3 ms·

Glad that authors retracted it by themselves. Surprised that no one found the mistake in such a popular paper for so long.

rjf72 8y ago
It's confirmation bias. When you want something to be true because it confirms your biases, most people are not going to actively try to refute it. This is one big argument for avoiding ideological homogeneity in academia. Homogeneity reduces the quality of work since ideas that are not properly supported are less challenged than they would be in cases where ones idea goes against the biases of other researchers. Consider the replication crisis in psychology as another embodiment of this. This was all really started when a replication study attempted to replicate a number of impactful studies from top tier psychology journals. It turns out that 64% of all studies, including 74% of social psychology studies, could not be replicated. That means if somebody actually tried to replicate any given study, they'd more likely than not find it was dodgy. But nobody did this, because there was not much motivation to do it. Refuting others' studies hurts them, likely creates enemies for you, and doesn't do all that much for your own career. It's a messed up system that basically needs ideological heterogeneity to create that motivation needed to ensure good quality. But such heterogeneity is practically nonexistent in many soft sciences now a days, and to some degree the problem is even starting to seep into the hard sciences.
wasdfff 8y ago
It takes a lot of work to come through other people’s work in detail. Even revisiting your old papers that you yourself wrote can have you scratching your head and reaching for your notes from the time. Maybe the authors had some problems using these methods for another more recent project, and found the error. Retraction doesn’t mean ‘it’s wrong please pretend this never happened,’ they will pull the paper as it contains an error, fix it, then resubmit it.

rjf72 8y ago

It's confirmation bias. When you want something to be true because it confirms your biases, most people are not going to actively try to refute it. This is one big argument for avoiding ideological homogeneity in academia. Homogeneity reduces the quality of work since ideas that are not properly supported are less challenged than they would be in cases where ones idea goes against the biases of other researchers. Consider the replication crisis in psychology as another embodiment of this. This was all really started when a replication study attempted to replicate a number of impactful studies from top tier psychology journals. It turns out that 64% of all studies, including 74% of social psychology studies, could not be replicated. That means if somebody actually tried to replicate any given study, they'd more likely than not find it was dodgy. But nobody did this, because there was not much motivation to do it. Refuting others' studies hurts them, likely creates enemies for you, and doesn't do all that much for your own career. It's a messed up system that basically needs ideological heterogeneity to create that motivation needed to ensure good quality. But such heterogeneity is practically nonexistent in many soft sciences now a days, and to some degree the problem is even starting to seep into the hard sciences.

wasdfff 8y ago

It takes a lot of work to come through other people’s work in detail. Even revisiting your old papers that you yourself wrote can have you scratching your head and reaching for your notes from the time. Maybe the authors had some problems using these methods for another more recent project, and found the error. Retraction doesn’t mean ‘it’s wrong please pretend this never happened,’ they will pull the paper as it contains an error, fix it, then resubmit it.