3 ms·
That's the thing, most of these are actually pretty bad papers. Their editors were right, it would have been improved with at least a couple of sentences of bac
by shmageggy 9y ago
That's the thing, most of these are actually pretty bad papers. Their editors were right, it would have been improved with at least a couple of sentences of background info or explanation. For example, why is that problem even an interesting one to ask? Should we expect the answer to the titular question to be no? Is there anything particularly novel or interesting about the existence proof they've provided that could maybe be applied to other problems? And so on.
- tgb 9y agoI disagree: the paper is clearly not trying to answer it's titular question, in fact it is justifying why that question is interesting to ask. In particular, it demonstrates that the answer to the obvious other question to ask (with n+2 instead of n+1) is yes and clearly if you altered the question the other direction (with n instead of n+1), then the answer is no. This immediately makes me find the question compelling. Papers motivating problems are, frankly, quite important and should be done more often.
- blauditore 9y agoWell, that way around it makes sense. But what you wrote here could have been written in the paper, so people like me would have understood it as well.
- tgb 9y agoYeah, it's definitely arguable. They clearly were trying to be cute with the paper. Though note that the published version of the paper was slightly longer (but without really enhancing its clarity).