Many such cases of this, it seems.
There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.
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.
If it doesn't have "science" in the name, it's a science
If it has the suffix "logy", it's a semi-science
If it has the word "science", it's notAnnals 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.
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)
- 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.