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> Their entire point is that the stuff they wrote is indistinguishable from these journal's normal fare. Journals publishing papers indistinguishable from thei
by fenomas 8y ago
> Their entire point is that the stuff they wrote is indistinguishable from these journal's normal fare.
Journals publishing papers indistinguishable from their normal fare is the null hypothesis! If accomplishing that was the authors' goal they could have taken ten months off, surely ;)
- darawk 8y agoDo you not understand what i'm saying? They're criticizing the content of these journals.
- fenomas 8y agoIn their capacity as authors of a blog post, sure - but in their capacity as conductors of a social science experiment they're also claiming to have verified a hypothesis (that certain journals would publish absurd papers), and that's the claim I think is weak. Please understand I'm not defending the content of these journals - I'm saying that this ten month hoax doesn't appear to have established anything.
- darawk 8y agoI think I would state their hypothesis as: that the content of these journals is absurd, and by using slightly more absurd hypotheses than their normal fare, we can clearly demonstrate to other people that their content is absurd when those more obviously ridiculous ideas get accepted.
- tptacek 8y agoIf that's really the case, they could have established the exact same thing simply by quoting real articles from the journal. Obviously, nobody would write a news story about that, and now you see the problem with this hoax.