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Well, for starters it won the best paper award at ACM Symposium on Theoretical Computing. Can you elaborate on which particular part you consider to be “word s

Well, for starters it won the best paper award at ACM Symposium on Theoretical Computing. Can you elaborate on which particular part you consider to be “word salad” as opposed to just unfamiliar?

mycologos 3y ago
Bit more context as a CS researcher: Symposium on Theoretical Computing (STOC) and Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) are the two main computer science theory conferences, they're not random journals or something.
- zerocuil 3y ago
  [flagged]
varispeed 3y ago
> Well, for starters it won the best paper award at ACM Symposium on Theoretical Computing. To be fair, this is just appeal to authority. Winning an award doesn't make something better or worse. It is orthogonal.
- jychang 3y ago
  Everything is an appeal to authority if you’re not an authority on the subject And if you’re an authority on the subject, then you don’t need this news article
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Authorities like major conferences and journals are pretty good at detecting word salad. It's not orthogonal. It's extremely highly correlated. Don't try too hard to find fallacies. And you'd better not respond by bringing up that one infamous time word salad was accepted; it's infamous for a reason.
  - icy_deadposts 3y ago
    Which one? Temporally Recurrent Optimal Learning [0] [1] [2] is the only one i know about, but it wasn't that famous afaik. [0] https://www.ruder.io/highlights-nips-2016/ https://www.ruder.io/highlights-nips-2016/ [1] https://medium.com/the-mission/rocket-ai-2016s-most-notorious-ai-launch-and-the-problem-with-ai-hype-d7908013f8c9 https://medium.com/the-mission/rocket-ai-2016s-most-notoriou... [2] https://securelist.com/rocket-ai-and-the-next-generation-of-av-software/77454/ https://securelist.com/rocket-ai-and-the-next-generation-of-...
    - Dylan16807 3y ago
      Sokal.
      - DougMerritt 3y ago
        People who aren't familiar with the Sokal affair may miss the critical point that word salad was the author's whole intent, to expose the problem. 'a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal...to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies...[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." 'The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair IMHO it is the most amazing academic comeuppance in history. Edit: See the author's great book: Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1998), Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1st ed.), New York: Picador USA, ISBN 0-312-19545-1
        Dylan16807 3y ago
        Yes, Sokal was word salad. But they also weren't treating it like a normal paper, and the lack of peer review is part of that. More importantly, that being the big example, decades later, helps show just how rare something like that is for major conferences and journals. An estimate of it happening 1% of the time would be much too high, but even if 1% was accurate it would still mean that endorsements are quite convincing. Let alone getting picked as the "best paper".
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Appeals to authority are fallacies with regard to specific logical arguments such that experts don’t get to override logic. Appeals to authority are otherwise deeply correlated to actually correct statements and are a boon, not a flaw, for explaining a context.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  There is no appeal to authority here. You asked: > why is this even on HN And I think that a news article about a paper that won an award at a top CS conference is pretty quintessential HN content.
- Forgeties79 3y ago
  If the general consensus is that the org is legit and hosts quality work/research, then yes an appeal to authority is warranted. Does that mean they’re above scrutiny? No. But it does mean the person dismissing the work needs to present a concrete reason given it’s been validated/vetted by an org folks generally trust based on a proven track record.

Well, for starters it won the best paper award at ACM Symposium on Theoretical Computing. Can you elaborate on which particular part you consider to be “word salad” as opposed to just unfamiliar?

mycologos 3y ago

Bit more context as a CS researcher: Symposium on Theoretical Computing (STOC) and Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS) are the two main computer science theory conferences, they're not random journals or something.

zerocuil 3y ago
[flagged]

varispeed 3y ago

> Well, for starters it won the best paper award at ACM Symposium on Theoretical Computing. To be fair, this is just appeal to authority. Winning an award doesn't make something better or worse. It is orthogonal.

jychang 3y ago
Everything is an appeal to authority if you’re not an authority on the subject And if you’re an authority on the subject, then you don’t need this news article
Dylan16807 3y ago
Authorities like major conferences and journals are pretty good at detecting word salad. It's not orthogonal. It's extremely highly correlated. Don't try too hard to find fallacies. And you'd better not respond by bringing up that one infamous time word salad was accepted; it's infamous for a reason.
- icy_deadposts 3y ago
  Which one? Temporally Recurrent Optimal Learning [0] [1] [2] is the only one i know about, but it wasn't that famous afaik. [0] https://www.ruder.io/highlights-nips-2016/ https://www.ruder.io/highlights-nips-2016/ [1] https://medium.com/the-mission/rocket-ai-2016s-most-notorious-ai-launch-and-the-problem-with-ai-hype-d7908013f8c9 https://medium.com/the-mission/rocket-ai-2016s-most-notoriou... [2] https://securelist.com/rocket-ai-and-the-next-generation-of-av-software/77454/ https://securelist.com/rocket-ai-and-the-next-generation-of-...
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    Sokal.
    - DougMerritt 3y ago
      People who aren't familiar with the Sokal affair may miss the critical point that word salad was the author's whole intent, to expose the problem. 'a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal...to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading North American journal of cultural studies...[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions." 'The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity",[3] was published in the journal's spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. The journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair IMHO it is the most amazing academic comeuppance in history. Edit: See the author's great book: Sokal, Alan; Bricmont, Jean (1998), Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (1st ed.), New York: Picador USA, ISBN 0-312-19545-1
      - Dylan16807 3y ago
        Yes, Sokal was word salad. But they also weren't treating it like a normal paper, and the lack of peer review is part of that. More importantly, that being the big example, decades later, helps show just how rare something like that is for major conferences and journals. An estimate of it happening 1% of the time would be much too high, but even if 1% was accurate it would still mean that endorsements are quite convincing. Let alone getting picked as the "best paper".
jncfhnb 3y ago
Appeals to authority are fallacies with regard to specific logical arguments such that experts don’t get to override logic. Appeals to authority are otherwise deeply correlated to actually correct statements and are a boon, not a flaw, for explaining a context.
l33t7332273 3y ago
There is no appeal to authority here. You asked: > why is this even on HN And I think that a news article about a paper that won an award at a top CS conference is pretty quintessential HN content.
Forgeties79 3y ago
If the general consensus is that the org is legit and hosts quality work/research, then yes an appeal to authority is warranted. Does that mean they’re above scrutiny? No. But it does mean the person dismissing the work needs to present a concrete reason given it’s been validated/vetted by an org folks generally trust based on a proven track record.