5 ms·

This is straight up appeal-to-authority credentialism. What is actually wrong with the paper?

Certhas 4y ago
No it's not. It's a useful heuristic to adjust your priors before engaging with the work. It's also a useful bit of information when making the decision what to spend time on. Obviously this is a decision that you have to make before reading the paper. If you're a bit familiar with typical physics crackpottery there are many other red flags that might tell you this is not worth your time.
SantalBlush 4y ago
There can be quality papers on Vixra, sure. But I'm not about to sift through all of the bad ones to find them. That's not an appeal to authority fallacy, that's a useful heuristic.
- User23 4y ago
  Sifting through Vixra isn’t in play here though. We’re discussing a single paper.
  - SantalBlush 4y ago
    We're discussing a single paper posted on Hacker News by some user called Certhas, whom I'm not familiar with. So that doesn't improve my desire to view the paper. Am I meant to assume this person has the necessary background knowledge to vet the paper? And if not, why should I waste my time looking at it? The internet is absolutely full of nonsense, and nobody is obligated to look through it in the name of open-mindedness. Most of us have things to do. Mind you, I'm not saying the paper is bad. I'm saying it needs to pass certain filters before I spend time giving it a try.
  - Brian_K_White 4y ago
    It doesn't matter. If the content of the paper were worth even looking at, it should exist in channels that do discriminate more. Yes, the venue or the speaker matters, not just the message. Calling that an appeal to authority, or failing to keep an open mind, is just something the quack cries to explain their lack of impact. That cry is just another thing it is entirely reasonable and defensible to utterly ignore.
    - JadeNB 4y ago
      > It doesn't matter. If the content of the paper were worth even looking at, it should exist in channels that do discriminate more. As jjgreen points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937266), it does. But, whether or not your point of view is legitimate—in my case, I agree with your point of view, and won't give serious consideration to anything only available on vixra, and even just finding out an otherwise reputable-seeming paper was on vixra would give me pause—it is literally credentialism.
      - User23 4y ago
        I'm fairly sympathetic to both of you here. Even without the vast trove of bullshit that is the Internet, the published scientific literature is already far more than anyone could possibly hope to read with care. Using a credentialism filter is one possible step in the process of narrowing down the set of papers available to read to a subset small enough that you can read them all. It's a popular method that has been practiced in some form for as long as there have been organized intellectual pursuits. And while it's evidently good for maintaining some approximation of a local optimum, I suspect it's also why the adage that scientific progress comes one funeral at a time rings so true. We should be clear though it's the narrowing process that has the value. Credentialism is just one possible means of narrowing that scores highly on ease of use, but perhaps not so highly for learning radically new things.
      - Brian_K_White 4y ago
        There's no getting around it. Are you going to invest in the guy trying to sell his engine that runs on water? He's not in any reputable channels either. Maybe it's suppressed by oil companies. I think it's good enough to rely on the fact that the world has a lot of people in it, and there are more than enough people, not even including the idiots and misguided, but more than enough provably rational people who just have decided it's their hobby or even their vocation, to investigate even wacko claims, purely for academic reasons without necessarily caring about the claims themselves. They will bring anything worth our attention to us. Maybe we are all one of those people on occasion or on specific topics. To me that is quite sufficient way to allow for the possibility that someone did actually discover a way to burn water essentially like gasoline.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

No it's not. It's a useful heuristic to adjust your priors before engaging with the work. It's also a useful bit of information when making the decision what to spend time on. Obviously this is a decision that you have to make before reading the paper. If you're a bit familiar with typical physics crackpottery there are many other red flags that might tell you this is not worth your time.

SantalBlush 4y ago

There can be quality papers on Vixra, sure. But I'm not about to sift through all of the bad ones to find them. That's not an appeal to authority fallacy, that's a useful heuristic.

User23 4y ago
Sifting through Vixra isn’t in play here though. We’re discussing a single paper.
- SantalBlush 4y ago
  We're discussing a single paper posted on Hacker News by some user called Certhas, whom I'm not familiar with. So that doesn't improve my desire to view the paper. Am I meant to assume this person has the necessary background knowledge to vet the paper? And if not, why should I waste my time looking at it? The internet is absolutely full of nonsense, and nobody is obligated to look through it in the name of open-mindedness. Most of us have things to do. Mind you, I'm not saying the paper is bad. I'm saying it needs to pass certain filters before I spend time giving it a try.
- Brian_K_White 4y ago
  It doesn't matter. If the content of the paper were worth even looking at, it should exist in channels that do discriminate more. Yes, the venue or the speaker matters, not just the message. Calling that an appeal to authority, or failing to keep an open mind, is just something the quack cries to explain their lack of impact. That cry is just another thing it is entirely reasonable and defensible to utterly ignore.
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > It doesn't matter. If the content of the paper were worth even looking at, it should exist in channels that do discriminate more. As jjgreen points out (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937266), it does. But, whether or not your point of view is legitimate—in my case, I agree with your point of view, and won't give serious consideration to anything only available on vixra, and even just finding out an otherwise reputable-seeming paper was on vixra would give me pause—it is literally credentialism.
    - User23 4y ago
      I'm fairly sympathetic to both of you here. Even without the vast trove of bullshit that is the Internet, the published scientific literature is already far more than anyone could possibly hope to read with care. Using a credentialism filter is one possible step in the process of narrowing down the set of papers available to read to a subset small enough that you can read them all. It's a popular method that has been practiced in some form for as long as there have been organized intellectual pursuits. And while it's evidently good for maintaining some approximation of a local optimum, I suspect it's also why the adage that scientific progress comes one funeral at a time rings so true. We should be clear though it's the narrowing process that has the value. Credentialism is just one possible means of narrowing that scores highly on ease of use, but perhaps not so highly for learning radically new things.
    - Brian_K_White 4y ago
      There's no getting around it. Are you going to invest in the guy trying to sell his engine that runs on water? He's not in any reputable channels either. Maybe it's suppressed by oil companies. I think it's good enough to rely on the fact that the world has a lot of people in it, and there are more than enough people, not even including the idiots and misguided, but more than enough provably rational people who just have decided it's their hobby or even their vocation, to investigate even wacko claims, purely for academic reasons without necessarily caring about the claims themselves. They will bring anything worth our attention to us. Maybe we are all one of those people on occasion or on specific topics. To me that is quite sufficient way to allow for the possibility that someone did actually discover a way to burn water essentially like gasoline.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]