Bongo comments on Follow-up on ESP study: "We don't publish replications" - Less Wrong

71 Post author: CarlShulman 12 July 2011 08:48PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (50)
Tags: science statistics bias

Comments (50)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Bongo 13 July 2011 09:14:19AM 10 points [-]

So if it's true that most publications are uninteresting and if it's true that most academics have to publish at a high rate in order to protect their career and send the right signals we don't want to punish and humiliate academics for publishing stupid ideas or badly executed experiments. And when you publish a paper that demonstrates the other party did a terrible job it does exactly that. The signal to noise ratio in academic journals wouldn't increase by much but suddenly academics can simply reach their paper quota by picking the ideas of other academics apart

Surely it's better to have academics picking apart crap than producing crap.

Comment author: Zed 13 July 2011 10:52:46AM 4 points [-]

Not necessarily. Ignoring crap may be a better strategy than picking it apart.

Cooperation is also easier when different groups in the same research area don't try too hard to invalidate each other's claims. If the problem in question is interesting you're much better off writing your own paper on it with your own claims and results. You can dismiss the other paper with a single paragraph: "Contrary to the findings of I.C. Wiener in [2] we observe that..." and leave it at that.

The system is entirely broken but I don't see an easy way to make it better.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit