8 ms·

It is a fun little event that something posted on 4chan is used in a research paper. But that nobody knows how it should be cited is just plain wrong. They sho

• yipbub 8y ago
  I'm not in academia. How is it possible for people to check if the proof is peer reviewed? Do they have to rely on their own verification?
  • syn0byte 8y ago
    It's a proof. It validates itself or it doesn't.
    • TimTheTinker 8y ago
      Not so fast. Yes, many proofs do follow from formal logic and maths, but new proofs often connect things or draw inferences that haven't been done previously, thus requiring human review to verify.
    • throwawaymath 8y ago
      That's a non-answer. Peer review is a thing in mathematics precisely because it's difficult to verify if a proof is valid. In a sense you can say something like, "A proof is valid or it isn't", but that's vacuous because you still need someone to check it. There are many examples available of proofs which have been initially accepted but later discredited in the mathematical community. There are also many examples of proofs which have been polarizing from their first publication. Consider the controversy surrounding Mochizuki and his Inter-Universal Teichmuller Theory. Also consider that there have been credible (though ultimately incorrect) proofs published by credible people for several famous problems, such as P = NP. The academic community at large can't just eyeball a proof and know it to be true, and often even fundamentally flawed proofs require more than a week of careful attention to be declared incorrect. If you want to argue that peer review is an imperfect system then that's one thing. But to say that a proof is demonstrably true or it isn't ignores the entire complexity of actually figuring out whether or not it's true. Some people can rely upon their own ability to do this, but for the most part the mathematical community is so heavily specialized that even most mathematicians cannot find errors in advanced proofs unless it's their particular subfield of research.
      • syn0byte 8y ago
        Yes, it was a mostly non-answer to a mostly non-question. It was in response to citing a proof in your own work, not a comment on the need for peer review of proofs in general. The bulk of your rebuttal is exactly my own point. Peer review doesn't actually prove anything one way or the other. The ultimate truthfulness of a cited proof is all that matters. The idea that cited proofs should be peer reviewed don't add intrinsic validity, it just fosters academic laziness. "Boy that's a fantastical claim that doesn't seem right; but all the citations are peer reviewed and I see nothing obviously wrong so I guess its true!" -OR- "Boy That's a fantastical claim that doesn't seem right; I don't see anything obviously wrong here so lets double check the cited proofs they based this on." What's the practical upside to only using peer-reviewed proofs besides speed at the cost of fidelity? What's the practical downside to using unreviewed proofs besides "more work"?
        • Jweb_Guru 8y ago
          People do use unreviewed proofs. They just mark those results separately from the rest of the paper so that people (correctly) know not to rely on them, or at least to continue to treat them as tainted; they also usually try to avoid relying on such theorems for critical results. Which is a way better solution than what you're proposing, which is to just mix them in with proofs that people are reasonably confident in and hope for the best.
• rspeer 8y ago
  It's not that nobody knows how to cite it, it's that nobody wants to cite things from outside of academia, perhaps because it lowers their own perceived prestige. I have seen this in computational linguistics where people frequently don't cite their data sources, which often come from outside of the field or outside academia altogether. Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit. Reviewers don't take anyone to task for it, because they do that too. For a while, there was a collection of multilingual word counts over OpenSubtitles that everyone was using, and you would acquire it from the OneDrive of the pseudonymous blogger "Hermit Dave". Many people put the link to his blog in a footnote, but I think I was the only person to come up with a citation for (Dave 2011). People don't even cite Google Books Ngrams and that's got a real paper [1]. [1] Lin, Y., Michel, J.-B., Aiden, E. L., Orwant, J., Brockman, W., and Petrov, S. (2012). Syntactic annotations for the Google Books Ngram Corpus. Proceedings of the ACL 2012 system demonstrations, 169-174.
  • jessriedel 8y ago
    > Instead they put a link to a webpage in a footnote, which does nothing for assigning credit. Why would a footnote be considered less credit than something in the list of references? It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Indeed, the question of whether prose footnotes are at the bottom of the page rather than displayed intermixed with citations to published sources (as in Physical Review Letters) is just a stylistic choices that varies by journal. Obviously unpublished sources can't easily be counted into automated citation tracking systems for technical reasons, but if the author wanted that they could publish something (or, e.g., put it in a free repository like the arXiv).
    • OscarCunningham 8y ago
      > It's pretty common in my field to use footnotes to give credit to other researchers for ideas that arose in an informal context, e.g., "I thank A. Zee for pointing this out". Is your field Quantum Field Theory? https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/zee/ https://www.kitp.ucsb.edu/zee/
• derblitzmann 8y ago
  Well I know for 4chan, each thread is ephemeral and depending on how active a board is, the thread will be deleted. Which I think is the challenge citing it. Since even a day or two after finding it, it can be lost.
  • strictnein 8y ago
    This is directly addressed in the comment you're responding to. > "And you have things like the internet archive or Webcite[0] to make sure the web document doesn't disappear."
    • komali2 8y ago
      Does that even work on 4chan? On /b/ threads can vanish in less than an hour. There used to be specialized sites such as 4chanarchive to fill the gap, but last I checked most are dead.
      • setr 8y ago
        Afaik there are various ones still existing, but dunno how ephemeral they are (eg archive.moe supports /b/), and how much they miss And then you just webarchive archive the archive sites instead of 4chan directly :-)
      • TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Well, this particular thread still exists; somewhere in the Tweets there there was a link posted to an archived version.
• new12345 8y ago
  I agree. Its doesn't seems like that big of a deal to cite a web article. What's causing trouble is the stereotype among the research institutions to not trust/value communities like 4chan. I am glad that this is being highlighted.
• prepend 8y ago
  I read this more that if they follow common web citation guidelines, there’s a strong probability that 4chan will replace the target with goatse, or something worse.
  • swebs 8y ago
    You can't direct link to 4chan anyway, as posts are cycled out and deleted quite frequently. You would have to archive the page and link to that.
• tomjen3 8y ago
  We cited a random persons blog in my masters thesis, supervisor didn't blink an eye (that person had the most clear and concise formulation of the problem we were trying to solve).
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Someone contacted me once wanting to cite a web page I authored in a paper, but I assumed they were trying to social engineer my identity, or similar.
• marmaduke 8y ago
  I don’t see any mention of Zenodo but it is a potential solution for, in their words, the long tail of science. One could post some extract from the 4chan page, post it on Zenodo and have a DOI to work with.
  • romwell 8y ago
    Didn't know about it. Seems to be more for data sets. ArXiV would be a better place for math papers.