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>The following paper may not match our usual standards... My opinion of the declining quality of scientific and especially mathematical papers is different. I

>The following paper may not match our usual standards... My opinion of the declining quality of scientific and especially mathematical papers is different. I used to work in medical and molecular imaging. Whatever we did obviously required FDA approval. One engineer, a good one, but engineers aren't usually very detail oriented when it comes to "getting the math right" so to speak, referenced a paper in some of the documentation to some code. Long story short, the paper had been peer reviewed, but was riddled with material errors. I caught the issue in our internal review process, and removed the incorrect code and reimplemented the feature correctly. (Was highly annoyed at having to essentially write my own paper for documentation and FDA submission). Here's the point though, we're already putting out too many poor quality papers. (And calling them "poor quality" is being charitable.) Why is the mathematics community being pressured to go even lower quality? I took the liberty of reading this "paper", and there's no meat in it. Put it in the Intelligencer, or in Wired, or on HN, or Reddit or whatever. But let's try to get actual journals cleaned up. The way this should to work is that people like the engineer at my company, should be able to cite a peer reviewed scientific paper from a peer reviewed journal. (Or a mathematics paper, in that particular case). But right now that's an unsafe practice where the safety of a human life is potentially a concern. The quality problem is out of hand right now. (And it's not just the "paper" that is the subject of this article, low quality papers abound out there, believe me). My question is, why are we intentionally asking to make the issue worse?

pgeorgi 8y ago
> Why is the mathematics community being pressured to go even lower quality? If quality had been the only argument, I'd buy it - but[0]: - “As a matter of principle,” she wrote, “I support people discussing controversial matters openly … At the same time, I think it’s good to be aware of the effects.” - “but you should know in advance that many (most?) of us have strong disagreements with what you did.” (not "with the quality of the work", but "with what you did") - "people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful”" (there _could_ be a quality argument in there depending on what was meant by "bad", but harmful is not a quality category) > Put it in the Intelligencer That's what Hill tried first: "Once we had written up our findings, Sergei and I decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the ‘Viewpoint’ section of which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics"[0] As told by Hill, it wasn't his decision that it didn't end up there. > But let's try to get actual journals cleaned up. NYJM only appeared on the scene after the Intelligencer was pressured into not publishing. In NYJM case, probably due to political interest of one of its editors (seeing the edits made), sadly not merely due to "I stand for journals' press freedom". > My question is, why are we intentionally asking to make it worse? Because the more reasonable alternative was prevented by others. Even just publishing it in the Intelligencer now would be an option to make the entire situation whole again (apart from the year or so wasted on a messy situation). After that, ridicule the paper's result all you want in the Intelligencer or any other journal. In contrast the outcome that seems to be preferred by the paper's opponents, which is "don't dare talk about it", doesn't sound very sciencey to me. [0] https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/ https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  >If quality had been the only argument, I'd buy it Look, I understand the political argument you are making, but politics has no place in peer reviewed scientific and mathematics journals. Quality is always the argument, or should be. If people want to have a political argument, take it elsewhere. There are a lot of people out there doing serious work who are relying on the reliability of the information presented in peer reviewed journals. The political people have, quite literally, the entire world outside of peer reviewed journals to engage in their flame wars. The mathematics community should be pushing back on stuff like this. As I said, it's not a problem if you'd like to publish that stuff elsewhere, it's appropriate in other venues. But you can't just be publishing whatever you like in a peer reviewed journal. It's particularly galling that the political people had so infested NYJM that they decided to simply dispense with the formality of peer review in the case of this particular paper. Why? Presumably because it agreed with their politics. I mean, that's literally some "Sun revolves around the Earth .. you can't question this .. great doctrinal import" type stuff. Come on people. Please, TRY to be reasonable here. I'm not saying you can't have the flame wars you want to have, I'm just asking that we not put low quality science or math papers in peer reviewed journals. Especially papers so low quality that you feel the need to exempt them from peer review lest they not get published.
  - pgeorgi 8y ago
    > If people want to have a political argument, take it elsewhere For example the Intelligencer? So why did folks cause a ruckus to prevent that? Not having a political argument in a journal also means having freedom from politics. That was denied to both the Intelligencer (by outside parties) and NYJM (arguably by both outside parties and the editor who rushed in that paper). > It's particularly galling that the political people had so infested NYJM that they decided to simply dispense with the formality of peer review in the case of this particular paper. I agree - however, NYJM wasn't the first episode of the paper but (so far) the last. > Please, TRY to be reasonable here. I'm not saying you can't have the flame wars you want to have, I'm just asking that we not put low quality science or math papers in peer reviewed journals. Especially papers so low quality that you feel the need to exempt them from peer review lest they not get published. Here I disagree. First, the plea to be "reasonable": I think I'm quite reasonable asking to undo the damage by undue interference. Second, I don't think scientists will have issues handling a properly annotated paper (ie "we publish it here not for its quality but because some people want to keep it hidden for non-scientific reasons") in a sensible way.

pgeorgi 8y ago

> Why is the mathematics community being pressured to go even lower quality? If quality had been the only argument, I'd buy it - but[0]: - “As a matter of principle,” she wrote, “I support people discussing controversial matters openly … At the same time, I think it’s good to be aware of the effects.” - “but you should know in advance that many (most?) of us have strong disagreements with what you did.” (not "with the quality of the work", but "with what you did") - "people who explained that the paper was “bad and harmful”" (there _could_ be a quality argument in there depending on what was meant by "bad", but harmful is not a quality category) > Put it in the Intelligencer That's what Hill tried first: "Once we had written up our findings, Sergei and I decided to try for publication in the Mathematical Intelligencer, the ‘Viewpoint’ section of which specifically welcomes articles on contentious topics"[0] As told by Hill, it wasn't his decision that it didn't end up there. > But let's try to get actual journals cleaned up. NYJM only appeared on the scene after the Intelligencer was pressured into not publishing. In NYJM case, probably due to political interest of one of its editors (seeing the edits made), sadly not merely due to "I stand for journals' press freedom". > My question is, why are we intentionally asking to make it worse? Because the more reasonable alternative was prevented by others. Even just publishing it in the Intelligencer now would be an option to make the entire situation whole again (apart from the year or so wasted on a messy situation). After that, ridicule the paper's result all you want in the Intelligencer or any other journal. In contrast the outcome that seems to be preferred by the paper's opponents, which is "don't dare talk about it", doesn't sound very sciencey to me. [0] https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/ https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-p...

bilbo0s 8y ago
>If quality had been the only argument, I'd buy it Look, I understand the political argument you are making, but politics has no place in peer reviewed scientific and mathematics journals. Quality is always the argument, or should be. If people want to have a political argument, take it elsewhere. There are a lot of people out there doing serious work who are relying on the reliability of the information presented in peer reviewed journals. The political people have, quite literally, the entire world outside of peer reviewed journals to engage in their flame wars. The mathematics community should be pushing back on stuff like this. As I said, it's not a problem if you'd like to publish that stuff elsewhere, it's appropriate in other venues. But you can't just be publishing whatever you like in a peer reviewed journal. It's particularly galling that the political people had so infested NYJM that they decided to simply dispense with the formality of peer review in the case of this particular paper. Why? Presumably because it agreed with their politics. I mean, that's literally some "Sun revolves around the Earth .. you can't question this .. great doctrinal import" type stuff. Come on people. Please, TRY to be reasonable here. I'm not saying you can't have the flame wars you want to have, I'm just asking that we not put low quality science or math papers in peer reviewed journals. Especially papers so low quality that you feel the need to exempt them from peer review lest they not get published.
- pgeorgi 8y ago
  > If people want to have a political argument, take it elsewhere For example the Intelligencer? So why did folks cause a ruckus to prevent that? Not having a political argument in a journal also means having freedom from politics. That was denied to both the Intelligencer (by outside parties) and NYJM (arguably by both outside parties and the editor who rushed in that paper). > It's particularly galling that the political people had so infested NYJM that they decided to simply dispense with the formality of peer review in the case of this particular paper. I agree - however, NYJM wasn't the first episode of the paper but (so far) the last. > Please, TRY to be reasonable here. I'm not saying you can't have the flame wars you want to have, I'm just asking that we not put low quality science or math papers in peer reviewed journals. Especially papers so low quality that you feel the need to exempt them from peer review lest they not get published. Here I disagree. First, the plea to be "reasonable": I think I'm quite reasonable asking to undo the damage by undue interference. Second, I don't think scientists will have issues handling a properly annotated paper (ie "we publish it here not for its quality but because some people want to keep it hidden for non-scientific reasons") in a sensible way.