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Exactly! My troll-sense was tingling when reading the original article, so I was skeptic about the content claims of the original article. But the author had a

Exactly! My troll-sense was tingling when reading the original article, so I was skeptic about the content claims of the original article. But the author had a good point: the NYJM screwed up by not publishing a retraction. A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being persecuted for their beliefs.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago
"...A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being persecuted for their beliefs..." Or simply imagine so, given a lack of information. I'm still trying to sort this out. So this entire thing boils down to "Not-so-good pop-math piece is hated by some. It is first accepted by a journal, then rejected without comment, leading the authors to believe it was a deliberate campaign that led to their rejection, not the quality of their work"? And the proof that it was a quality issue that caused it to be pulled? I'm thinking we still don't know. All I know from reading this thread is that the article doesn't match up in quality against others that were published. I'm not saying this thread is wrong. I'm saying that speculating on the quality of the work is as much bullshit as the authors claiming it was a campaign. To your point, without a clear retraction, it's just people making stuff up -- based on stuff they already believed long before this paper ever came along. So far? Not so much. But admittedly, only the flame-throwers get the media attention. I neither know nor care about this. The only reason it interests me is the quality of the debate, which I would hope among mathematicians would be a little better than average. (Since I admire them so)
- tptacek 8y ago
  It is clear on its face that the paper is not of the quality, or even really the subject matter, to merit inclusion in NYJM. It's not even a close call. It's a little embarrassing to see people on HN not able to recognize that. This isn't a political question; it's a "being able to read and evaluate journal articles" question.
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    So no, there's no way of telling whether or not an editorial change in direction was made or a mistake. Instead we can just talk about journals in general, with nobody knowing what the hell was going on in this particular case. And all the other comments regarding other journals and their consistency of quality is where, exactly? I'm also missing any discussion of standards to judge quality articles and their application (or lack thereof) I must be missing it because to me it looks like a bunch of usual political crap. Assuming charitable intent, I understand that you might want to talk about honing one's ability to "read and evaluate journal articles" instead of what this turned out to be. That'd be cool. I'd like to read more of that. Sounds great.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      Sure. 1. Go to NYJM and select a bunch of articles at random. 2. Read Hill's article. 3. Observe that NYJM papers are all wall-to-wall theoretical math. 4. Observe that Hill's paper has hardly any math at all, and inexplicably ends with an appendix with quotations about male variability, which is itself longer than the elementary "proof" in section 5. It's simply not a theoretical math paper. Journals have subjects. NYJM's subject is not this.
- kaitai 8y ago
  I think part of the problem is that mathematicians are just surprised something like this was published in the NYJM in the first place. It's like publishing a sci-fi short story in a literary poetry journal -- a genre mismatch to begin with. It's not usual in math for a journal like NYJM to publish a "we propose a model for a bio problem & look it gives this kind of result". That's not a math paper. There's no theorem. How does it advance our understanding of the underlying structures of mathematics? Papers like that are far more often published in applied math (look, we can apply this math to that problem) or computer science (look, we can apply this ML algorithm fruitfully to this type of data, for instance). I have sympathy in trying to find journal homes for these types of papers, because I'm looking for journal homes right now for some very interdisciplinary papers (applications of topology or algebraic geometry to finance). Often it seems you have to have really amazing results so you can publish in a general-interest science journal, because the math journals are so specialized they won't consider something like my papers or this paper. You don't have to accept anyone else's judgement on the quality of the paper, although Tim Gowers is a guy who knows his math. A cheap shot here is to search for the word "theorem" in the provided arXiv text. Doesn't appear. Ok, the authors are so modest that they only prove propositions, not theorems -- but that is a sign it's not a real math paper! Then look at the propositions themselves. Prop 7.1, the first of a grand total of three propositions in the paper (no lemmas): a particular normal distribution is more variable than another if the... variance of the first is bigger. Wow. Sure, the authors say "the following simple proposition may be well known" but dang, this is not groundbreaking. This is barely mathematics. Try following through the proofs of the three propositions. It really is at an undergrad level -- I'd be happy assigning some of these 'propositions' as homework exercises in the class I'm teaching now except we have more useful material to cover. There are also some problems the authors should have addressed regarding the subpopulation assumptions, etc. A good article of this type would have done additional modeling to address that. If I were reviewing it, I'd like to see a breakdown say of the different results given initial values of parameters (I'm a total sucker for wall-crossing or regime-change-type results -- like, cross this wall in the space of parameters and the behavior of the model will change in this way. Think phase planes in differential equations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_plane or regime-change results in economics). A dynamical systems analysis would be cool, but I'm biased like that. Analysis of robustness or sensitivity would be nice. I'd want to see comparison with other models, or applications of these models to other topics. The author could have replaced the non-math appendix full of useless crap with this material. It's really important to be able to argue that your model isn't just a one-trick pony if you want to call it math -- you need to show it's a useful model with interesting mathematical properties that you can elucidate in the paper. This paper doesn't do that.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

"...A retraction would have made clear what the problem with the paper was. Sure, publicly saying "we made a mistake" sucks, but not doing so empowers the author of the paper to claim they are being persecuted for their beliefs..." Or simply imagine so, given a lack of information. I'm still trying to sort this out. So this entire thing boils down to "Not-so-good pop-math piece is hated by some. It is first accepted by a journal, then rejected without comment, leading the authors to believe it was a deliberate campaign that led to their rejection, not the quality of their work"? And the proof that it was a quality issue that caused it to be pulled? I'm thinking we still don't know. All I know from reading this thread is that the article doesn't match up in quality against others that were published. I'm not saying this thread is wrong. I'm saying that speculating on the quality of the work is as much bullshit as the authors claiming it was a campaign. To your point, without a clear retraction, it's just people making stuff up -- based on stuff they already believed long before this paper ever came along. So far? Not so much. But admittedly, only the flame-throwers get the media attention. I neither know nor care about this. The only reason it interests me is the quality of the debate, which I would hope among mathematicians would be a little better than average. (Since I admire them so)

tptacek 8y ago
It is clear on its face that the paper is not of the quality, or even really the subject matter, to merit inclusion in NYJM. It's not even a close call. It's a little embarrassing to see people on HN not able to recognize that. This isn't a political question; it's a "being able to read and evaluate journal articles" question.
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  So no, there's no way of telling whether or not an editorial change in direction was made or a mistake. Instead we can just talk about journals in general, with nobody knowing what the hell was going on in this particular case. And all the other comments regarding other journals and their consistency of quality is where, exactly? I'm also missing any discussion of standards to judge quality articles and their application (or lack thereof) I must be missing it because to me it looks like a bunch of usual political crap. Assuming charitable intent, I understand that you might want to talk about honing one's ability to "read and evaluate journal articles" instead of what this turned out to be. That'd be cool. I'd like to read more of that. Sounds great.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Sure. 1. Go to NYJM and select a bunch of articles at random. 2. Read Hill's article. 3. Observe that NYJM papers are all wall-to-wall theoretical math. 4. Observe that Hill's paper has hardly any math at all, and inexplicably ends with an appendix with quotations about male variability, which is itself longer than the elementary "proof" in section 5. It's simply not a theoretical math paper. Journals have subjects. NYJM's subject is not this.
kaitai 8y ago
I think part of the problem is that mathematicians are just surprised something like this was published in the NYJM in the first place. It's like publishing a sci-fi short story in a literary poetry journal -- a genre mismatch to begin with. It's not usual in math for a journal like NYJM to publish a "we propose a model for a bio problem & look it gives this kind of result". That's not a math paper. There's no theorem. How does it advance our understanding of the underlying structures of mathematics? Papers like that are far more often published in applied math (look, we can apply this math to that problem) or computer science (look, we can apply this ML algorithm fruitfully to this type of data, for instance). I have sympathy in trying to find journal homes for these types of papers, because I'm looking for journal homes right now for some very interdisciplinary papers (applications of topology or algebraic geometry to finance). Often it seems you have to have really amazing results so you can publish in a general-interest science journal, because the math journals are so specialized they won't consider something like my papers or this paper. You don't have to accept anyone else's judgement on the quality of the paper, although Tim Gowers is a guy who knows his math. A cheap shot here is to search for the word "theorem" in the provided arXiv text. Doesn't appear. Ok, the authors are so modest that they only prove propositions, not theorems -- but that is a sign it's not a real math paper! Then look at the propositions themselves. Prop 7.1, the first of a grand total of three propositions in the paper (no lemmas): a particular normal distribution is more variable than another if the... variance of the first is bigger. Wow. Sure, the authors say "the following simple proposition may be well known" but dang, this is not groundbreaking. This is barely mathematics. Try following through the proofs of the three propositions. It really is at an undergrad level -- I'd be happy assigning some of these 'propositions' as homework exercises in the class I'm teaching now except we have more useful material to cover. There are also some problems the authors should have addressed regarding the subpopulation assumptions, etc. A good article of this type would have done additional modeling to address that. If I were reviewing it, I'd like to see a breakdown say of the different results given initial values of parameters (I'm a total sucker for wall-crossing or regime-change-type results -- like, cross this wall in the space of parameters and the behavior of the model will change in this way. Think phase planes in differential equations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_plane or regime-change results in economics). A dynamical systems analysis would be cool, but I'm biased like that. Analysis of robustness or sensitivity would be nice. I'd want to see comparison with other models, or applications of these models to other topics. The author could have replaced the non-math appendix full of useless crap with this material. It's really important to be able to argue that your model isn't just a one-trick pony if you want to call it math -- you need to show it's a useful model with interesting mathematical properties that you can elucidate in the paper. This paper doesn't do that.