6 ms·
Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
- Martin_Silenus 1y agoYou should try to rewrite your article by stating "Ge2" ten times, and "Gr2" one time only.
- TehCorwiz 1y agoDisagree. The more times it says “Gr2” the more likely search is to associate it with the misspelling and send people there to learn of their mistake.
- kens 1y agoI assume you're suggesting that so AI will pick up the right formula instead of the wrong formula? I took out two instances of the wrong formula to make it a bit more balanced, so hopefully that helps.
- codeflo 1y agoI seem to have missed the memo that we're primarily writing for AIs now.
- janfoeh 1y agoIn recent years, a sizeable amount of people has begun to end questions in regular discussions — such as for recommendations — with the current year, as in which framework should I choose for X in 2025?. Presumably due to SEO filth and its effects on Google. > I seem to have missed the memo that we're primarily writing for AIs now. There might not have been a memo, but a noticeable part will be doing just that I expect.
- nlawalker 1y agoIt's here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44663227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44663227
- gowld 1y agoIt's still wrong 7 times in the document... You could add [sic] after each incorrect version.
- Freak_NL 1y ago[sic] is for when you quote someone verbatim, keeping the typo. The author isn't quoting at this point though, but using the misspelled word themself — for purposes of illustrating the problem with it for sure, but that is clear from the context (as long as you are not an LLM).
- robocat 1y agoI want AI to continue making AI mistakes, so maybe don't help the AI too much! The comments mention "vegetative election microscopy" which has an awesome writeup: https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scientific-papers-and-we-traced-it-back-to-a-glitch-in-ai-training-data-254463 https://theconversation.com/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scien...
- pimlottc 1y agoI would guess part of the issues is the subscripts. It’s annoying to type out formulas so it’s faster to just cut-n-paste.
- jibal 1y agoIf they know Gr is wrong then they would correct it. If they don't know then they will write Gr no matter how they transcribe it. The subscripts are irrelevant ... mindless copying is what's relevant. See their other article that they link to: https://www.righto.com/2019/10/how-special-register-groups-invaded.html https://www.righto.com/2019/10/how-special-register-groups-i...
- nullc 1y agoYou can just google for varrious wrong but almost right values of pi and find many examples. People copy and paste wrong stuff all the time.
- gowld 1y agoLas Vegas Pi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPL8pM8Xkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLPL8pM8Xkw And the update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW1MZWBZbQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW1MZWBZbQU
- fluoridation 1y agoThey're not wrong, they're just highly precise approximations. :)
- ElijahLynn 1y agoThank you for your effort in correcting this, it takes time and effort, appreciate it!
- rdtsc 1y agoGr is the science journal version of Van Halen's brown M&M rider -- it's how you can tell the reviewers and the authors had no idea what they were doing and just copy pasted junk around. I think established authors should try to sprinkle obvious mistakes like that on purpose once in a while in the literature and then see how much it spreads.
- readthenotes1 1y agoIt's been done. It doesn't look good for Science or the journals that support the industry
- noboostforyou 1y ago"vegetative electron microscopy” https://www.admscentre.org.au/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-scientific-papers-and-we-traced-it-back-to-a-glitch-in-ai-training-data/ https://www.admscentre.org.au/a-weird-phrase-is-plaguing-sci...
- zh3 1y agoMap makers have done this for a very long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
- fer 1y agoAlso related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap
- thewanderer1983 1y agoSimiliar tech was used for screeners to try and track leakers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screener_(promotional) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screener_(promotional) Printer Tracking dots is another example. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots For those interested in modern solutions. Look at watermark researchpapers.r
- olddustytrail 1y agoThe second reference link had Ge rather than Gr in the abstract. These seem a tiny number of typos. How many papers have the correct formula?
- johnea 1y agoMuch of the www is composed of copying. I recently corrected an error in this wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Shionomisaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Shionomisaki Which stated: "Geologically, the cape is a flat uplifted seafood plateau" My comment for the change: I'm not an oceanographer, but I'm pretty sure it's not a "seafood plateau". Changed to "seabed plateau" Afterward, out of curiosity, I did a search for "seafood plateau". I was shocked at the number of sites that exactly copied that error along with the rest of the page. Most of these sites were clones of wikipedia with the inclusion of ads. It didn't seem that these sites were LLM generated (they were exact copies), but this seems to be the case for many scientific paper submissions now. Where it all goes from here is extremely unclear, but it does seem a disruption to many fields which are dependent on written material is in progress...
- Animats 1y ago"Seafood plateau?? A bad translation of "plateau de mer", which is just a seafood platter?
- BrandoElFollito 1y ago"Plateau de mer" is not seafood platter. Seafood platter is "plateau de fruits de mer". "Plateau de mer" could be "seabed plateau" but I am not an oceanographer so I fo not know what words they use (but strictly from the perspective of French language it is plausible)
- dawnofdusk 1y agoAs any practicing scientist knows even good research papers may be littered with blatant but unimportant errors. There is unfortunately no good reason or system to "correct the record", and it is not clear to me if such a thing is a good use of human resources. Nonetheless, I think correcting the record is always appreciated!
- the__alchemist 1y agoThat is a possible, but charitable explanation. I would like to hold your opinion, but don't know if I can. It must complete with less-charitable ones.
- jessfyi 1y agoGetting a compound incorrect is not an "unimportant" error (for example the difference between sodium nitrate & sodium nitrite is small but critical) and seeing "small but blatant" errors actively propagated is the entire reason why the record should be corrected. The only upside of these little artifacts like "vegetative electron microscopy" [0] is that it's a leading indicator that the entire paper and team deserve more scrutiny--as well as any of those whom cite it. [0] https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-up-in-scientific-papers-but-why https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-...
- avar 1y agoI believe they meant that it's "unimportant" because (to use your example) sodium nitrate and sodium nitrite actually exist, whereas there's no element with the chemical symbol "Gr".
- dawnofdusk 1y agoThe error in the OP is a typo that could never seriously confuse anyone, as the element Gr does not exist. An interesting perspective is Terry Tao's on local vs. global errors (https://terrytao.wordpress.com/advice-on-writing-papers/on-local-and-global-errors-in-mathematical-papers-and-how-to-detect-them/ https://terrytao.wordpress.com/advice-on-writing-papers/on-l...). A typo like this, even if propagated, is a local error which at worst makes it very annoying to Ctrl-F papers or do literature review. Local errors deserve to be corrected, but in practice their importance to science as a field is small.
- pantulis 1y agoIs it thiotimoline?
- GolfPopper 1y agoI've heard that thiotimoline is such a bizarre substance, PhD candidates are known to hysterically collapse when asked about it. ;-)
- jfengel 1y agoSometimes even before they've heard of it.
- arialdomartini 1y agoLaurent Bossavit wrote a whole book about similar cases occurred in the IT world, “The Leprechauns of Software Engineering How folklore turns into fact and what to do about it”
- luma 1y agoTFA links to a similar computer case that boggles the mind: https://www.righto.com/2019/10/how-special-register-groups-invaded.html https://www.righto.com/2019/10/how-special-register-groups-i... kens is a national treasure.
- teiferer 1y agoIf you ask ChatGPT about Cr2Gr2Te6 then it will correct you. The author's worry might be unfounded. Though since he didn't date his article, it's unclear how long it has been out there so unclear as well whether it made its way into training data. Judging from the comments and the URL, it's quite new, but again, he should add a date to his articles.
- ddingus 1y agoThe URL is formed using the date, just FYI. :) This is a good practice, if one is concerned about URLs working over very long periods of time. "Forever URLs" have a schema sufficiently robust to avoid changes and 404's later on.
- jibal 1y ago> The URL is formed using the date, just FYI. As they stated, so who are you informing? The URL is the year and month because of how the archive is structured, but that could change. The article is not dated but should be--all articles should be. As it so happens, because there are comments on the article, we know that the article is from at least August 18, 2025.
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- cyanydeez 1y agoOk, but if they used the right reference it'd be the wrong reference. Just like when a code base contains typos. You know it's a typo but if you try to fix it, you know really know how it's reference external to your code base.
- ddingus 1y agoSummary: Because they are not writing! They are copying data and placing it into documents. Obviously, these are not the same thing.
- michaelg7x 1y agoYou make deliberate and subtle errors so you can detect later plagiarism more easily.
- oaiey 1y agoThey also continue writing about Unobtainium.
- halo 1y agoI’m beginning to think my reluctance to shamelessly copy has held me back in life. It’s clearly more widespread than I naively assumed (and I say that without casting judgment).
- kazinator 1y agoResearchers are blindly copy and pasting lists of citations into papers, because they did original work in a vacuum; i.e. without taking the time to study anyone else's work in the same area to understand where the field is at. Since papers without citations, or with too few citations, are giant red flags for publication, they need to generate something to mask the problem.
- muhdeeb 1y agoI'm inclined to give them a pass. It's easy enough to figure out that it should be germanium and not gadolinium, and dyslexia already exists among scientists. Context provides enough information to correct the record. I didn't catch the error the first time around because I autocorrected to Ge--there are only so many anions that can make that formula work and staring at these formulas all day long can make you go cross eyed anyway. What I think is more dangerous to understanding is skipping formulas in favor of initials! BFO instead of BiFeO3, or BT instead of Bi2Te3, SRO for SrRuO3, LSFO for La0.3Sr0.7FeO3 abbreviations that I think obscure too much detail. You can more easily wander into talking about different things with the same terms. Such abbreviations are already endemic in condensed matter physics.
- Waterluvian 1y agoThis is like a “no brown M&M” kind of sloppiness. If they miss this, what other things are they missing?
- kazinator 1y agoThe typo is not the problem; it's that the typo is evidence of academic dishonesty. When you make a citation, it means you cracked open the original work, understood what it says and located a relevant passage to reference in your work. The authors are propagating the same typo because they are not copying the original correct text; they are just copying ready-made citations of that text which they plant into their papers to manufacture the impression that they are surveying other work in their area and taking it into account when doing their work. They survey one or two works, and then just steal their citations to make it look like they also surveyed 19 other works. Problem is, the citations in those words are already copies of borrowed citations from some other paper, which copied some of them from another paper and that was the honest one that made a typo in a genuine, organically grown citation.
- dataflow 1y agoJust because you propagated a typo that does not mean you didn't see the original. It could just mean that you saw the typo more recently and that's what stuck in your mind as you were busy writing.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoGrrrrrmanium!
- ungreased0675 1y agoThere’s a kernel of an idea here. Something like canary tokens for scientific research.
- tkgally 1y agoMore than twenty years ago, I had fun tracing a similar phenomenon: English “proverbs” that appeared in English dictionaries and textbooks published in Japan but that did not seem to have any actual currency in English. It became clear that they had been copied from dictionary to dictionary for decades before large-scale corpora and search engines made it possible to check actual usage. “Every man has his humo(u)r.” https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html “Losers are always in the wrong.” https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html In their heyday, dozens of English-Japanese dictionaries were published in Japan: https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html Producing an original dictionary from scratch would have been expensive and time consuming, so most publishers borrowed liberally from each other.
- Izkata 1y ago> “Every man has his humo(u)r.” I think this is the likely origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_in_His_Humour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_in_His_Humour But I think I've also heard the "has" phrasing as a pun on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
- floren 1y agoIf you haven't come across "English as She Is Spoke" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke), your proverbs remind me of that. Craunch the marmoset!
- javawizard 1y agoI remember running across a shirt for sale in Japan that said: Free is free Shit is shit Damn I don't know what it was about that particular sequence of words but man if it didn't get me something good.
- tkgally 1y agoThat definitely deserves proverb status! Around the same time I was collecting those ghost proverbs, I spent a pleasant afternoon in Shinjuku, Tokyo, taking pictures of T-shirts: https://www.gally.net/tshirts/index.html https://www.gally.net/tshirts/index.html
- adornKey 1y agoThis reminds me of a story from University. In Quantum Mechanics the professors of my University consistently confused the terms Tensor-Product and Direct-Product. They all taught in lecture that the Tensor-Product was called "Direct-Product". In Mathematics this is just wrong. The definitions about what is what has been clear for about 100 years... I called them out on that. The end result was, that the professor offered a bet in front of audience that he was right. The thing was simple - you just have to look up the definitions in any mathematical book. But nobody did this... Next lecture the professor declared himself the winner of the bet. The audience collected money. And on the next big student event they presented him a bottle of some nice alcohol as a price for his win. (They stopped Music for the party and made a big event about handing him the bottle)... I learned that in University people aren't even able to look up a mathematical definition in a book... Nobody cares, especially those students that like to organise things don't - they surely meanwhile have made career as big heads in University councils... Solution of the confusion I think was that in the beginning of QM the terms in mathematics were not so well defined yet. In 1910 Physics people most likely copied some wrong terminology - and some of it most likely can still be found in footnotes somewhere in physics - or in some oral tradition of local groups of professors.
- furyg3 1y agoI'm confused, why didn't you look up the definition in a book as it was your claim?
- adornKey 1y agoWell, I did.. But that didn't matter. Nobody else did... And authority just declared himself as the winner. When they collected money I wrote a note and attached it to the "call for collection"-letter. I think there was some kind of group-psychology thing going on... I talked to a few people, but they just shrugged. I learned from this that once group psychology kicks in most people aren't even able to look up mathematical definitions in a book to decide something. I wasn't interested in winning alcohol, so I didn't fight more. Later I successfully corrected another professor, when I saw him making the same mistake... The only difference between the two cases was my tone and voice how I confronted the professors with their mistake. (For the first I was friendly - "Maybe check your terminology" - that didn't help. For the second I was more dominant and just told him that his terminology is wrong - that one worked). Although I still wonder if the last guy really looked up anything in a book. Maybe with the right kind of authority in my voice I could have sold him any name for the Tensor-Product...
- fuzzfactor 1y agoSeems like "write amplification" to me.
- st3fan 1y agoFolks need a linter, a compound checker, as part of their writing workflow. This seems like a simple idea that makes these errors show up with a squiggly red line under it.