6 ms·

You could publish notes in rough form and clean them up on demand.

rspeer 10y ago
Publishing poorly-written crap will make you look worse than publishing nothing at all. There's already a terrible stigma around negative results. Grant committees and tenure committees would subconsciously like to believe that you are not a scientist who need to test hypotheses, but a clairvoyant superhero who only has correct hypotheses. Yes, this is ridiculous and anti-scientific.
- mtdewcmu 10y ago
  Everyone would have to agree to publish their rough notes (on the web). If this was the norm, then no one would be singled out for criticism. Of course, norms would have to change.
  - rspeer 10y ago
    > Of course, norms would have to change. Sure. How? Changing the norms of academia will take a generation, and would require some actual incentive to change them in the correct direction.
    - mtdewcmu 10y ago
      The article is calling for demanding more effort to get a paper published. That would be a change of norms. There's no real way to solve the reproducibility problem without changing norms. Publishing notes seems easiest. It would be like "open source" research.
- arthur_pryor 10y ago
  > There's already a terrible stigma around negative results. Grant committees and tenure committees would subconsciously like to believe that you are not a scientist who need to test hypotheses, but a clairvoyant superhero who only has correct hypotheses. Yes, this is ridiculous and anti-scientific. this is exactly why an archive of these sorts of results is necessary. so that we can see that this is part of the process, de-stigmatize it, and use those findings to make more progress and design better experiments to gain further insight into the world. replication and null results are an important part of the scientific process and building up our overall store of knowledge. it can't all be sexy groundbreaking proofs of new hypotheses.

Publishing poorly-written crap will make you look worse than publishing nothing at all. There's already a terrible stigma around negative results. Grant committees and tenure committees would subconsciously like to believe that you are not a scientist who need to test hypotheses, but a clairvoyant superhero who only has correct hypotheses. Yes, this is ridiculous and anti-scientific.

mtdewcmu 10y ago
Everyone would have to agree to publish their rough notes (on the web). If this was the norm, then no one would be singled out for criticism. Of course, norms would have to change.
- rspeer 10y ago
  > Of course, norms would have to change. Sure. How? Changing the norms of academia will take a generation, and would require some actual incentive to change them in the correct direction.
  - mtdewcmu 10y ago
    The article is calling for demanding more effort to get a paper published. That would be a change of norms. There's no real way to solve the reproducibility problem without changing norms. Publishing notes seems easiest. It would be like "open source" research.
arthur_pryor 10y ago
> There's already a terrible stigma around negative results. Grant committees and tenure committees would subconsciously like to believe that you are not a scientist who need to test hypotheses, but a clairvoyant superhero who only has correct hypotheses. Yes, this is ridiculous and anti-scientific. this is exactly why an archive of these sorts of results is necessary. so that we can see that this is part of the process, de-stigmatize it, and use those findings to make more progress and design better experiments to gain further insight into the world. replication and null results are an important part of the scientific process and building up our overall store of knowledge. it can't all be sexy groundbreaking proofs of new hypotheses.