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Peer-review will help with that. I strongly support amateurs publishing if they have something real to contribute. Gate-keeping based on degrees is bad.

by harias 8y ago

SiempreViernes 8y ago
The argument you object to is exactly that peer review will not accept it because it is trash research.
geofft 8y ago
There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith: if peer reviewers were tasked with reviewing every clever idea from someone who notices a correlation in one data set—and, in particular, at conductor their own experiments to replicate the result—there would statistically be no time for correct science. Scott Aaronson's "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong" on https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 is a similar argument. Though there's no hard logic why a non-TeX math paper from an outsider would be wrong, the probability that it's right is extremely low.
- fromthestart 8y ago
  This isn't exactly crank science. This is a valid challenge to an equality assumption which permeates modern academia and industry, with potential negative consequences, which has never actually been proven. And the same correlative "evidence" for sexism (which really is just a conflation of equality of outcome and equality of opportunity) could just as readily be taken as a manifestation of functional inequality. But social stigma and an imepenetrable bias in academia keeps any meaningful research in this area from occurring, probably because people are afraid of the potential implications. That's bad science and ultimately is probably bad for society if it turns out these unproven assumptions for equal competence are untrue.
- iguy 8y ago
  > There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith Absolutely. And thus sadly a solid field needs a certain (ideally low) amount of gatekeeping. But there are also academic fields which are very far from solid, in which the same license to ignore "cranks" is employed, not to save some mathematicians time, but to build a wall around an ideology. I don't really think there's an easy way to tell the difference "from 10_000ft", the two situations look identical in that there are journals, those who publish can get jobs, and later edit these journals... and without reading any of the work, there's no way to tell if it's basically solid or basically nonsense.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Peer-review will help with that. I strongly support amateurs publishing if they have something real to contribute. Gate-keeping based on degrees is bad.

by harias 8y ago

Peer-review will help with that. I strongly support amateurs publishing if they have something real to contribute. Gate-keeping based on degrees is bad.

SiempreViernes 8y ago

The argument you object to is exactly that peer review will not accept it because it is trash research.

geofft 8y ago

There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith: if peer reviewers were tasked with reviewing every clever idea from someone who notices a correlation in one data set—and, in particular, at conductor their own experiments to replicate the result—there would statistically be no time for correct science. Scott Aaronson's "Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong" on https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=304 is a similar argument. Though there's no hard logic why a non-TeX math paper from an outsider would be wrong, the probability that it's right is extremely low.

fromthestart 8y ago
This isn't exactly crank science. This is a valid challenge to an equality assumption which permeates modern academia and industry, with potential negative consequences, which has never actually been proven. And the same correlative "evidence" for sexism (which really is just a conflation of equality of outcome and equality of opportunity) could just as readily be taken as a manifestation of functional inequality. But social stigma and an imepenetrable bias in academia keeps any meaningful research in this area from occurring, probably because people are afraid of the potential implications. That's bad science and ultimately is probably bad for society if it turns out these unproven assumptions for equal competence are untrue.
iguy 8y ago
> There is too much crank science in the world to evaluate it all in good faith Absolutely. And thus sadly a solid field needs a certain (ideally low) amount of gatekeeping. But there are also academic fields which are very far from solid, in which the same license to ignore "cranks" is employed, not to save some mathematicians time, but to build a wall around an ideology. I don't really think there's an easy way to tell the difference "from 10_000ft", the two situations look identical in that there are journals, those who publish can get jobs, and later edit these journals... and without reading any of the work, there's no way to tell if it's basically solid or basically nonsense.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]