6 ms·

What a clever and, dare I say it, fantastically useful experiment! So much less harm than even "door knob twisting" type explorations - no, this was using publ

What a clever and, dare I say it, fantastically useful experiment! So much less harm than even "door knob twisting" type explorations - no, this was using published works and pretty much running them through a process to verify or not verify accuracy. Unsolicited? So what! As a practiced writer I make unsolicited judgments on language usage all the time. Are these people that completely write from their own minds and don't use a spell check or grammar check program of any sort before sending their material for editorial review? I'd strongly doubt it, because it's a tool to make communication more accurate. Math and formulas having a similar procedural check sounds quite constructive to me. It's not bullying to point out errors; it's bullying to use the existence of errors to belittle or insult a person. I don't see that happening here. Sure, it's a little sterile or "cold" in this fashion, but I think that's for the best if such a process / tool can gain acceptance. It just spits out results and I think that's all it should do. Neat to read about.

SerLava 10y ago
Certainly not bullying. It's actually shocking to me that these studies could have been published without running a similar check on all of the arithmetic. The technology to automate this has been possible for decades.
- dclowd9901 10y ago
  Right. To my mind, this level of scrutiny is little different than a linter or static analyzer for a programming language.
hueving 10y ago
Putting grammar on the same level as this is wrong. Poor grammar and spelling doesn't frequently change the entire results of a paper. Math errors though can easily be the difference between significance and insignificance, changing the entire set of conclusions that can be drawn from the paper.
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  Uh, no, poor grammar or words or phrases used improperly can genuinely have cascade / domino effects. Brush up on "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" if you wish to counter-balance your math-centric logic notions with how similar principles apply in written language. English is, without question, one of the more tricky (re: confusing) mutts of linguistics.
  - hueving 10y ago
    Can you point me to a published paper where the entire meaning changed because of poor grammar?
    - mcbits 10y ago
      I don't have an example from a published academic paper, but from the linked article: > the odds are this will stoke real hostility for those who are already dubious about what has been termed 'bullying' and so on by people interested in reproducibility. I'm pretty sure this was intended to be read as [has been termed] ['bullying' and so on by people interested in reproducibility]. But it could also be read as [has been termed 'bullying' and so on] [by people interested in reproducibility]. Ambiguous wording like this could easily be overlooked in review, especially if the misinterpretation agrees with what the reader was already expecting.
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > English is, without question, one of the more tricky (re: confusing) mutts of linguistics. I am aware of two theories in linguistics about the complexity of languages: 1. All human languages are equally complex, presumably for some fundamental reason. 2. Some languages are more complex than others. Specifically, languages with a long history of being spoken only within isolated communities are more complex, and languages that have had a wave of non-native adults learn to speak them get simplified as that happens. English is one of the go-to examples for simplicity in languages that have been learned by many adults; the others I'm aware of are Swahili (the trade language for north/east Africa), Mandarin Chinese (the cross-regional language for China), and (in reverse) Latin (the cross-regional language for western Europe -- a lot of grammatical features of Latin get lost as the Romance languages develop from it; you might wonder why Greek still has noun cases when the romance languages lost them). I'm not aware of any theory that would suggest English is more tricky than other langauges.
cushychicken 10y ago
I think "bullying" is a reductive term for what's actually happening. I think the point trying to be conveyed is that there is a certain decline in the author's personal status when they get holes punched in their publications.
- zerocrates 10y ago
  Sounds like a nice incentive to double-check before publishing.
  - cushychicken 10y ago
    I mean, it's open source software, right? Nothing stopping you from downloading it and running before publishing. I view that as a pretty solid way to make the science better all by itself.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  As it should be, when you publish a stupid error that can substantially alter your conclusions.
  - cushychicken 10y ago
    I'm not sure that's the healthiest attitude. The pursuit here is knowledge, not prestige. Getting personal doesn't do anything for the higher goal. I read once that the attitude in NASA over Space Shuttle code was very focused not on who wrote the bug, but how to fix the bug. The thought was that who caused the failure was not nearly as important as preventing the failure, as "failure" in that context generally meant loss of human life.
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      Of course it turned out that NASA's two biggest failures were human/cultural, and which led to the loss of two shuttles. Besides, as you say it's not about prestige, it's about knowledge, and if you're publishing something with basic math errors, it leads to questions about whether you'd know "knowledge" if it bit you.

SerLava 10y ago

Certainly not bullying. It's actually shocking to me that these studies could have been published without running a similar check on all of the arithmetic. The technology to automate this has been possible for decades.

dclowd9901 10y ago
Right. To my mind, this level of scrutiny is little different than a linter or static analyzer for a programming language.

hueving 10y ago

Putting grammar on the same level as this is wrong. Poor grammar and spelling doesn't frequently change the entire results of a paper. Math errors though can easily be the difference between significance and insignificance, changing the entire set of conclusions that can be drawn from the paper.

6stringmerc 10y ago
Uh, no, poor grammar or words or phrases used improperly can genuinely have cascade / domino effects. Brush up on "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" if you wish to counter-balance your math-centric logic notions with how similar principles apply in written language. English is, without question, one of the more tricky (re: confusing) mutts of linguistics.
- hueving 10y ago
  Can you point me to a published paper where the entire meaning changed because of poor grammar?
  - mcbits 10y ago
    I don't have an example from a published academic paper, but from the linked article: > the odds are this will stoke real hostility for those who are already dubious about what has been termed 'bullying' and so on by people interested in reproducibility. I'm pretty sure this was intended to be read as [has been termed] ['bullying' and so on by people interested in reproducibility]. But it could also be read as [has been termed 'bullying' and so on] [by people interested in reproducibility]. Ambiguous wording like this could easily be overlooked in review, especially if the misinterpretation agrees with what the reader was already expecting.
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > English is, without question, one of the more tricky (re: confusing) mutts of linguistics. I am aware of two theories in linguistics about the complexity of languages: 1. All human languages are equally complex, presumably for some fundamental reason. 2. Some languages are more complex than others. Specifically, languages with a long history of being spoken only within isolated communities are more complex, and languages that have had a wave of non-native adults learn to speak them get simplified as that happens. English is one of the go-to examples for simplicity in languages that have been learned by many adults; the others I'm aware of are Swahili (the trade language for north/east Africa), Mandarin Chinese (the cross-regional language for China), and (in reverse) Latin (the cross-regional language for western Europe -- a lot of grammatical features of Latin get lost as the Romance languages develop from it; you might wonder why Greek still has noun cases when the romance languages lost them). I'm not aware of any theory that would suggest English is more tricky than other langauges.

cushychicken 10y ago

I think "bullying" is a reductive term for what's actually happening. I think the point trying to be conveyed is that there is a certain decline in the author's personal status when they get holes punched in their publications.

zerocrates 10y ago
Sounds like a nice incentive to double-check before publishing.
- cushychicken 10y ago
  I mean, it's open source software, right? Nothing stopping you from downloading it and running before publishing. I view that as a pretty solid way to make the science better all by itself.
M_Grey 10y ago
As it should be, when you publish a stupid error that can substantially alter your conclusions.
- cushychicken 10y ago
  I'm not sure that's the healthiest attitude. The pursuit here is knowledge, not prestige. Getting personal doesn't do anything for the higher goal. I read once that the attitude in NASA over Space Shuttle code was very focused not on who wrote the bug, but how to fix the bug. The thought was that who caused the failure was not nearly as important as preventing the failure, as "failure" in that context generally meant loss of human life.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    Of course it turned out that NASA's two biggest failures were human/cultural, and which led to the loss of two shuttles. Besides, as you say it's not about prestige, it's about knowledge, and if you're publishing something with basic math errors, it leads to questions about whether you'd know "knowledge" if it bit you.