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The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...
This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth.
Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know.
In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots.
Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while.
In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source.
Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit.
From the article:
>> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.
There is a big difference between something that just turns out to be wrong, and something that is dishonestly or negligently wrong.
For example, AFAIK, Wakefield's paper claiming MMR causes autism was eventually retracted by the editors of The Lancet.
The policy is what you would expect from a journal that is effectively run by volunteers. While the publisher has paid employees, the editorial board in charge of the journal itself seems to consist of volunteers.
When you have a volunteer organization, the impact on people's personal lives is one of the main factors driving decisions. You try to avoid getting involved in somebody else's controversies, as the impact is almost always negative.
From that perspective, the policy seems clear. The authors are responsible for their papers. If someone else claims that a paper should be corrected, they are free to write a paper of their own. That way no volunteer has to take responsibility for someone else's claims.
They could at least send the paper with the reported problems out to a new set of referees.
And just as they decided to take responsibility for publishing, they can take responsibility after a similar review for retraction (or issuing an errata or whatever fancy way they want to signal the result of the process).
> Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide.
Medicine never figured this out. The medical community put Semmelweis in a lunatic asylum, because physicians' ego could not accept the fact that their unclean hands were causing harm to patients. Semmelweis' modern peers continue to let millions of patients die preventable deaths due to errors in medical decisionmaking, and ego plus institutional inertia prevents serious measures against it (most notably fatigue management).
Academia is not any better though. There was the recent high-profile retraction of a publication on opioid exposure via human breastmilk which was widely cited and the basis for many child custody decisions: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/03/03/canadian-pediatric-so...
Semmelweis died approximately 100 years before the thalidomide scandal so not sure what that is supposed to prove…
(other than being a favorite go-to of numerous quacks and charlatans who insist that modern medicine is similarly persecuting them).
As somebody who has spent a bit of time in academia, I have often been slightly alarmed by some of the research (and opinon) that comes out of business schools. One thing is that it is often unsubstantiated and just plain wrong, another is that it often seems like the authors kind of know it, almost as if they are intentionally pandering to a lowbrow/midwit audience, and they expect everybody else to be in on the game. Its mystifying.
I had the privilege last night of attending a lecture given by Prof Sir John Kay (Obliquity, Radical Uncertainty, etc). He was scathing on two points: 1) the way the world changed in the 1970s from management as responsibility to leadership as prize, and 2) the abject failure of business schools to develop a serious body of knowledge. Taken together, business schools have become cash cows for universities while still being held in disdain by academia. This from the first dean of Oxford's Said Business School.
There was tremendous resistance to setting up that school both because of where the money came from but more so because of the possibility that the school would not actually be academic but more 'professional' instead. I can't comment on the former as it seems mostly just xenophobic but maybe there are other angles there. The latter is definitely a concern though.
Not xenophobic. Oxford happily takes money from people from anywhere all the time. It might be things such as his involvement in the Al Yamamah arms deal.
Not at all limited to business schools
Business school writing frequently smells like Post hoc rationalisation to me (with some confirmation bias mixed in).
I took one class in the business department while I was in university and it felt like basically "business" anthropology without any of the reflection that the field of anthropology has done about its own research and the limits/biases of their claims.
The "scholarly" aspect and the standards were comical compared to other fields (even compared to some standards in other fields that I consider pretty suspect).
Some years ago, my institution (primarily a teaching college) decided it needed an additional accreditation. The organization they went with requires faculty to publish. Including our undergrad business faculty.
We all know that "publish or perish" is stupid. The premier example of Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Why can't our highly paid administration understand this?
I think a more useful version of the law is
"Any good measure requires a good person."
For example, a good measure of research is to have an intelligent faculty member or members read it and decide if it's good. Converting it to a mechanical calculation is fundamentally bad.
They were pressured from somewhere to show results. They had to invent a metric to be able to prove they make results. It was easier to ask the neighbour what they are measuring, than to think it through and form a synthesis. If it works for the Jones', it'll work for us.
What's undergrad business faculty? The people who teach undergrads or undergrad TAs?
> their policies allow only authors to request corrections
Say what now?
So the only way to get a correction for a paper is if the author is willing to publicly admit they messed up? Something that an unethical researcher is very unlikely to do.
I thought the proper way to correct questionable results is to conduct and publish a follow-up study that independently looks at the same question with better data and better methodology. And wait until multiple independent teams have done the same. And then write a meta-analysis on the emerging pool of independent papers.
That's how scientific consent is normally formed, at least in rigorous disciplines like experimental physics or medicine. A single paper in the end is going to be just a single data point in any such meta-analysis study.
It depends on whether the paper is simply wrong for some reason, or if there is either fraud or a fundamental mistake in the procedure. But in general you're right, retractions are not the way to handle most scientific disputes.
Your point about consensus unfortunately doesn't quite work in cases like this were the people using the paper are not scientists. They're not continuing work in the same area, people are using this paper to support their arguments.
I'm very confused because there are 2 Andrews, the author in the blog post only states "Andrew", and by the list of Authors the author seems to be Andrew Gelman, but the slug in the first link is "aking", and then there is also Andrew King, lol.
Andrew King seems to be the person who published the original exposé of the paper:
> The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King [...]
Comment was deleted :(
Hey, don't take kids joy! The paper was cited thousands of times, lots of uni students built their early career using it!
Are there any factual allegations on that page? All I could find was "the method described in the paper is not the method the authors actually used", without any elaboration.
I'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."
Management Studies is the top management journal, it is highly regarded and would count as fairly prestigious in e.g. tenure applications.
There is a replication study of the Andrew Kling who made the claim of false claims first, I guess there is more info there
oh how I'd love to see a gitlab GitHub like infrastructure and culture for scientific publication. let them have the repo private/authors and reviewers only until publication.
but all flaws are issues, later reported issues are right next to the paper, heck there could even badges for publication and review status...
a woman may dream...
There is: https://osf.io/
Somewhat unrelated but relevant thought: from software engineering experience in large orgs, correction of any issue rarely worth any effort. AI will drive commiting more and more papers with less and less review. The review takes effort, too much in the age of easy generation.
With this, science will probably lose trust even more in the coming years.
Brandolini's Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is the adage for our age:
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
I’m cautiously optimistic that LLMs have a role in addressing that asymmetry to the side of good faith actors.
Gish galloping bad faith trolls aren’t new. LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But now, We Have The Technology, refuting a pile of poo semi-accurately should be cheap (or at least getting cheaper).
I don’t need an LLM on my phone that can do tax law in Georgia the country. But an “AI Assistant” that could highlight logical fallacies, shifting goalposts, non-responsive dialog, rhetorical obfuscations, etc, would be useful online, at the bar, and work (ie when HR tries to “HR” you, but also is lying and obfuscating about it).
We already have models and people that bullshit. Maybe refutation models are the cure… Chinese needle snakes to catch the lizards, Gorillas to catch the snakes…
This is a horrendous take. The only thing this is going to do / is already doing is increasing people's creation of their own reality bubble. LLMs are not some source of objective truth, they will inevitability lean towards reinforcing either (1) prompter's position, (2) the model trainer's position, or (3) the statistically average position, none of which are guaranteed to be logically correct. But people do take them as objective truth, so now we have a bunch of fucking morons going around saying "see, ChatGPT says so, I'm right!".
> LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective.
But does take longer to disprove.
I once copy pasted a spam email in https://www.bullshitremover.com/ and it simply returned "bullshit".
“Professionals” in traffic engineering still religiously cling to “standards” that are largely based on BS served up by auto companies pre 1940.
Many such cases of this, it seems.
At least your traffic engineers set standards. In Taiwan often the standards come straight from the legislative yuan, aka just vibes laws from people who are driven around in private cars their whole lives.
This is just for reference: last time someone tried to address this issue, they found that no one was willing to vote for them again...
Don’t worry, we’re getting there. They just started dismantling what they refer to as the “administrative state”, but which largely deferred substantial questions requiring skill and non-partisan judgement to their respective experts. It was never perfect, nor free from partisan and/or economic concerns, but the replacement appears to be self-interested narcissists and sycophants and their personal fiefdoms, with precious little space for competence, logic, or integrity.
At least now the masks (and Musks) are off.
It was never between the left and the right or any other false dichotomies, but always between the Epstein-class and the actual human beings.
The question now is that do the normal people realize and act on the fact that the elevator to Epstein class was never working. Or even better, they don't want to become the zillionaire class husk of a human.
You say it's not left v. right, but it sure sounds like you think the right is what's causing inequality. Which I agree with.
The current fight is within the Eppstein class (both right and left elites), between the old money (Wall Street) and new money (techno-fascists/feudalists of Silicon Valley).
The rabble is just taken for the ride, fooled by left vs right show and exploited along the way.
I consider "this" right to be moral in a different way.
Now the right all around the world is hijacked by narcissistic greed that punishes any voicing of conservative moral.
In the US some republicans are daring to challenge the extreme narcissistic greed and a lot more are thinking about this privately.
I also mentioned the other dichotomies and perhaps the "right" could be hopelessness and the the "left" false hope.
As in "no point trying to curb the emissions or addressing any social causes, because the zillionaires choke hold of the planet" vs. the "eternal green growth and economy will save us and make us rich".
The Trump humangod class is not the right IMO.
I believe that power (via money or absolute power) corrupts and thus me must find a way to prevent individuals from becoming human-gods.
The left (without the "") pretends to know this but ends up being corrupted anyway and the right (the one that has some moral and spine left) seems to believe that they will not be corrupted by power.
Hope that explains it a bit better.
You're still making a leftist argument here, even if you end up dismissing the left as "corrupt" without pointing to anything specific.
Maybe you have some personal difficulty identifying with the left? You're not wrong in your characterizations, you just seem to be using different labels to me.
Maybe this is a US thing? Because there barely is a left wing in US politics. Democrats are right wing, for one.
I'm from Finland and more aligned to the left I guess.
I'm trying to distance myself from though as I'm currently seeing everything as merely corrupt (by power) elite vs. normal people.
But yes, perhaps the thing I'm looking after is something like the real equality side, which to me doesn't seem to exist as even the left here in Finland seems to disregard the laws of physics and nature in terms of the impossible eternal growth.
What a coincidence, I'm also Finnish.
Vas. definitely has degrowth as a part of their platform, and is often speaking against eternal growth and trying to get climate laws passed. They're only one party, and the last govt's more left-leaning SD was the best partner they could have had here, but Kesk. dragged down their efforts. Of course now, with Antti Lindtman, we have a right-wing SD, I agree that they aren't very clear on policy, and are fine with sitting around waiting to win the election on the current govt's failures.
What I'm trying to say is that I don't recognize your picture of the left within Finland. Which to be clear is something like Vas. + some parts of SD (Mäkynen, Kiuru e.g.).
Are you an American? It would help me frame my response better to know. I assume yes for now, apologies if not.
> The Trump humangod class is not the right IMO.
Basically the problem with American education is that they started using the wrong words to describe things. American libertarians are right wing and not anarchists, American liberals are right wing, American right wingers are religious ethno-fascists, and American "communists" are neoliberals. Or democratic socialists. Or just protestors.
Trump is absolutely on the Right Wing of politics, specifically he's a populist fascist: obsession with masculinity, hearkening to the culture of a mythical "before times," referencing national strength coming from ethnic purity, huge emphasis on marketing over policy, support for centralization of power around a dictator, militarism, and suppression of opposition through force. Verbatim fascist ideals, he's just not as powerful (yet) as previous fascist leaders.
Fascist ideology is pretty much as far-right you can get, if we use useful definitions of "left wing" and "right wing." Anarchism would be as far-left as you can get, for comparison.
Regarding the current discussion, those who are making critiques of a narcissistic greed class overriding morality and buying politics, are making, even if unintentionally, a leftist, anti-capitalist critique. A right-wing critique of the current USA government wouldn't be a class-analysis (Marxist analysis) like you did in your previous comment comparing "Epstein-class" (ultra wealthy) and "actual human beings" (the working class).
A right wing critique would be more along the lines of: the government is incompetent, it's putting the needs of a few individuals above those of the state, it's not cracking down hard enough on leftist opposition, it should jail all opposition leaders, it should pass apartheid laws against members of the non-chosen ethnic group.
So basically, if your issue with the USA is that power can be purchased with money, welcome to the Left, I promise we're not all as cringe as the ones you've seen on Twitter. Just kidding, it's perfectly possible to make leftist critiques without being a leftist, of course. You see American liberals do it all the time when they make right-wing critiques of the Left, in e.g. their opposition to anti-fascist and anti-capitalist elements of the left.
> The left (without the "") pretends to know this but ends up being corrupted anyway
Yes, absolutely, this is often a critique anarchists make of revolutionary communists. I think one American politician that will be very interesting to pay attention to for the next decade is Zohran Mamdani. He's already significantly softened his stance on Israel, I'm curious how far away from his original values he'll move.
Yup, I'm still thinking that also the right has had some moral foundations and even some classical Christian values before, but just like Mamdani has centraled already the right has been Republican-Jesused from the classical Jesus (not that they ever were 100% that).
But the both show (at least to me) the corruption by power thus compromising. Either consciously or un.
I'm seeing as the natural solution, something that has been a bit field tested here in Finland, that we start the discussion on what is the safe limit for individual power or money before the risk of corruption. After the latest year almost everyone agrees that this is a conversation we must have to stand a chance.
> the right is what's causing inequality
If people have rights, then they are unequal. If they have no rights, they are equal.
There's a simple rule of thumb that seems obvious to me but is widely ignored: we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values- or between what is and what we think should be. Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values, which makes any coincidence between the two extremely suspicious.
>Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values...
what? that's nonsense. Not everybody's values are the same, for one thing. Especially as society has become more and more international.
You should be equally skeptical of any result until proper evidence is presented and verified. Values should have no bearing either way on empirical truth-claims.
Exactly, you're saying the exact same thing that I am. "Orthogonal" means independent, unrelated. This is why coincidence is very suspicious, because it's statistically very improbable.
you also said
>we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values
And I'm saying that's silly because you should hold all claims in equal skepticism. Just because something contains an ideological basis does not, in itself, make it more or less correct.
The consequences here don’t seem all that bad, it’s just a silly management fad. By contrast, “Growth in a Time of Debt” from Reinhardt and Rogoff steered multiple national governments into pointless self-destructive and immiserating austerity, despite being equally bunk, and none of the authors ever saw any consequences for that either. You can’t even blame that one on “management science”, it was a straight macroeconomics paper.
There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.
So, I was interested in this statement, and looked into it barely, and on one side, its conclusions were replicated in a number of other papers[1] (despite the headlines, three years after its publication, of a simple calculation error)[2]. I'll state that neither of these points are a slam-dunk if you're a member of one political side or another. If you're a believer in austerity, you'll look at the corroborating studies; if you think that was a bad policy choice, you can argue that they're all junk science, pushed out by supporters of the status quo.
I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here.
[1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro...
That paper wasn’t even peer reviewed. If I remember it correctly it was published in the AER Papers and Proceedings.
Silly management fads waste huge amounts of time and resources and generate all manner of perverse incentives. They entrench institutional mediocrity as much as anything.
political? what about business? If junk science can help a huge market to keep selling, I think it will be the biggest blocker.
> pointless
I'm sure it benefitted some people.
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.
Graduate students! Hah! ML researchers can only hope their papers at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPs are reviewed by graduate students!
You had grad students? Ha, we would'a killed for grad students. Our work was reviewed by two trained pigeons and a dead salmon. And we liked it!
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.
"For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to [...]including practices such as peer review"
Nitpick: peer review as we know it is only about fifty years old.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&...
Status quo changes at the speed of snail.
Or by trillions - the peer review process will no doubt continue, its continued importance maybe in question.
Usually when people die and vacate their seats of power in society.
> 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.
> good stuff rejected, are you sure that's true
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...
Personally, I'm shocked it went from submission to publication 5 weeks! I didn't think that was possible.
I mean at a top or middle ranked journal. There are tons of predatory journals that will publish anything
Ooops, sorry... I cannot edit the URL in the submission. I should have checked.
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.
You can always send a short polite email to hn@ycombinator.com with corrections you can't make yourself
I did, thanks for the suggestion.
> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected
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.
Katalin Karikó and her work on mRNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3
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.
Comment was deleted :(
Management Science, how am I not surprised? They have the worst rep of any Econ/Econ adjacent field for good reason.
Management, Political, Economic, Social Sciences are not sciences.
I see all the non-STEM losers are upset.
Social sciences definitely are.
No.
It's social studies, not science.
Social studies is a school subject, that's irrelevant.
You really think sociology is not a science then? Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. They have to, because physical sciences deal with deterministic objects, while social sciences deal with nondeterministic subjects.
>Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do.
Whilst I agree that can be a science the amount of contradicting bs, ideologically driven stuff i've seen come out of one such department and their replication crisis kind of undercut their credibility on that front for me.
There's been similar cases in physical sciences. E.g. all the room temperature superconductor stuff a few years back, Avi Loeb claiming that an object hurtling thorugh the solar system was alien technology.
There's also more fraud in medicine or health sciences.
You make some very handwavy claims about ideology, do you mean economy by this? It's the most clearly politicized of the social sciences, qnd the one that has been most funded by political actors. This I can concede. But don't throw sociology under the bus just because economy has a bad rap.
So we're firmly in the era of few people caring about few things now aren't we.
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).
Computer science is very close to math and should be even easier to verify, 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 the physics-adjacent world of materials science, a lot of announcements related to metamaterials and nanotech are suspect.
I would point out that most products are useless, and either fail or replace other products which weren't any worse. None of which prevented me from cashing my paychecks for the first half of my career when I worked in private industry.
Most scientific research represents about the same amount of improvement over the state of the art as the shitty web app or whatever that you're working on right now. It's not zero, but very few are going to be groundbreaking. And since the rules are that we all have to publish papers[*], the scientific literature (at least in my field, CS) looks less like a carefully curated library of works by geniuses, and more like an Amazon or Etsy marketplace of ideas, where most are crappy.
[* just like software engineers have to write code, even if the product ends up being shitty or ultimately gets canceled]
Neither of us are going to be changing how the system works, so my advice is to deal with it.
Hey I have also called research a marketplace for ideas before! cool.
There are dubious results published in every subject, including math and physics (whether theoretical or experimental). The difference is that such results are less likely to be widely cited and accepted by the field. For math and theoretical physics, the reader can (assuming sufficient knowledge and skill) verify the result themselves, so if your proof is incorrect or not rigorous enough, you won't get cited. For experimental physics, it is more common for different teams to reproduce a result, or verify a result using a different method, so papers aren't usually widely cited unless they have been independently verified. Part of that is cultural, part of that is attempting to reproduce results is relatively straightforward compared to say experiments involving human subjects, and part if is because results are usually quantitative, so "we did the same thing as paper X, but with more precision" is still interesting enough to be published.
Great take. I have seen the discussion on this often gets turned into a hard vs soft science debate where in actuality it's just simply about money.
I track these across all fields. It’s money and prestige and arrogance and ignorance and “keep my job” and more
[dead]
> Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
I used to work for the leading statistical expert witness in the country. Whenever I read something like this:
> The empirical strategy in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) rests on a demanding requirement: the “treated” and “control” firms must be so closely matched that which firm is treated is essentially random. The authors appear to recognize this, reporting that they used very strict matching criteria “to ensure that none of the matched pairs is materially different.”
I just assume they kept trying different "very strict matching criteria" until they got the matches they wanted. Which is basically what we did all day to support our client (usually big auto or big tobacco). We never presented any of the detrimental analyses to our boss, so he couldn't testify about them on the stand even if asked.
Although in this case it sounds like the authors couldn't even do that, and just fudged the data instead.
There's plenty of results in math and physics that are true, in the sense that the math checks out, but are useless, in the sense that the authors claim they've made a breakthrough, but actually they've just tweaked a few parameters of an existing unverified theory and constructed a new unverified theory. (If you've ever read a news headline like "physicists now believe reality may actually have 400 dimensions!", they were probably citing one of these papers.)
There are also plenty of physics papers where, the math actually just doesn't check out at all. But those, at least, rarely make it into headlines or reputable journals.
Observing, measuring, but also repeatability and ground truth.
Math (and theoretical adjacents like TCS) claim not to make any fundamental claims about the actual world (compared to 17th century philosopher-mathematicians like Leibniz), and physics studies the basest of, well, physical phenomenon.
I don't even know how you would begin actually rigorously studying sociology unless you could start simulating real humans in a vat, or you inject everybody with neuralink. (but that already selects for a type of society, and probably not a good one...)
To be clear, I don't think all sociological observations are bad. However, I tend to heavily disregard "mathematical sociological studies" in favor of just... hearing perspectives. New ones and unconventional ones especially, as in a domain where a lot of theories "seem legit", I want to just hear very specific new ways of thinking that I didn't think about before. I find that to be a pretty good heuristic for finding value, if the verification process itself is broken.
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.
Quantum physics, due to its own "difficulty of observing and measuring", has its fair share of nonsense too
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 notAstrology thanks you for your service.
Philosophers rejoice.
Oh I'm sure the grifters will find ways in. The other disciplines may have provided a "moat" for the past few decades, but it won't last forever.
Stop buying from/submitting to discredited publishers.
Some problems with that: "discredited" isn't a binary; memes (in the original sense) from papers circulate easily even if nobody pays the publishers (the problem is arguably even worse, because people will read abstracts for free and distort the claims further); there might not be higher quality alternatives.
Two out of three authors from Harvard Business School. The place is practically a horseshit factory.
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Stopped reading not long after noticing the title of the paper in question.
The very hypothesis is laughable. It is completely irrelevant if the hypothesis is supported or not.
That paper is like flypaper for anyone seeking affirmation of sustainability policies.
I could write a paper tomorrow claiming that [insert conspiracy theory here] is absolutely true and why Big [insert hated industry here] doesn't want you to know the truth and it would be cited until the earth crashes into the sun.
It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation.
I could write a paper about that but wouldn't hold my breath on getting any cites.
> It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation.
But... that's exactly what Big Academia doesn't want you to know.
the hypothesis seems pretty important and interesting, even if hard to study (and hard to classify companies, and sustainability, way too many degrees of freedom, so it would need preregistration, etc)
Previously on HN, the referenced paper:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151
(2 months ago, 374 comments)
What does it matter that the claims are "false" if claiming them as the truth results in encouraging the society we wish to exist? That paper is a cornerstone of sustainability initiatives, if you retract it, you might as well set the whole Earth on fire. To hell with integrity, I say, it's time to do some good for the world!
Peer reviews need to be more transparent and accountable. Otherwise, we are sure to lose to the misinformation war that is rapidly reaching its peak, thanks but no thanks to AI.
How would you do that? One reason peer reviews are usually anonymous is to prevent retribution (ex. rejecting someone's paper, because they rejected yours). Not that it is perfect at doing that, but if you make it more transparent, you may trade one problem for another.
There's this 'criterion of embarrassment' / 'cui bono' sort of standard[0] that really helps judge these things. So many people perform science that seems to always confirm the positions they've held. All the "society is terrible today" people like to quote LendingClub's "70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" without knowing it's LendingClub content marketing. The snail darter guy happened to find a novel species that is endangered and genetically identical to a non-endangered one just in the place where he was trying to get a dam banned. The sustainability guys find that companies that focus on sustainability do better. The diversity guys find that companies that focus on diversity do better. A scientist who gets a grant from Philip Morris finds that cigarettes aren't bad for you.
It reminds me of something my dad said while watching Generation Kill - a TV show adapted from the written work of an embedded journalist in Iraq. The show, made by Americans, depicts the US armed forces as ramified through with bumbling fools seeking glory with a few competent people in there. So we finish watching the series and my dad says "Only the Americans would make a show like this" and it's somewhat[1] true. I think perhaps that being able to create a machine that tells you the truth is crucial to success and I feel that the US's peak period as unipolar hegemon (Gulf War I to the end of Obama I) this was more the case than it is today, though this is more of a feeling than anything I have verified.
It also reminds me of an old sort of censorship, one which George Orwell talks about in regards to Animal Farm[2] - a book that was criticized because it perhaps harmed the greater cause of communism. There's too much to quote in his essay because I find the whole thing worthy of reading, but here's one bit:
> Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest.
...
> Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ʻYesʼ. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ʻHow about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?ʼ, and the answer more often than not will be ʻNoʼ. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses.
There is even today an orthodoxy of sorts and if you were to contradict it, it is considered sinful to say so. I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people. Could such a thing be published if it were true? People often say "what are you going to do with that information?" and somehow I don't share that view that all science must necessarily immediately deliver applied benefit. Knowing is good for its own sake. Truth is good for its own sake. Or at least that's what I believe.
I suppose I'll only know through the period of my own life whether this belief is adaptive. Who knows, a present or future power might be one formed entirely through inaccurate data and information[3], and we might be as Orks and painting things red might make them faster because we believe it so in sufficient numbers.
0: Obviously there are limits. Eli Lilly benefits from GLP-1RA drugs working well but they do in fact work well.
1: Others obviously also make fun of themselves, but something like In The Loop parodies specific people more than the whole machine and its participants. Generation Kill feels much more real a depiction of large organizations and their incentive mechanisms - especially how they grind forward and get the outcomes they want despite everything else. Perhaps my least favourite parts were the emotional-breakdown bits at the end, which I've since found out that the participants themselves said were invented for TV.
2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm
3: Open societies like ours have the problem that external misdirection leaks into internal data but perhaps with sufficient computerization we can keep separate truth and propaganda within the structure of government
On the study of management in the military, what does West Point think of HBS, and v.v.? (for example, were the fictitious body counts in the Vietnam War comparable/earlier/later than civilian management doing dubious things with metrics/OKRs?)
Alternatively, what is the most heterodox institute studying management, esp. in the military?
> I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people
This is an interesting thought experiment.
I'd like to think that if such a thing was discovered, we would investigate why this is the case. I'd like to believe that we wouldn't just accept this as some kind of de-facto truth, and start treating Indians as lesser
I'm an idealist I guess though
disheartening
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cleaned up url: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/false-clai...
(if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)
dang could you change the link
hn doesn't have tags; email hn@ycombinator.com (which is what the submitter did)
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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?
The golden age of western civilisation was n - 5 years ago, where n is the year the speaker got their first job.
What do you mean when was it again? I don't understand your questions or how they relate to what I wrote.
They are insinuating that the consensus you're talking about never existed as you have described it.
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.
Nobody is looking at that, they're watching TikTok and ReelShorts
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.
Right, the mechanism you mentioned, reason, never existed. That's how I read their comment anyways.
Sorry for being flippant. My analysis is that the mix of reason or emotions is unchanged over time. Take the case of this management science paper. What is irrational about defending a bad paper you wrote when it brings you all the accolades and benefits Andrew has described? The authors' personal goals aren't aligned with the public's goals of getting good science. That's not a failure of reason. Maybe it's selfish. That's different.
That's great, I'd love to see this analysis of yours.
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That's really root cause in everything, isn't 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.
>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.
Fair point! Makes complete sense.
But I wouldn't exactly call "professionals trying to make high brow media" exclusive alternative to Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok.
A lot of the propaganda (and sane washing) is coming from mass media, too. I feel like the only "legit" media outlets are like Reuters, AP, and some international ones, I guess.
Post-truth ... and it's gonna get worse.
Biases will always be endemic to any human system.
Excellent summary, as unfortunate as it is.
Oh that's not new.
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.
> Oh that's not new.
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.
60-70% for a politician or political position is high. For believing in reality it's low.
If you asked "Do cigarettes contribute to lung cancer", you'd expect 95%+. Our evidence for climate change is on-par with that, and yet the rich have run a wildly successful campaign to cast doubt on it for years.
If people really appreciated the gravity of it, we would not have trump, a demonstrably anti-climate president who has rolled back green policies and slowed decarbonization, and even ran on it. Apparently spiting the "other side" is more important than our planet's long term habitability.
We used to burn women to death because they were accused of being witches. I don't think this was because there was a lot of reason and evidence when they were doing this.
I don't think it's unique to the people of today that people in groups do dumb emotional shit. That's kind of the point of Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger".
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