Lightwave comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong

73 Post author: Vladimir_M 15 February 2011 09:17AM

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Comment author: Lightwave 16 February 2011 08:12:41AM 0 points [-]

but the scholarship was absolutely abysmal

Hey, can you expand a bit on this? Is this lecture an example of this?

Comment author: wedrifid 16 February 2011 08:59:17AM 6 points [-]

Hey, can you expand a bit on this?

Blast, I wrote a couple of paragraphs but accidental bumped the 'cancel' button. So you get dot points this time.

  • Some of the papers by field leaders misused statistical tool tools.
  • Insufficient comparison to the relevant mainstream techniques for the same problem.
  • Excessive amount of ad hoc algorithm selection and cherry picking of results.
  • I shouldn't be able to see blatant problems in the leading research any any field when I am a hack who has had to self teach and pick things up as I go along.

My disillusionment, unfortunately, wasn't just limited to that one field. I had higher expectations of academic research than what seems to be available in quite a few fields. There are some high quality fields but you still have to be careful when you take things at face value.

Is this lecture an example of this?

Not exactly. It is a bit more of a biology course than just a 'metaphor' course. It seems quite good. I'm looking at some of the other lectures now.

Comment author: DSimon 17 February 2011 07:45:59PM 5 points [-]

Blast, I wrote a couple of paragraphs but accidental bumped the 'cancel' button.

I hate it when that happens! There's a good technique to prevent it from happening again, though: form recovery plugins, like Lazarus.

(Heck, it helped me just now; I accidentally pressed cancel on this very comment a moment ago.)

Comment author: wedrifid 18 February 2011 12:13:40AM 0 points [-]

form recovery plugins, like Lazarus.

Thanks, installed. :)

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