4 ms·

Have you encountered concrete examples of such rejections in your field? Care to share some tales?

by XCabbage 8y ago

extra88 8y ago
Peer reviewers are humans, there are many examples humans denying, avoiding, turning away “uncomfortable” evidence.
- asciident 8y ago
  Do you not think that people who are doing this professionally as their career, spending their entire lives working, reviewing, and discussing this type of research, do not realize that there is a potential bias and do everything they can to address it? It seems like some of the people here believe that we've discovered something that the researchers don't already realize, and aren't already trying to address. It's kind of strange to me that you're attributing a simplemindedness to the experts doing peer review panels that is unrealistic. It reminds me of the times when people who aren't programmers seem to make this discovery that there is such thing as technical debt, and that programmers should be focused on programming in a way that avoids technical debt ("these programmers should focus on writing maintainable code! Not just short term hacks"). It's an oversimplication of the situation that is not helpful.
  - dash2 8y ago
    What are the incentives to address it? I can think of entire subfields where the whole premise is - IMHO - bullshit. (There are people who literally run lab experiments with 20 students in order to study how nations will contribute to climate change over the next century.) Do you think any of them want to admit that? To see how bad it can get, consider New Real Peer Review (https://twitter.com/realpeerreview https://twitter.com/realpeerreview). This is the extreme version, but it is the lower tail of a continuous distribution.
    - asciident 8y ago
      The incentive is that they're academics and want to do the right thing. Maybe more pessemistically, they don't want to be called out by other academics doing the right thing. If we go back to the original topic, which is that deidentifying data with some known fields is possible, do you think a reputable academic will want to be known for denying a simple arithmetic estimation? They'd be the laughingstock in their department and community.

Have you encountered concrete examples of such rejections in your field? Care to share some tales?

extra88 8y ago

Peer reviewers are humans, there are many examples humans denying, avoiding, turning away “uncomfortable” evidence.

asciident 8y ago
Do you not think that people who are doing this professionally as their career, spending their entire lives working, reviewing, and discussing this type of research, do not realize that there is a potential bias and do everything they can to address it? It seems like some of the people here believe that we've discovered something that the researchers don't already realize, and aren't already trying to address. It's kind of strange to me that you're attributing a simplemindedness to the experts doing peer review panels that is unrealistic. It reminds me of the times when people who aren't programmers seem to make this discovery that there is such thing as technical debt, and that programmers should be focused on programming in a way that avoids technical debt ("these programmers should focus on writing maintainable code! Not just short term hacks"). It's an oversimplication of the situation that is not helpful.
- dash2 8y ago
  What are the incentives to address it? I can think of entire subfields where the whole premise is - IMHO - bullshit. (There are people who literally run lab experiments with 20 students in order to study how nations will contribute to climate change over the next century.) Do you think any of them want to admit that? To see how bad it can get, consider New Real Peer Review (https://twitter.com/realpeerreview https://twitter.com/realpeerreview). This is the extreme version, but it is the lower tail of a continuous distribution.
  - asciident 8y ago
    The incentive is that they're academics and want to do the right thing. Maybe more pessemistically, they don't want to be called out by other academics doing the right thing. If we go back to the original topic, which is that deidentifying data with some known fields is possible, do you think a reputable academic will want to be known for denying a simple arithmetic estimation? They'd be the laughingstock in their department and community.