anyway, and with good reason as
| humans are crap at reading metadata or switching between
| text and another document such as a citation tree. I
| definitely do not want to do it, and no matter what
| someones AI or algorithm will anyway analyze my work, not
| matter what I do.
| nine_k wrote:
| The problem is that there's more than one view on ontology, and
| the dominant view changes sometimes.
|
| Look at biology, where the knowledge is expected to be based on
| directly observable, highly repeatable phenomena like animals
| or plants. The tree of life that orders the species, families,
| etc up to the realms at root is constantly reviewed and
| reordered close to leaves, and had seen a few changes close to
| the root.
|
| Ontology, being a lot less strict than disciplines studying
| more direct observation, would have much trouble producing a
| universally agreed-upon tree of notions, and a lot of energy
| would be spent around contested branches.
|
| I suppose the only possible outcome is an ontological forest,
| or shrubs, like what we have now, which is only locally
| helpful.
| aj7 wrote:
| In science, this is a second order effect compared to the problem
| that negative results and failed experiments are never reported,
| especially in the case of the physical sciences. "If my
| experiment doesn't work, you get to repeat it."
| bluenose69 wrote:
| > Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go
| through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment
| behind each citation?
|
| This would be very difficult to do. In many fields, papers are
| written on the assumption that the reader is really quite
| familiar with the topic, so the potential recruits to this army
| would be thin on the ground. They are busy doing other things,
| doing research and writing papers of their own. Unless there is a
| new funding agency that would hire this army, I see no way to
| make progress on this. And the researchers in the field would be
| very unhappy to see their grants cut by a factor of 2, just to
| fund this army.
|
| I like linkages as much as anybody else, but we use natural
| language in papers for a reason: the message is complicated. In
| my own field, I might read many dozens of papers before I found
| one that said another paper had been disproved, for example. And
| -- to raise another topic -- it's very hard to publish a paper
| saying that another result had been confirmed, since reviewers
| would reject it on the basis that we already knew the result.
|
| Besides, in many fields, citations are provided just for
| completeness. "Previous studies have dealt with -TOPIC-
| (-CITATION_1-, -CITATION_2-, ...)" is quite a common construct in
| the natural sciences, for example. Exactly what information can
| be gleaned from this is uncertain to me, beyond "-CITATION_x-
| CITES -CITATION_1-", "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_2-" and so
| forth. And this citation linkage is already available.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > Besides, in many fields, citations are provided just for
| completeness. "Previous studies have dealt with -TOPIC-
| (-CITATION_1-, -CITATION_2-, ...)" is quite a common construct
| in the natural sciences, for example. Exactly what information
| can be gleaned from this is uncertain to me, beyond
| "-CITATION_x- CITES -CITATION_1-", "-CITATION_x- CITES
| -CITATION_2-" and so forth. And this citation linkage is
| already available.
|
| I published one paper before leaving academia. It was published
| in a top journal in the field and has about a dozen citations
| now (I get a notification email each time a new citation pops
| up). Every single one of them is this kind of citation-in-
| passing. Not a single one actually engaged with the content of
| the paper.
|
| I have a couple other half-finished papers that I was working
| on before I quit, and sometimes I think about going back and
| polishing them up for publication, but given the reception my
| previous paper received it's hard to justify the time. It's not
| like I need papers for tenure now.
| cproctor wrote:
| This paper [1] aims for a related goal: automatically parsing the
| argumentative function of citations ("citation frames").
|
| [1] Jurgens, D., Kumar, S., Hoover, R., McFarland, D., &
| Jurafsky, D. (2018). Measuring the evolution of a scientific
| field through citation frames. Transactions of the Association
| for Computational Linguistics, 6, 391-406.
| azhenley wrote:
| In HCI and SE there is very little incentive and it is way too
| much effort to disagree with prior research. Most work isn't
| replicable. The fields value novelty.
|
| Why would I spend countless hours replicating someone else's
| human-subjects study when I could pursue something new?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Why can't well funded researchers just assign a post-doc to go
| through all the papers and analyze their sentiments? Doesn't seem
| so difficult logistically or technically.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| We just call this "literature review", and everyone does it at
| times regardless of seniority level. But the aim is not a
| sentiment graph because it doesn't really matter whether author
| A said paper B was good or bad. What would we even use that
| information for? We instead want a comprehensive list of papers
| that are relevant to what we're trying to do right now, with a
| note on each saying why it is relevant.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Seems like a good project for an undergrad who is just getting
| started in research, actually.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| How do you control for bias in the post-doc? What exactly is
| "sentiment"? Is it a qualitative description, or something more
| analytical? Why does a future researcher care about the
| sentiment instead of the content itself? Or is this to better
| help guide other research directions?
| gzer0 wrote:
| https://retractionwatch.com/2014/11/17/fake-citations-plague...
|
| Faking Google Scholar citation counts is relevant here.
| Absolutely insane how easy it is to "game" this system.
| hirundo wrote:
| The same arguments apply to HN comments. Up/down could profitably
| be replaced by a spectrum of adjectives mapped to floats, e.g. {
| worst: -1, best: 1, meh: 0, ok: 0.5 }, etc. ad infinitum. It
| would give us a nuanced way to express sentiments while retaining
| the value of aggregation.
| [deleted]
| JadeNB wrote:
| I found the title nearly incomprehensible, so here's a brief pull
| quote:
|
| > Using Google Scholar (or any other knowledge graph) I can find
| just about any academic paper. More importantly, it lets me see
| every paper which references that paper.
|
| > Great! I can see if something has been cited lots of times, or
| very few times. That gives me a weak signal about its
| "importance".
|
| > But it tells me nothing about the sentiment of those citations.
|
| > Suppose I've just read (Smith, 2015) and I want to know whether
| the consensus is that the paper is a work of genius or absolute
| horseshit. What are my options?
| mattkrause wrote:
| Read the paper; ask someone else who read the paper :-)
|
| Your best bet would be to find a review paper that cites Smith
| (2015) and see how they interpret it and how Smith (2015)'s
| conclusions jibe with the rest of the review. A few review
| series even use little icons to indicate "important" and
| "crucial" papers. Even there, you've got to be careful that you
| haven't fallen into some weird fringe-y subfield though.
|
| Raw bibliometrics aren't totally useless--I'd bet most bad work
| is ignored, rather than refuted--but I'm really skeptical that
| anyone can automatically put a valance onto most citations.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The nature of citations are often much more ambiguous, though,
| and assigning sentiment will often be unhelpful.
|
| Background citations are often of the flavor of: "These guys
| did almost exactly the same thing as us, but due to the minor
| detail of wanting to get our own work published, we think their
| work is inferior."
|
| Or, "This cited work had a great idea, but due to rush to
| publish they left out a bunch of details and took a few short
| cuts on the implementation. We've fixed some of these holes,
| and called the original authors dolts to elevate the importance
| of our own incremental improvements."
| jll29 wrote:
| This is correct, however, it does not eliminate the value of
| citation polarity; citation polarity must be seen relative to
| the rhetorical zone type in which it occurs: the parent's
| examples are valid, but typically limited to zone type
| BACKGROUND ( https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/thesis/t.pdf ),
| where the related work is described, and often differentiated
| from one's own work.
| patel011393 wrote:
| Author may want to look at scite.ai
|
| It does something similar to what they propose.
| toomim wrote:
| As an academic, I find that positive or negative sentiment isn't
| expressed in _citations_ -- it 's expressed in the _review
| process_ before the paper is published. Once a paper is
| published, academics assume that it 's already been vetted and is
| good, and the citations rarely bother to express agreement or
| disagreement.
|
| When I cite a paper, I don't include a sentence saying _whether_
| the paper is good; I say _why_ it is good, because the author of
| that paper is likely to be reviewing my paper, and I need to
| acknowledge his strengths before differentiating my work, or he
| 'll kill my paper in the review process.
|
| My advisor taught me that the point of a citation is not to give
| your opinion on which other papers are good or bad; it's to tell
| the editors which other scientists should be on your paper's
| review committee. The way editors choose reviewers is to look
| through the citations, find people cited who they know, and then
| ask those people to review the paper.
|
| Thus, the author's goal when citing other work is to (1)
| highlight potential reviewers who would see your work favorably,
| and (2) say something positive about them to put them into a mood
| to see your work favorably.
|
| There is nary an incentive to express negative sentiment in
| citations.
| jll29 wrote:
| While the parent is right in stressing the importance of the
| review phase, which is a filter to decide whether we will ever
| see a candidate paper or not, it is indeed the case, as the OP
| posits, that there is merit in extracting the context in which
| a citation is used, which has been termed "citation polarity".
|
| For example, 'Chomsky (1969) was entirely wrong when he said
| that "it must be recognized that the notion of 'probability of
| a sentence' is an entirely useless one, under any known
| interpretation of this term".'
|
| There are Natural Language Processing methods and tools to
| extract the citation polarity. Researchers like S. Teufel have
| used citation polarity and other methods to analyze
| publications ("rhetorical zoning") and to create maps of the
| published literature: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/az.html
|
| A scientific literature search engine (Semantic Scholar,
| CiteSeerX etc. - sadly Microsoft Academic has recently been
| discontinued) can benefit from such knowledge; for example,
| PageRank can be modified so as to incorporate citation polarity
| in the random walker model that underlies it. Think of it as
| adding a "dislike" button to a system that already offers a
| graph with "like" button relations.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The Microsoft Academic dataset has been picked up by
| OpenAlex.org
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I disagree that that is the sole (or even most important) point
| of a citation. Most of the time you can view a citation as part
| of the (extended, implicit) problem statement for the paper,
| e.g. here is what X did in this space, and we are
| different/better/build on that work by doing Y. If an important
| citation is missing, it shows you aren't familiar with what has
| been done before in relation to the problem you are trying to
| solve (bad). Of course reviewers and readers are free to
| disagree with your characterization of a cited paper in
| relation to your own.
|
| Having said that, maybe if you publish in journals a lot this
| is more of an issue. In conferences the Program Committee is
| usually set in advance so there is less scope to target
| specific reviewers (other than those on the PC).
| sampo wrote:
| This is a very cynical and opportunistic way to do science. It
| may be the winning strategy to play the academic game and
| advance your career, though.
| concinds wrote:
| Citation rings are a huge problem, but couldn't the sentiment-
| analysis side be readily addressed? There's a difference
| between papers that just cite a paper without judgment (+0),
| papers whose results explicitly support another paper (+1) and
| papers that explicitly reject another paper (-1). Such an AI
| could also bypass "citation analysis" and instead ingest the
| entire scientific literature, and find refutations in papers
| that don't even cite each other.
|
| In practice, 2 problems: 1) this requires sophisticated AI; and
| 2) many people will keep assuming that high citations =
| credible (i.e. assume that +0 and +1 are equivalent).
|
| But this method will help researchers go beyond "it's highly-
| cited therefore I trust it"; it'll help students and rigorous
| scholars find how well-supported a paper is, despite its
| popularity. And it'll surface refutations that may be hard to
| otherwise find; for example when a scholar that's famous in a
| field, and unknown in another, decides to publish a paper in
| the latter field that may not be widely seen.
|
| Ultimately (though this is far off: theoretically completely
| possible but highly technically difficult) we can also imagine
| AIs that ingest the whole literature, gains deep cross-domain
| knowledge, and are trained to detect poor methodologies, or
| automatically highlight new insights in one discipline that can
| enrich another discipline, or (ideally) make its own judgments
| about the merits of any finding based on the knowledge it
| acquired. After human review, it could systemically help "clean
| up" the scientific literature of bad methodologies and ideas,
| and free scientists to spend less time working on scientific
| dead ends.
|
| That last paragraph won't be doable for a while, but the first
| 3 seem readily within reach of today's AI technologies (and
| seems to be what scite is doing).
| toomim wrote:
| That said, I have hope we can solve this problem _outside_ the
| academic incentive system. Here 's a relevant prototype
| developed by my research lab: https://braid.news/about
| robocat wrote:
| Thanks. I've wanted something similar to rank HN comments - I
| really want to read some users and I really don't care to
| read the same tripe repeated by some other users.
|
| I presume it is a hobby project but calling it PeeryView and
| then using braid.news was confusing to me. I didn't even
| realise the "home" link would take me to the site (or maybe I
| didn't see the home link, because I look to top left for
| that? e.g. Y logo on HN)
| murphyslab wrote:
| > Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go
| through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment
| behind each citation?
|
| This is similar to what SciFinder, a database created by the
| Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) does for every paper. They have
| a substantial team that parses through every journal of
| significance where chemical research might be published. They are
| searching for chemical structures and substances and encoding
| each structure within their proprietary database. That database
| offers a concrete value to researchers at companies,
| universities, and law firms, whether looking for prior art or
| simply the most reliable methods of synthesis. Hence that product
| is greatly valued by those who use it and they can pay for people
| to do the complex task of indexing those papers.
|
| While the idea of determining the sentiment of references is
| _interesting_ , I'm skeptical whether there is nearly the same
| level of potential commercial value in creating such a database.
| It would be useful for reviewing grant applications, but those
| reviewers tend to be experts who already know if a paper received
| negative attention in the literature or even just on Twitter.
| nicoco wrote:
| This would be interesting indeed. But it wouldn't be enough to
| really appreciate the paper's value. Often times a paper is cited
| because it is related 'prior work', even if it's crap. This can
| happen because a reviewer asks it. Sometimes the reviewer is the
| crap's author, for instance. Yes, many things are broken about
| bibliometry and scientific publishing in general.
| Quekid5 wrote:
| Absolutely. Peer review causes peer pressure.
|
| Ofc, it depends heavily on how big one's 'niche' is, but...
| eesmith wrote:
| Sounds like the Citation Typing Ontology. See
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2903725/
|
| DDG finds it's in use in at least one journal:
| https://jcheminf.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13321-0...
| jwie wrote:
| There aren't meaningful disagreements in many disciplines as
| those who disagree and are smart are selected out of a field.
|
| There's too much academic labor coming into any field so there's
| always some useful idiot rather than a brilliant opponent to
| recruit.
|
| They're not going to structure their work to make it clear since
| obfuscation is more useful to the status quo.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >There aren't meaningful disagreements in many disciplines as
| those who disagree and are smart are selected out of a field.
|
| This trope needs to die. There are major competing theories in
| pretty much every academic discipline. The claim is so ignorant
| and baseless that I think less of this site every time I see it
| come up. It is the HN version of a shitpost.
|
| We get it, you don't like academia. To be honest, there's a lot
| to dislike. But please, for the love of god, stop writing this
| low-effort nonsense on a site that is meant to have users who
| actually use their brains.
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