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That one economics paper, as an example, could have made one seemingly innocuous assumption that might be overlooked by later work. Let's say a paper that reli

That one economics paper, as an example, could have made one seemingly innocuous assumption that might be overlooked by later work. Let's say a paper that relies on the preprint take that assumption for granted. And then another paper references that one. And again. And again. Then the fifth paper gets adopted by a government in some esoteric policy, which causes their economy to implode. May not be necessary to just publish "stuff", but it is necessary to mitigate against the dangers of invalid assumptions.

SAS_80sTrash 8y ago
I agree with you. Assumptions will cause a person to fail a sociology class because the majority of them are factually incorrect and anything that has the potential to cause negative consequence should be thoroughly examined before being published as valid, but if it is just an idea or a thought then I would personally write the idea as a question and send the question to those in current research.
barry-cotter 8y ago
Peer Review has not stopped the situationyou describe from occurring in multiple fields. Social Psychology is particularly bad but cancer biology isn’t great either. ——- Why Most Published Research Findings Are False https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... Bayer and Amgen, reported dismal results when they tried to reproduce some cancer papers. Only 25 percent of the papers Bayer examined were reproduced. Amgen was able to replicate only six out of the 53 studies it examined. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/18/510304871/what-does-it-mean-when-cancer-findings-cant-be-reproduced https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/18/5103048... Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18 An ambitious project that set out nearly 5 years ago to replicate experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers, but gradually shrank that number, now expects to complete just 18 studies. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-replicate-50-high-impact-cancer-papers-shrinks-just-18 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-replicate-50-hi...

SAS_80sTrash 8y ago

I agree with you. Assumptions will cause a person to fail a sociology class because the majority of them are factually incorrect and anything that has the potential to cause negative consequence should be thoroughly examined before being published as valid, but if it is just an idea or a thought then I would personally write the idea as a question and send the question to those in current research.

barry-cotter 8y ago

Peer Review has not stopped the situationyou describe from occurring in multiple fields. Social Psychology is particularly bad but cancer biology isn’t great either. ——- Why Most Published Research Findings Are False https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... Bayer and Amgen, reported dismal results when they tried to reproduce some cancer papers. Only 25 percent of the papers Bayer examined were reproduced. Amgen was able to replicate only six out of the 53 studies it examined. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/18/510304871/what-does-it-mean-when-cancer-findings-cant-be-reproduced https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/01/18/5103048... Plan to replicate 50 high-impact cancer papers shrinks to just 18 An ambitious project that set out nearly 5 years ago to replicate experiments from 50 high-impact cancer biology papers, but gradually shrank that number, now expects to complete just 18 studies. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-replicate-50-high-impact-cancer-papers-shrinks-just-18 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-replicate-50-hi...