• BattleGrown@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I recently reviewed a paper, for a prestigious journal. Paper was clearly from the academic mill. It was horrible. They had a small experimental engine, and they wrote 10 papers about it. Results were all normalized and relative, key test conditions not even mentioned, all described in general terms… and I couldn’t even be sure if the authors were real (korean authors, names are all Park, Kim and Lee). I hate where we arrived in scientific publishing.

    • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      To be fair, scientific publishing has been terrible for years, a deeply flawed system at multiple levels. Maybe this is the push it needs to reevaluate itself into something better.

      • Tja@programming.dev
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        5 days ago

        And to be even fairer, scientific reviewing hasn’t been better. Back in my PhD days, I got a paper rejected from a prestigious conference for being too simple and too complex from two different reviewers. The reviewer that argue “too simple” also gave a an example of a task that couldn’t be achieved which was clearly achievable.

        Goes without saying, I’m not in academia anymore.

        • joonazan@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 days ago

          Startups on the other hand have people pursuing ideas that have been proven to not work. The better starups mostly just sell old innovations that do work.

    • Comment105@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.

        • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          Her video on trans issues has made it very difficult to take her seriously as a thinker. The same types of manipulative half truths and tropes I see from TERFs pretending they have the “reasonable” view, while also spreading the hysteric media narrative about the kids getting transed.

          • zqps@sh.itjust.works
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            4 days ago

            I didn’t even see that. Just a few clips of her rants about other things she confidently knows nothing about, like a less incoherent Jordan Peterson.

      • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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        4 days ago

        People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.

        Somehow I briefly got her and Pluckrose reversed in my mind, and was still kinda nodding along.

        If you don’t know who I mean, Pluckrose and two others produced a bunch of hoax papers (likening themselves to the Sokal affair) of which 4 were published and 3 were accepted but hadn’t been published, 4 were told to revise and resubmit and one was under review at the point they were revealed. 9 were rejected, a bit less than half the total (which included both the papers on autoethnography). The idea was to float papers that were either absurd or kinda horrible like a study supporting reducing homophobia and transphobia in straight cis men by pegging them (was published in Sexuality & Culture) or one that was just a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf as a feminist text (was accepted by Affilia but not yet published when the hoax was revealed).

        My personal favorite of the accepted papers was “When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire” just because of how ballsy it is to spell out what you are doing so obviously in the title. It was accepted by Hypatia but hadn’t been published yet when the hoax was revealed.

      • Camille d'Ockham@jlai.lu
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        5 days ago

        She sucks when overextendeding her aura of expertise to domains she’s not good in (eg metaphysics and esp pan-psychism which she profoundly misunderstands yet self-assuredly talked about). Her criticism of academia is good, but she reproduces some of that nonsense herself.

        • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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          5 days ago

          As someone who just looked at the Wikipedia article, I too am an expert in this field, unironically, because it’s woo woo nonsense.

          • Camille d'Ockham@jlai.lu
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            5 days ago

            Can you explain how you reached that conclusion? Since you’re a rigorous thinker, no doubt it would be trivial for you. After all, you’re notably up against Bertrand Russell, one of the writers of the first attempt to ground maths onto rigorous foundations, so since it only took you a few minutes to come to your conclusion, you must have a very powerful mind indeed. Explaining your reasoning would be as easy as breathing is for us the lesser-minded.

            • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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              5 days ago

              Aristotle believed in it too, along with the four humors and classical elements.

              Doesn’t make his thoughts on rhetoric irrelevant, but those also don’t make his mystical solutions to problems he didn’t have the tools to solve correct.

              • Camille d'Ockham@jlai.lu
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                5 days ago

                That someone like Russell subscribed to a form of protopanpsychism is not a proof that his position is right. It does indicate, on the other hand, that it could be a kind of metaphysical position that’s more serious than you believe it is, serious enough that vaguely recognizing a few words in a few sentences on wikipedia is not enough to actually understand it. Not only that but it’s had actual scientific productivity through ergonomics (eg “How the cockpit remembers its speed”), biology (biosemiotics), sociology (actor network theory), and even arguably in physics through Ernst Mach and information theory.

                  • Camille d'Ockham@jlai.lu
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                    5 days ago

                    What are you even responding to? You don’t seem too keen on learning anything honestly. Can we at least agree that saying “panpsychism is woo/mysticism” is a form of ignorance, willful, stubborn ignorance in your case? It’s fine, it’s impossible to learn everything in a single lifetime, but at least let’s be honest.

    • GreatDong3000@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      Do you usually get to see the names of the authors you are reviewing papers of in a prestigious journal?

      • BattleGrown@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        I try to avoid reviews, but the editor is a close friend of mine and i’m an expert of the topic. The manuscript was only missing the date