[HN Gopher] Russell's Paradox of ghostwriters
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Russell's Paradox of ghostwriters
Author : luu
Score : 23 points
Date : 2023-12-05 06:26 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| prvc wrote:
| Where is the paradox?
| javier_e06 wrote:
| In this town there are two kind of people. Those who write
| their biographies themselves and those who use the help of the
| town Ghostwriter. Who writes the Ghostwriter biography?
| gumby wrote:
| Thanks for phrasing it this way!
| smeagull wrote:
| The Ghostwriter, but he is of no help.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| 10,000 monkeys with typewriters!
| hosh wrote:
| Now we have 70B LLM models.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This piece does seem incomplete, starting off with a big
| grammar issue
|
| > [...], so much so that when it turned out that one of the
| books had "at least 95 separate passages" of plagiarism,
| including "long sections of a chapter on the cardiac health of
| giraffes."
|
| "so much so that when ..." _what_?!
|
| meta commentary?
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| > "so much so that when ..."
|
| This is a common enough turn of phrase, at least in my corner
| of the world. What's your problem with it?
|
| https://www.collinsdictionary.com/sentences/english/so-
| much-...
| dcminter wrote:
| The conclusion is missing. Normally the formula is:
|
| "So much so that when {occurrence} {outcome}"
|
| This has the occurrence (the inclusion of the topic) but
| not the consequent outcome - seems like some anecdote about
| that author not recollecting the clearly memorable topic
| got mangled.
|
| There's a missing word later in the piece as well.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Yes exactly, thank you!
| troupe wrote:
| I think that part was done by the ghostwriter.
| gumby wrote:
| > In contrast, Malcolm Gladwell deserves credit for producing
| readable prose while having his own interesting style. I doubt he
| uses a ghostwriter.
|
| He could use a ghostresearcher. Most of his claims are rather
| dubious.
|
| There's no shame in it: academics have grad students, who at
| least sometimes get a mention in the acknowledgements.
| gnulinux wrote:
| > There's no shame in it: academics have grad students, who at
| least sometimes get a mention in the acknowledgements.
|
| In what field????? In fields I'm familiar, whoever does the
| research (i.e. the grad student or the postdoc) is the first
| author, helpers are co-authors and the PI i.e. the main
| academic who leads the lab is the last author. In what field PI
| is the first author and grad students "sometimes get
| acknowledgement"? That sounds like academic fraud.
| tiffanyg wrote:
| It used to happen much more in the past. Many decades ago,
| AFAIK, at least in the journals / fields / areas I'm familiar
| with.
|
| I'm not sure where that might happen or be tolerated, today.
| If you go back and look at research into antibiotics, DNA,
| etc. back in the 1940s and 1950s ... and even research in the
| 1960s and 1970s, decades later, there ended up being serious
| questions around ethics, authorship, etc. for some really
| seminal papers, for example.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I agree. Grad students _must_ appear in the paper because
| most universities have an explicit or implicit requirement of
| a few papers to get the Ph.D.
| jhbadger wrote:
| It's very field dependent. The first author=person who did
| most of the work and last author=advisor is pretty much just
| how biomedical science works. Other fields have different
| traditions. I'm a computational biologist who has worked in
| both biology and computer science, and in CS (at least in the
| 1990s-early 2000s) the tradition was simple alphabetical
| order, for example, with no privilege afforded to either the
| first or last place. Along with other quirks like how
| presenting a result at a conference was considered equal to
| publishing it as opposed to in biology where conferences are
| more social networking events.
| two_handfuls wrote:
| In my experience for computer science (systems field) it's
| usually the same, first author=most work and last
| author=advisor.
| jasonhong wrote:
| In theoretical CS, the convention is still alphabetic
| order. In most other CS, advisor tends to be last.
| shmoe wrote:
| Did anyone else read this as "Russell's Paradox of Ghostbusters"
| the first time?
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I seem to recall that some of the Stratemeyer[1] series had a bit
| more of the ghostwriter's personality leak through in the earlier
| books. I have also been told (but not confirmed myself) that they
| filed off most of those edges when they revised the books to
| remove some of the casual racism that hadn't aged well.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratemeyer_Syndicate
| jancsika wrote:
| > "Nearly all experts and celebrities use ghostwriters,"
|
| Funny enough, my mind first went to Bernie Sanders' _My
| Revolution_.
|
| Either he didn't use a ghostwriter, or the ghostwriter was Larry
| David doing a Bernie Sanders impression.
|
| The Wikipedia entry for the book doesn't mention a
| ghostwriter[1]. But after reading this article, I think Wikipedia
| should have a policy of explicitly stating _so-and-so did not use
| a ghostwriter_ for what are apparently edge cases.
|
| Hey Wikipedians-- can you make this so?
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Revolution
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