the reaction to the arXiv slop penalty is the gift
"So this means you expect every author to check every citation and make sure that every citation is real and accurate" GOOD LORD WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING IN THERE THEN
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@davidgerard And I don't think these are even necessarily sloppers!
Academia has had a citation issue for a long time. People include citations without verifying them because they're just copying a citation from another paper.
Of course, if this policy also helps fix *that* problem, that's great!
People should be grateful. The policy affects the whole field equally, so everyone can slow down and do the citations right without worrying about losing competitive edge.
@varx these individuals do turn out to be sloppers tho
@davidgerard As a student working on my dissertation (but procrastinating on Mastodon instead): are these people even real?
@kraks i hope these guys thoroughly cure you of any impostor syndrome
@davidgerard They're trying to shut Arxiv down. Pump in slop, discredit, destroy. Bye-bye info.
@davidgerard so, out of interest, what if one of the citations is a genune paper, but *that* paper's citations are slop?
@fishidwardrobe you're asking me? I dunno, write to arXiv and ask them?
@davidgerard i'm just speculating without any expectation of an answer from anyone. sorry if that wasn't clear.
@fishidwardrobe sorry 😄 i just had one guy yesterday furiously demand that i explain precisely how arxiv would deal with his hypothetical edge case and he went off when I said "i dunno, ask them?" and demanded MY answer like, the fuck?
@davidgerard how can you cite something you can’t read or understand?
@davidgerard Seeing the article in the link looks like someone is getting himself into a pickle: If what I am quoting is in a foreign language I just translate it, I don't have the nerve to cite something that I have not read and kinda sends a shiver that someone has the audacity to put in writing some ridiculous arguments to justify the practice.
@davidgerard Back when I was in research, we just copied the citations from other papers 😜
But on a more serious note, I have discovered several assumptions that have been repeated from a single paper without anyone checking what it actually says... some going back as far as the 1800s.
@olivia @davidgerard Adding to the list of obfuscations of women in science: the very first known chemist was a woman from Mesopotamia. But she created a recipe for perfume, so that makes it "not real chemistry", I guess.
@AimeeMaroux @davidgerard Copying citations from other papers is definitely rampant, and yes, that is the problem: often they don't say the things people attribute to them. I've learned a ton by just making sure I've read everything I've cited!
@AimeeMaroux @davidgerard This Jim Miller guy is a tenured economist at Smith with a PhD from Chicago?
@grvsmth @AimeeMaroux these people are the cure for impostor syndrome
@davidgerard What can The Onion do with this? They seem to be literally objecting to the requirement of reading.
@davidgerard "collective punishment is not the answer" how is someone individually being banned for submitting a dubious paper "collective punishment"?
@rnd COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT of the FIELD of MACHINE LEARNING (which lets you slop all over the damn place)
@davidgerard You mean we have to do the shit we should've already been doing?
@davidgerard As a teacher, researcher, and editor, the outrage at the idea that an author needs to—as a bare fucking minimum—actually know that what they are citing EXISTS makes me want to walk into the sea. Then again, what doesn't make me want to walk into the sea these days?
@davidgerard
I've been terrified of academic publishing for my entire career, thinking I'm not good enough. But it turns out the expectations are in the toilet. What a fucking waste of a decade.
@Rhodium103 luca ambrogioni: the cure for academic imposter syndrome
@davidgerard Seems I have to change the "Science works" in my profile to "Science used to work".
@davidgerard Ha, this is like the nonsense about producing X thousand lines of code to make a claim for quality.
Neither "AI", its makers, nor the troglodytes celebrating it understand the point of well considered research and output. Whether that be in code or academic writing.
@davidgerard when you ask llm boosters to mean things instead of just say them
