I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
I think that theoretical math and physics are special, but probably not in the way you assume. It's just that there isn't a whole lot of grant money, prestige, or influence associated with them (unless you accomplish something truly exceptional).
In contrast, computer science is very close to math and should be more verifiable, 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 physics, a lot of materials science breakthroughs are suspect.
I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...
I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results.
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.
Western civilization is transitioning from one where societal consensus is formed with reason and evidence to one where it is formed with emotions and feelings.
When was this golden age of western civilization again? like 10 years ago, are you suggesting we were in this golden age? I mean, the paper this link is discussing is from 2014, so I guess it was more like 15 years ago that the golden age sunsetted?
If anything, I think the Internet has made it easier to expose bad science. People like Andrew Gellman and websites like pubpeer have had a huge impact on the practice of the social sciences (psychology especially) just using blogs. In the past he would have been ignored. Journals and authors do their best to ignore, dismiss, and discredit him now. Having a direct voice to the public is what saves him.
That would be strange and misguided because I didn't talk about a consensus, I was talking about a mechanism for consensus. And consensus has existed many times on many issues now, and then.
- The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)
- Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings)
- Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right".
Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.
>The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)
I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out.
Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete.
The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.
I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
It's not that outrage or unfounded opinions were new, or the masses were never fooled or taken advantage of before. It's that the mechanism for social consensus is rapidly shifting.
> I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
And yet the consensus about climate change and in particular support for policies that address it is very strong.
60-70% is far far higher than most politicians win elections by. They'll call 5low-something% a landslide. They push policies and laws that are far less popular than that, claiming popular mandate.
And yet there are a bunch of people fixated on the idea that it is a disadvantaged (poorer, less educated) minority of average citizens of the country who are orchestrating some evil battle against it. Rather than seeing the obvious that the ruling class is as always pushing divide and conquer techniques, shifting blame, and turning people on one another. A good example of the emotional mechanism of social consensus.
Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.
Even in more respected journals, peer review is often done by beleaguered grad students who could be still relatively new to the field. They lack the experience to look at things with a critical eye.
For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, 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.
> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected
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.
No it's fine, it thoroughly amused a HN nerd like me. I've been keeping track of how HN works for well over a decade, and noticing small changes like this is something that's genuinely gratifying. The mods will no doubt be by to clean up the url shortly.
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.
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.
Many such cases of this, it seems.
In contrast, computer science is very close to math and should be more verifiable, 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 physics, a lot of materials science breakthroughs are suspect.
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.
- The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions)
- Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings)
- Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right".
Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.
I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out.
Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete.
The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.
I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
It's not that outrage or unfounded opinions were new, or the masses were never fooled or taken advantage of before. It's that the mechanism for social consensus is rapidly shifting.
> I remember when I was a teenager there were lawsuits about trying to teach creationism in school. My entire life conservatives have been arguing against climate change.
And yet the consensus about climate change and in particular support for policies that address it is very strong.
https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/yc...
60-70% is far far higher than most politicians win elections by. They'll call 5low-something% a landslide. They push policies and laws that are far less popular than that, claiming popular mandate.
And yet there are a bunch of people fixated on the idea that it is a disadvantaged (poorer, less educated) minority of average citizens of the country who are orchestrating some evil battle against it. Rather than seeing the obvious that the ruling class is as always pushing divide and conquer techniques, shifting blame, and turning people on one another. A good example of the emotional mechanism of social consensus.
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.
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.
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.
(if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)