[HN Gopher] Those correction notices, in full
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Those correction notices, in full
Author : Tomte
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-11-24 17:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| baggy_trough wrote:
| The cover up is usually worse than the crime.
| gcr wrote:
| Do you think these errata being published are a good thing?
| baggy_trough wrote:
| Yes of course. That's the point of my comment, which is being
| downvoted for some reason that eludes me.
| allannienhuis wrote:
| Perhaps its because your comment seemed to equate errors
| with crimes, or at least malicious intent. The language
| seems a bit provocative for many, detracting from whatever
| message was intended.
| brudgers wrote:
| Sometimes I write with "downvotes be damned" in mind and
| connected with the audience exactly how I intended.
|
| But not connecting with the audience is the usual reason.
|
| When it happens to me, I take it as feedback on my writing.
| Maybe I was unclear. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was
| written for a different audience.
|
| In those cases, I just try to improve my writing.
|
| Anyway, where can responses to your original comment go?
|
| They could dispute your maxim and the internet gets another
| argument where nobody changes their mind.
|
| Or they could agree with it and the internet gets another
| dog pile of cynicisms.
|
| Generally, those are not why people come to HN...at least
| when the form is one-liners.
|
| Finally, complaining about downvotes is contrary to the HN
| guidelines. Good luck.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Excellent, helpful, and appropriate to the context BTW.
| vasco wrote:
| I like that they are very blunt and to the point.
|
| It'd be really cool if we can add more social dynamic features to
| papers / research, and have people correct papers in the open,
| like twitter community notes, to the point that if you can really
| disprove it, the paper is now marked "wrong" or something like
| that on arxiv. Sort of inbetween collaborative science or hunting
| for patent prior art or bug bounty hunting. Getting paid for it
| would be even better, making money by sniping issues in research.
| One can dream.
|
| I wonder how much money in bounties it'd take to proof-invalidate
| whole branches of psychology (insert your own pet peeve here)
| research in a methodical way, probably not that much.
| srockets wrote:
| I too, would like to have what you're having.
|
| Academic publishing doesn't make the authors money, it costs
| them money. To publish is a requirement for academic
| employment, but there's no incentive to retract, either than
| revenge, or one's academic honesty.
| amoshebb wrote:
| I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles.
| Currently what I'm working on is really "Building on" one
| pretty pivotal paper from the 90s, and there's a whole
| constellation of work that has spawned.
|
| So much ink is spilled re-defining the problem, and reading any
| paper requires going through the system model every time
| because tons of arbitrary decisions may have been done
| different. It makes it hard to compare results, and makes
| almost every statement that reads "Over in this area we're not
| innovating on, we used the SOTA" wrong, because some other
| group is innovating in that corner.
|
| If instead there was one canonical version of it with an edit
| history, and I could go try to just re-write one little para
| and argue in the talk section about it with the one-or-two
| other groups picking away at that, I feel like things could
| move faster and be done higher quality.
|
| It'd also be a lot easier to peek at other areas. Currently if
| I have a question like "What's the latest in NeRFs underwater?
| I remember seeing a paper about that a while ago" I've
| basically got no idea.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I wish academic papers were more like Wikipedia articles.
|
| I don't think that would be helpful. Scientific development
| happens in branches, not linearly. The fact that a field is
| going in one direction does not mean that somebody won't make
| a breakthrough next year based on a poorly-cited paper from
| the 1970s, leapfrogging a whole bunch of studies that
| happened in the meantime.
|
| Most of the time, there is simply no "state of the art" that
| covers a whole field, and even in limited sub-fields, quite
| often there is no consensus.
| K0HAX wrote:
| Tell that to businesses, and beat it over the heads of
| marketeers.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| > 1999: It is not clear to us in general how to avoid this sort
| of false proof, the problem being that the false statement seemed
| so natural to us that we did not think to look at it carefully.
|
| Assuming I understand correctly, this is basically the common
| issue of being unable to be objective when you've lived and
| breathed a subject matter for long enough. The answer is rigorous
| peer review, I think.
| srockets wrote:
| Peer reviews are (often) also done by people who live and
| breathe the subject matter.
| timkam wrote:
| Without knowing the specific context: I think this really is a
| good example of how errors should be disclosed. We need to
| acknowledge that scientists/academics are human; even very
| competent mathematicians make mistakes and some of these mistakes
| appear in published papers. What we lack in many fields is a
| culture and process that allows (and ideally, encourages) one to
| disclose: "this was wrong, here is how I fixed it, or how it's
| actually correct". E.g., in the communities I know in Computer
| Science & AI, I rarely even see errata lists on personal
| webpages, not to speak of journals that provide a straightforward
| process for updates. I would even go so far to claim that the
| current culture, in which honest errors cannot be
| straightforwardly corrected, plays into the hands of the clearly
| dishonest "bad apples".
|
| Science is, obviously, not a "monotonic" process in which every
| single paper adds to the truth; this is practically not even the
| case for mathematics, which is at least monotonic on object-level
| (but mistakes happen all the time). As a prominent example,
| consider this impressive list of Feynman errata:
| https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/info/flp_errata.html.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > "Should the Democrats move to the left?
|
| >
|
| > Because of a data coding error, all of our analysis of social
| issues is incorrect.
|
| Yeah, sure, that's why the analysis was incorrect, it was all
| about that typo...
| cipheredStones wrote:
| I really enjoyed this phrasing, from the comments on the post:
|
| > I suspect the careerization of Big Science and Big Academia has
| a lot to do with [unwillingness to plainly admit error]. Although
| I have no proof to that effect. And certainly man has been
| subject to failings since Adam and Eve chomped.
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