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Although it's true I wasn't a layman, it turned out my own expertise in bot fighting had no utility to reviewing the paper. The review was done as a "layman", b
by mike_hearn 3y ago
Although it's true I wasn't a layman, it turned out my own expertise in bot fighting had no utility to reviewing the paper. The review was done as a "layman", because the sociological subfield of twitter bot research has nothing to do with bots :( Anyone could have written that and actually most of the paper takedowns in that subfield are done by a team of a CS prof (with no specialism in bots) and a data journalist.
- dekhn 3y agoUnderstood. At best, though, I think these takedowns are based primarily on "technical invalidation": identification of one or more faults in logic, presumption, study design, or execution, which brings enough question to the results/conclusions that it's best just to assume the paper isn't worth reading. (put another way: many papers that contributed what appears to be new, true knowledge contain factual errors, some of them invalidating, yet the paper turned out to be correct, in terms of its conclusions, in the long run)