8 ms·

False claims in a widely-cited paper

341 points by qsi 6mo ago

paulpauper 6mo ago
Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.
- sillysaurusx 6mo ago
  > and actually good and original stuff gets rejected This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true? In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context. Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.
  - qsi 6mo ago
    Ooops, sorry... I cannot edit the URL in the submission. I should have checked.
    - cwillu 6mo ago
      You can always send a short polite email to hn@ycombinator.com with corrections you can't make yourself
      - qsi 6mo ago
        I did, thanks for the suggestion.
    - sillysaurusx 6mo ago
      No it's fine, it thoroughly amused a HN nerd like me. I've been keeping track of how HN works for well over a decade, and noticing small changes like this is something that's genuinely gratifying. The mods will no doubt be by to clean up the url shortly. I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.
  - hansvm 6mo ago
    > good stuff rejected, are you sure that's true In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either. Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example: One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in. [0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbariAMS9-12-2019.pdf https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...
    - paulpauper 6mo ago
      I mean at a top or middle ranked journal. There are tons of predatory journals that will publish anything
    - scheme271 6mo ago
      Personally, I'm shocked it went from submission to publication 5 weeks! I didn't think that was possible.
- Aperocky 6mo ago
  For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc. But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.
  - JoeOfTexas 6mo ago
    Status quo changes at the speed of snail.
    - Tostino 6mo ago
      Usually when people die and vacate their seats of power in society.
    - Aperocky 6mo ago
      Or by trillions - the peer review process will no doubt continue, its continued importance maybe in question.
  - MarkusQ 6mo ago
    "For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to [...]including practices such as peer review" Nitpick: peer review as we know it is only about fifty years old. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&...
- zer00eyz 6mo ago
  > and actually good and original stuff gets rejected This isnt a new thing though. Cantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th... they didnt just reject him, they basically publicly beat him down, and drove him away from math and into depression. David Bohm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential spent years on the outside for having his ideas on this. Geoffrey Hinton: was considered a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc). Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972... Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.
  - bsder 6mo ago
    Katalin Karikó and her work on mRNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3 Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.
- BobbyTables2 6mo ago
  Even in more respected journals, peer review is often done by beleaguered grad students who could be still relatively new to the field. They lack the experience to look at things with a critical eye.
  - tylerhou 6mo ago
    Graduate students! Hah! ML researchers can only hope their papers at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPs are reviewed by graduate students!
    - MarkusQ 6mo ago
      You had grad students? Ha, we would'a killed for grad students. Our work was reviewed by two trained pigeons and a dead salmon. And we liked it!
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
OhioMan2943 6mo ago
So we're firmly in the era of few people caring about few things now aren't we.
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
  - erikerikson 6mo ago
    I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...
  - austinjp 6mo ago
    Oh I'm sure the grifters will find ways in. The other disciplines may have provided a "moat" for the past few decades, but it won't last forever.
  - p-e-w 6mo ago
    I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results. Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.
  - Georgelemental 6mo ago
    Quantum physics, due to its own "difficulty of observing and measuring", has its fair share of nonsense too
foweltschmerz 6mo ago
disheartening
ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
cleaned up url: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/false-claims-in-a-published-no-corrections-no-consequences-welcome-to-the-business-school/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/false-clai... (if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)
- internetter 6mo ago
  dang could you change the link
  - cwillu 6mo ago
    hn doesn't have tags; email hn@ycombinator.com (which is what the submitter did)
stinkbeetle 6mo ago
[flagged]
- ginkgotree 6mo ago
  Excellent summary, as unfortunate as it is.
- andrewjf 6mo ago
  That's really root cause in everything, isn't it? - The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions) - Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings) - Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right". Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.
  - lotsofpulp 6mo ago
    >The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions) I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out. Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete. The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.
    - andrewjf 6mo ago
      Fair point! Makes complete sense. But I wouldn't exactly call "professionals trying to make high brow media" exclusive alternative to Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok. A lot of the propaganda (and sane washing) is coming from mass media, too. I feel like the only "legit" media outlets are like Reuters, AP, and some international ones, I guess.
ls612 6mo ago
Management Science, how am I not surprised? They have the worst rep of any Econ/Econ adjacent field for good reason.
- SanjayMehta 6mo ago
  Management, Political, Economic, Social Sciences are not sciences.
  - tovej 6mo ago
    Social sciences definitely are.
    - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
      No. It's social studies, not science.
      - tovej 6mo ago
        Social studies is a school subject, that's irrelevant. You really think sociology is not a science then? Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. They have to, because physical sciences deal with deterministic objects, while social sciences deal with nondeterministic subjects.
        modo_mario 6mo ago
        >Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. Whilst I agree that can be a science the amount of contradicting bs, ideologically driven stuff i've seen come out of one such department and their replication crisis kind of undercut their credibility on that front for me.
        tovej 6mo ago
        There's been similar cases in physical sciences. E.g. all the room temperature superconductor stuff a few years back, Avi Loeb claiming that an object hurtling thorugh the solar system was alien technology. There's also more fraud in medicine or health sciences. You make some very handwavy claims about ideology, do you mean economy by this? It's the most clearly politicized of the social sciences, qnd the one that has been most funded by political actors. This I can concede. But don't throw sociology under the bus just because economy has a bad rap.
banana_sandwich 6mo ago
“Professionals” in traffic engineering still religiously cling to “standards” that are largely based on BS served up by auto companies pre 1940. Many such cases of this, it seems.
- komali2 6mo ago
  At least your traffic engineers set standards. In Taiwan often the standards come straight from the legislative yuan, aka just vibes laws from people who are driven around in private cars their whole lives.
  - nativeit 6mo ago
    Don’t worry, we’re getting there. They just started dismantling what they refer to as the “administrative state”, but which largely deferred substantial questions requiring skill and non-partisan judgement to their respective experts. It was never perfect, nor free from partisan and/or economic concerns, but the replacement appears to be self-interested narcissists and sycophants and their personal fiefdoms, with precious little space for competence, logic, or integrity.
    - shrubby 6mo ago
      At least now the masks (and Musks) are off. It was never between the left and the right or any other false dichotomies, but always between the Epstein-class and the actual human beings. The question now is that do the normal people realize and act on the fact that the elevator to Epstein class was never working. Or even better, they don't want to become the zillionaire class husk of a human.
      - tovej 6mo ago
        You say it's not left v. right, but it sure sounds like you think the right is what's causing inequality. Which I agree with.
        6mo ago
Analemma_ 6mo ago
The consequences here don’t seem all that bad, it’s just a silly management fad. By contrast, “Growth in a Time of Debt” from Reinhardt and Rogoff steered multiple national governments into pointless self-destructive and immiserating austerity, despite being equally bunk, and none of the authors ever saw any consequences for that either. You can’t even blame that one on “management science”, it was a straight macroeconomics paper. There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.
- malshe 6mo ago
  That paper wasn’t even peer reviewed. If I remember it correctly it was published in the AER Papers and Proceedings.
- qsera 6mo ago
  political? what about business? If junk science can help a huge market to keep selling, I think it will be the biggest blocker.
- tdeck 6mo ago
  > pointless I'm sure it benefitted some people.
- dannyobrien 6mo ago
  So, I was interested in this statement, and looked into it barely, and on one side, its conclusions were replicated in a number of other papers[1] (despite the headlines, three years after its publication, of a simple calculation error)[2]. I'll state that neither of these points are a slam-dunk if you're a member of one political side or another. If you're a believer in austerity, you'll look at the corroborating studies; if you think that was a bad policy choice, you can argue that they're all junk science, pushed out by supporters of the status quo. I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here. [1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-growth-decade-studies https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190
- 6mo ago
arjie 6mo ago
There's this 'criterion of embarrassment' / 'cui bono' sort of standard[0] that really helps judge these things. So many people perform science that seems to always confirm the positions they've held. All the "society is terrible today" people like to quote LendingClub's "70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" without knowing it's LendingClub content marketing. The snail darter guy happened to find a novel species that is endangered and genetically identical to a non-endangered one just in the place where he was trying to get a dam banned. The sustainability guys find that companies that focus on sustainability do better. The diversity guys find that companies that focus on diversity do better. A scientist who gets a grant from Philip Morris finds that cigarettes aren't bad for you. It reminds me of something my dad said while watching Generation Kill - a TV show adapted from the written work of an embedded journalist in Iraq. The show, made by Americans, depicts the US armed forces as ramified through with bumbling fools seeking glory with a few competent people in there. So we finish watching the series and my dad says "Only the Americans would make a show like this" and it's somewhat[1] true. I think perhaps that being able to create a machine that tells you the truth is crucial to success and I feel that the US's peak period as unipolar hegemon (Gulf War I to the end of Obama I) this was more the case than it is today, though this is more of a feeling than anything I have verified. It also reminds me of an old sort of censorship, one which George Orwell talks about in regards to Animal Farm[2] - a book that was criticized because it perhaps harmed the greater cause of communism. There's too much to quote in his essay because I find the whole thing worthy of reading, but here's one bit: > Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. ... > Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ʻYesʼ. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ʻHow about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?ʼ, and the answer more often than not will be ʻNoʼ. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. There is even today an orthodoxy of sorts and if you were to contradict it, it is considered sinful to say so. I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people. Could such a thing be published if it were true? People often say "what are you going to do with that information?" and somehow I don't share that view that all science must necessarily immediately deliver applied benefit. Knowing is good for its own sake. Truth is good for its own sake. Or at least that's what I believe. I suppose I'll only know through the period of my own life whether this belief is adaptive. Who knows, a present or future power might be one formed entirely through inaccurate data and information[3], and we might be as Orks and painting things red might make them faster because we believe it so in sufficient numbers. 0: Obviously there are limits. Eli Lilly benefits from GLP-1RA drugs working well but they do in fact work well. 1: Others obviously also make fun of themselves, but something like In The Loop parodies specific people more than the whole machine and its participants. Generation Kill feels much more real a depiction of large organizations and their incentive mechanisms - especially how they grind forward and get the outcomes they want despite everything else. Perhaps my least favourite parts were the emotional-breakdown bits at the end, which I've since found out that the participants themselves said were invented for TV. 2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm 3: Open societies like ours have the problem that external misdirection leaks into internal data but perhaps with sufficient computerization we can keep separate truth and propaganda within the structure of government
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
pjdesno 6mo ago
Are there any factual allegations on that page? All I could find was "the method described in the paper is not the method the authors actually used", without any elaboration. I'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."
- karel-3d 6mo ago
  There is a replication study of the Andrew Kling who made the claim of false claims first, I guess there is more info there https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4648438 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4648438
- dash2 6mo ago
  Management Studies is the top management journal, it is highly regarded and would count as fairly prestigious in e.g. tenure applications.
- jkman 6mo ago
  It is elaborated on in the first linked article in this one, under the section "Research Integrity Offices (Part 1)".
altairprime 6mo ago
Previously on HN, the referenced paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151 (2 months ago, 374 comments)
ernsheong 6mo ago
I'm very confused because there are 2 Andrews, the author in the blog post only states "Andrew", and by the list of Authors the author seems to be Andrew Gelman, but the slug in the first link is "aking", and then there is also Andrew King, lol.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- flexagoon 6mo ago
  Andrew King seems to be the person who published the original exposé of the paper: > The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King [...]
- zimpenfish 6mo ago
  > the author in the blog post only states "Andrew" If you click on that "Andrew", it takes you to [0] which is clear that it's Gelman. [0] https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/ https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/
zx8080 6mo ago
Somewhat unrelated but relevant thought: from software engineering experience in large orgs, correction of any issue rarely worth any effort. AI will drive commiting more and more papers with less and less review. The review takes effort, too much in the age of easy generation. With this, science will probably lose trust even more in the coming years.
- rectang 6mo ago
  Brandolini's Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is the adage for our age: > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
  - bonesss 6mo ago
    I’m cautiously optimistic that LLMs have a role in addressing that asymmetry to the side of good faith actors. Gish galloping bad faith trolls aren’t new. LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But now, We Have The Technology, refuting a pile of poo semi-accurately should be cheap (or at least getting cheaper). I don’t need an LLM on my phone that can do tax law in Georgia the country. But an “AI Assistant” that could highlight logical fallacies, shifting goalposts, non-responsive dialog, rhetorical obfuscations, etc, would be useful online, at the bar, and work (ie when HR tries to “HR” you, but also is lying and obfuscating about it). We already have models and people that bullshit. Maybe refutation models are the cure… Chinese needle snakes to catch the lizards, Gorillas to catch the snakes…
    - Pay08 6mo ago
      > LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But does take longer to disprove.
    - applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
      This is a horrendous take. The only thing this is going to do / is already doing is increasing people's creation of their own reality bubble. LLMs are not some source of objective truth, they will inevitability lean towards reinforcing either (1) prompter's position, (2) the model trainer's position, or (3) the statistically average position, none of which are guaranteed to be logically correct. But people do take them as objective truth, so now we have a bunch of fucking morons going around saying "see, ChatGPT says so, I'm right!".
zx8080 6mo ago
Hey, don't take kids joy! The paper was cited thousands of times, lots of uni students built their early career using it!
nerolawa 6mo ago
[dead]
rudderdev 6mo ago
Peer reviews need to be more transparent and accountable. Otherwise, we are sure to lose to the misinformation war that is rapidly reaching its peak, thanks but no thanks to AI.
- thayne 6mo ago
  How would you do that? One reason peer reviews are usually anonymous is to prevent retribution (ex. rejecting someone's paper, because they rejected yours). Not that it is perfect at doing that, but if you make it more transparent, you may trade one problem for another.
thayne 6mo ago
> their policies allow only authors to request corrections Say what now? So the only way to get a correction for a paper is if the author is willing to publicly admit they messed up? Something that an unethical researcher is very unlikely to do.
bradley13 6mo ago
Some years ago, my institution (primarily a teaching college) decided it needed an additional accreditation. The organization they went with requires faculty to publish. Including our undergrad business faculty. We all know that "publish or perish" is stupid. The premier example of Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Why can't our highly paid administration understand this?
- flowerthoughts 6mo ago
  They were pressured from somewhere to show results. They had to invent a metric to be able to prove they make results. It was easier to ask the neighbour what they are measuring, than to think it through and form a synthesis. If it works for the Jones', it'll work for us.
- InkCanon 6mo ago
  I think a more useful version of the law is "Any good measure requires a good person." For example, a good measure of research is to have an intelligent faculty member or members read it and decide if it's good. Converting it to a mechanical calculation is fundamentally bad.
- pas 6mo ago
  What's undergrad business faculty? The people who teach undergrads or undergrad TAs?
ANarrativeApe 6mo ago
Stop buying from/submitting to discredited publishers.
- zahlman 6mo ago
  Some problems with that: "discredited" isn't a binary; memes (in the original sense) from papers circulate easily even if nobody pays the publishers (the problem is arguably even worse, because people will read abstracts for free and distort the claims further); there might not be higher quality alternatives.
froh 6mo ago
oh how I'd love to see a gitlab GitHub like infrastructure and culture for scientific publication. let them have the repo private/authors and reviewers only until publication. but all flaws are issues, later reported issues are right next to the paper, heck there could even badges for publication and review status... a woman may dream...
- neurotroph 6mo ago
  There is: https://osf.io/ https://osf.io/
fergie 6mo ago
As somebody who has spent a bit of time in academia, I have often been slightly alarmed by some of the research (and opinon) that comes out of business schools. One thing is that it is often unsubstantiated and just plain wrong, another is that it often seems like the authors kind of know it, almost as if they are intentionally pandering to a lowbrow/midwit audience, and they expect everybody else to be in on the game. Its mystifying.
- Lionga 6mo ago
  Not at all limited to business schools
- asplake 6mo ago
  I had the privilege last night of attending a lecture given by Prof Sir John Kay (Obliquity, Radical Uncertainty, etc). He was scathing on two points: 1) the way the world changed in the 1970s from management as responsibility to leadership as prize, and 2) the abject failure of business schools to develop a serious body of knowledge. Taken together, business schools have become cash cows for universities while still being held in disdain by academia. This from the first dean of Oxford's Said Business School.
  - AdamN 6mo ago
    There was tremendous resistance to setting up that school both because of where the money came from but more so because of the possibility that the school would not actually be academic but more 'professional' instead. I can't comment on the former as it seems mostly just xenophobic but maybe there are other angles there. The latter is definitely a concern though.
    - graemep 6mo ago
      Not xenophobic. Oxford happily takes money from people from anywhere all the time. It might be things such as his involvement in the Al Yamamah arms deal.
- ycombinete 6mo ago
f30e3dfed1c9 6mo ago
Two out of three authors from Harvard Business School. The place is practically a horseshit factory.
anshulbasia27 6mo ago
The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...
- jltsiren 6mo ago
  The policy is what you would expect from a journal that is effectively run by volunteers. While the publisher has paid employees, the editorial board in charge of the journal itself seems to consist of volunteers. When you have a volunteer organization, the impact on people's personal lives is one of the main factors driving decisions. You try to avoid getting involved in somebody else's controversies, as the impact is almost always negative. From that perspective, the policy seems clear. The authors are responsible for their papers. If someone else claims that a paper should be corrected, they are free to write a paper of their own. That way no volunteer has to take responsibility for someone else's claims.
  - pas 6mo ago
    They could at least send the paper with the reported problems out to a new set of referees. And just as they decided to take responsibility for publishing, they can take responsibility after a similar review for retraction (or issuing an errata or whatever fancy way they want to signal the result of the process).
- gus_massa 6mo ago
  This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth. Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know. In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots. Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while. In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source. Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit. From the article: >> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.
devcraft_ai 6mo ago
[flagged]
throw310822 6mo ago
There's a simple rule of thumb that seems obvious to me but is widely ignored: we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values- or between what is and what we think should be. Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values, which makes any coincidence between the two extremely suspicious.
- b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
  >Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values... what? that's nonsense. Not everybody's values are the same, for one thing. Especially as society has become more and more international. You should be equally skeptical of any result until proper evidence is presented and verified. Values should have no bearing either way on empirical truth-claims.
  - throw310822 6mo ago
    Exactly, you're saying the exact same thing that I am. "Orthogonal" means independent, unrelated. This is why coincidence is very suspicious, because it's statistically very improbable.
    - b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
      you also said >we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values And I'm saying that's silly because you should hold all claims in equal skepticism. Just because something contains an ideological basis does not, in itself, make it more or less correct.
Beestie 6mo ago
Stopped reading not long after noticing the title of the paper in question. The very hypothesis is laughable. It is completely irrelevant if the hypothesis is supported or not. That paper is like flypaper for anyone seeking affirmation of sustainability policies. I could write a paper tomorrow claiming that [insert conspiracy theory here] is absolutely true and why Big [insert hated industry here] doesn't want you to know the truth and it would be cited until the earth crashes into the sun. It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation. I could write a paper about that but wouldn't hold my breath on getting any cites.
- bregma 6mo ago
  > It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation. But... that's exactly what Big Academia doesn't want you to know.
- pas 6mo ago
  the hypothesis seems pretty important and interesting, even if hard to study (and hard to classify companies, and sustainability, way too many degrees of freedom, so it would need preregistration, etc)
mgkuhn 6mo ago
I thought the proper way to correct questionable results is to conduct and publish a follow-up study that independently looks at the same question with better data and better methodology. And wait until multiple independent teams have done the same. And then write a meta-analysis on the emerging pool of independent papers. That's how scientific consent is normally formed, at least in rigorous disciplines like experimental physics or medicine. A single paper in the end is going to be just a single data point in any such meta-analysis study.
- fabian2k 6mo ago
  It depends on whether the paper is simply wrong for some reason, or if there is either fraud or a fundamental mistake in the procedure. But in general you're right, retractions are not the way to handle most scientific disputes. Your point about consensus unfortunately doesn't quite work in cases like this were the people using the paper are not scientists. They're not continuing work in the same area, people are using this paper to support their arguments.
Asooka 6mo ago
What does it matter that the claims are "false" if claiming them as the truth results in encouraging the society we wish to exist? That paper is a cornerstone of sustainability initiatives, if you retract it, you might as well set the whole Earth on fire. To hell with integrity, I say, it's time to do some good for the world!

341 points by qsi 6mo ago

Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.

sillysaurusx 6mo ago
> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true? In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context. Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time. Anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.
- qsi 6mo ago
  Ooops, sorry... I cannot edit the URL in the submission. I should have checked.
  - cwillu 6mo ago
    You can always send a short polite email to hn@ycombinator.com with corrections you can't make yourself
    - qsi 6mo ago
      I did, thanks for the suggestion.
  - sillysaurusx 6mo ago
    No it's fine, it thoroughly amused a HN nerd like me. I've been keeping track of how HN works for well over a decade, and noticing small changes like this is something that's genuinely gratifying. The mods will no doubt be by to clean up the url shortly. I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.
- hansvm 6mo ago
  > good stuff rejected, are you sure that's true In the academic circles I frequent, it's not true. Any one journal might reject the good stuff, but it doesn't take more than a few applications to find a journal who recognizes it, and the cost of producing the research is so high that with the current career incentives it'd be ridiculous not to continue submitting. That does mean that journal "quality" matters less than you might think, but I don't think anyone's surprised by that notion either. Errors the other direction are more common. I'll state that as an easily verified fact, but people like fun stories, so here's an example: One professor I worked with had me write up a bunch of case studies of some math technique, tried to convince me that it was worth a paper, paid somebody else to typeset my work, and told me to compensate him if I wanted my name on the "paper." I didn't really; it was beneath any real mathematician; but there now exists some journal which has a bastardized, plagiarized version of my work with some other unrelated author tacked on available for the world to see [0], and it's worth calling out that nothing about the "paper" is journal-worthy. It's far too easy to find a home for academic slop, and I saw that in every field I spent any serious amount of time in. [0] https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbariAMS9-12-2019.pdf https://www.m-hikari.com/ams/ams-2019/ams-9-12-2019/p/jabbar...
  - paulpauper 6mo ago
    I mean at a top or middle ranked journal. There are tons of predatory journals that will publish anything
  - scheme271 6mo ago
    Personally, I'm shocked it went from submission to publication 5 weeks! I didn't think that was possible.
Aperocky 6mo ago
For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to the fact that theory derive practical and useful results. This made academic system flourish including practices such as peer review, etc. But for the millenniums preceding that, it was the reverse, practice and observation drove theory, and I wonder if we are going back to that and practice and once again dominate how we discover new things as a civilization.
- JoeOfTexas 6mo ago
  Status quo changes at the speed of snail.
  - Tostino 6mo ago
    Usually when people die and vacate their seats of power in society.
  - Aperocky 6mo ago
    Or by trillions - the peer review process will no doubt continue, its continued importance maybe in question.
- MarkusQ 6mo ago
  "For almost the last two centuries, we have grown accustomed to [...]including practices such as peer review" Nitpick: peer review as we know it is only about fifty years old. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+reviewed&...
zer00eyz 6mo ago
> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected This isnt a new thing though. Cantor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversy_over_Cantor%27s_th... they didnt just reject him, they basically publicly beat him down, and drove him away from math and into depression. David Bohm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_potential spent years on the outside for having his ideas on this. Geoffrey Hinton: was considered a quack and an outsider for YEARS because of his ideas on AI... the breakthrough he spawned was done on a shoestring of a budget (read: home pc). Edit: I forgot John Yudkin: Pure White and Deadly, talking about how bad sugar is for you in 1972... Rejected by the mainstream academics, and in a brutal way, happens a LOT more than we think.
- bsder 6mo ago
  Katalin Karikó and her work on mRNA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3 Her advisor, Suhadolnik, was a gigantic asshole and paid no price whatsoever for it. University of Pennsylvania demoted her and denied her tenure and nobody involved paid any price for that. etc.
BobbyTables2 6mo ago
Even in more respected journals, peer review is often done by beleaguered grad students who could be still relatively new to the field. They lack the experience to look at things with a critical eye.
- tylerhou 6mo ago
  Graduate students! Hah! ML researchers can only hope their papers at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPs are reviewed by graduate students!
  - MarkusQ 6mo ago
    You had grad students? Ha, we would'a killed for grad students. Our work was reviewed by two trained pigeons and a dead salmon. And we liked it!
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

OhioMan2943 6mo ago

So we're firmly in the era of few people caring about few things now aren't we.

lotsofpulp 6mo ago
I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
- erikerikson 6mo ago
  I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...
- austinjp 6mo ago
  Oh I'm sure the grifters will find ways in. The other disciplines may have provided a "moat" for the past few decades, but it won't last forever.
- p-e-w 6mo ago
  I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results. Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.
- Georgelemental 6mo ago
  Quantum physics, due to its own "difficulty of observing and measuring", has its fair share of nonsense too

foweltschmerz 6mo ago

disheartening

ChrisArchitect 6mo ago

cleaned up url: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/false-claims-in-a-published-no-corrections-no-consequences-welcome-to-the-business-school/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/03/24/false-clai... (if not trying to highlight that particular comment on it)

internetter 6mo ago
dang could you change the link
- cwillu 6mo ago
  hn doesn't have tags; email hn@ycombinator.com (which is what the submitter did)

stinkbeetle 6mo ago

[flagged]

ginkgotree 6mo ago
Excellent summary, as unfortunate as it is.
andrewjf 6mo ago
That's really root cause in everything, isn't it? - The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions) - Anti Vax (& other) movements is about people only receptive to people saying what they already feel (feelings) - Accountability is gone because people care about being on the winning team and being "right". Reason, Logic, and Evidence seems completely replaced by propaganda and mistrust of experts (fueled by the propaganda), but it's all rooted in comfort in people's own emotional validation.
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  >The consolidation of media (& social media in general) is about making money from outrage (emotions) I think it is the exact opposite. Now that anyone in the world can create and share "media", professionals trying to make high brow media cannot compete with the emotional reaction slop that the other 8 billion people put out. Look at what is popular on Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok, and now even the federal US government targets the same lowest common denominator. Even Fox News and ESPN cannot compete. The supply of media sellers is the most unconsolidated it has ever been, with millions of random people recording their own faux outrage and uploading it daily for others to mindlessly consume.
  - andrewjf 6mo ago
    Fair point! Makes complete sense. But I wouldn't exactly call "professionals trying to make high brow media" exclusive alternative to Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, TikTok. A lot of the propaganda (and sane washing) is coming from mass media, too. I feel like the only "legit" media outlets are like Reuters, AP, and some international ones, I guess.

ls612 6mo ago

Management Science, how am I not surprised? They have the worst rep of any Econ/Econ adjacent field for good reason.

SanjayMehta 6mo ago
Management, Political, Economic, Social Sciences are not sciences.
- tovej 6mo ago
  Social sciences definitely are.
  - SanjayMehta 6mo ago
    No. It's social studies, not science.
    - tovej 6mo ago
      Social studies is a school subject, that's irrelevant. You really think sociology is not a science then? Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. They have to, because physical sciences deal with deterministic objects, while social sciences deal with nondeterministic subjects.
      - modo_mario 6mo ago
        >Sociologists do way more rigorous statistics than physicists do. Whilst I agree that can be a science the amount of contradicting bs, ideologically driven stuff i've seen come out of one such department and their replication crisis kind of undercut their credibility on that front for me.
        tovej 6mo ago
        There's been similar cases in physical sciences. E.g. all the room temperature superconductor stuff a few years back, Avi Loeb claiming that an object hurtling thorugh the solar system was alien technology. There's also more fraud in medicine or health sciences. You make some very handwavy claims about ideology, do you mean economy by this? It's the most clearly politicized of the social sciences, qnd the one that has been most funded by political actors. This I can concede. But don't throw sociology under the bus just because economy has a bad rap.

banana_sandwich 6mo ago

“Professionals” in traffic engineering still religiously cling to “standards” that are largely based on BS served up by auto companies pre 1940. Many such cases of this, it seems.

komali2 6mo ago
At least your traffic engineers set standards. In Taiwan often the standards come straight from the legislative yuan, aka just vibes laws from people who are driven around in private cars their whole lives.
- nativeit 6mo ago
  Don’t worry, we’re getting there. They just started dismantling what they refer to as the “administrative state”, but which largely deferred substantial questions requiring skill and non-partisan judgement to their respective experts. It was never perfect, nor free from partisan and/or economic concerns, but the replacement appears to be self-interested narcissists and sycophants and their personal fiefdoms, with precious little space for competence, logic, or integrity.
  - shrubby 6mo ago
    At least now the masks (and Musks) are off. It was never between the left and the right or any other false dichotomies, but always between the Epstein-class and the actual human beings. The question now is that do the normal people realize and act on the fact that the elevator to Epstein class was never working. Or even better, they don't want to become the zillionaire class husk of a human.
    - tovej 6mo ago
      You say it's not left v. right, but it sure sounds like you think the right is what's causing inequality. Which I agree with.
      - 6mo ago

Analemma_ 6mo ago

The consequences here don’t seem all that bad, it’s just a silly management fad. By contrast, “Growth in a Time of Debt” from Reinhardt and Rogoff steered multiple national governments into pointless self-destructive and immiserating austerity, despite being equally bunk, and none of the authors ever saw any consequences for that either. You can’t even blame that one on “management science”, it was a straight macroeconomics paper. There’s no accountability for junk science, especially if it props up the political status quo.

malshe 6mo ago
That paper wasn’t even peer reviewed. If I remember it correctly it was published in the AER Papers and Proceedings.
qsera 6mo ago
political? what about business? If junk science can help a huge market to keep selling, I think it will be the biggest blocker.
tdeck 6mo ago
> pointless I'm sure it benefitted some people.
dannyobrien 6mo ago
So, I was interested in this statement, and looked into it barely, and on one side, its conclusions were replicated in a number of other papers[1] (despite the headlines, three years after its publication, of a simple calculation error)[2]. I'll state that neither of these points are a slam-dunk if you're a member of one political side or another. If you're a believer in austerity, you'll look at the corroborating studies; if you think that was a bad policy choice, you can argue that they're all junk science, pushed out by supporters of the status quo. I suspect what it narrowly shows though is that this isn't the same category of error as what's being discussed here. [1] https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-growth-decade-studies https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-gro... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190
6mo ago

arjie 6mo ago

There's this 'criterion of embarrassment' / 'cui bono' sort of standard[0] that really helps judge these things. So many people perform science that seems to always confirm the positions they've held. All the "society is terrible today" people like to quote LendingClub's "70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck" without knowing it's LendingClub content marketing. The snail darter guy happened to find a novel species that is endangered and genetically identical to a non-endangered one just in the place where he was trying to get a dam banned. The sustainability guys find that companies that focus on sustainability do better. The diversity guys find that companies that focus on diversity do better. A scientist who gets a grant from Philip Morris finds that cigarettes aren't bad for you. It reminds me of something my dad said while watching Generation Kill - a TV show adapted from the written work of an embedded journalist in Iraq. The show, made by Americans, depicts the US armed forces as ramified through with bumbling fools seeking glory with a few competent people in there. So we finish watching the series and my dad says "Only the Americans would make a show like this" and it's somewhat[1] true. I think perhaps that being able to create a machine that tells you the truth is crucial to success and I feel that the US's peak period as unipolar hegemon (Gulf War I to the end of Obama I) this was more the case than it is today, though this is more of a feeling than anything I have verified. It also reminds me of an old sort of censorship, one which George Orwell talks about in regards to Animal Farm[2] - a book that was criticized because it perhaps harmed the greater cause of communism. There's too much to quote in his essay because I find the whole thing worthy of reading, but here's one bit: > Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ʻnot doneʼ. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ʻinopportuneʼ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. ... > Is every opinion, however unpopular – however foolish, even – entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ʻYesʼ. But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ʻHow about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?ʼ, and the answer more often than not will be ʻNoʼ. In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. There is even today an orthodoxy of sorts and if you were to contradict it, it is considered sinful to say so. I'm Indian so perhaps it is safe for me to use this as a race of choice but what if it were found that Indians actually are less smart than, say, White people. Could such a thing be published if it were true? People often say "what are you going to do with that information?" and somehow I don't share that view that all science must necessarily immediately deliver applied benefit. Knowing is good for its own sake. Truth is good for its own sake. Or at least that's what I believe. I suppose I'll only know through the period of my own life whether this belief is adaptive. Who knows, a present or future power might be one formed entirely through inaccurate data and information[3], and we might be as Orks and painting things red might make them faster because we believe it so in sufficient numbers. 0: Obviously there are limits. Eli Lilly benefits from GLP-1RA drugs working well but they do in fact work well. 1: Others obviously also make fun of themselves, but something like In The Loop parodies specific people more than the whole machine and its participants. Generation Kill feels much more real a depiction of large organizations and their incentive mechanisms - especially how they grind forward and get the outcomes they want despite everything else. Perhaps my least favourite parts were the emotional-breakdown bits at the end, which I've since found out that the participants themselves said were invented for TV. 2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/orwell/1945/preface.htm 3: Open societies like ours have the problem that external misdirection leaks into internal data but perhaps with sufficient computerization we can keep separate truth and propaganda within the structure of government

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

pjdesno 6mo ago

Are there any factual allegations on that page? All I could find was "the method described in the paper is not the method the authors actually used", without any elaboration. I'll add that the reaction of most of academia will be "It's in a management journal - of course it's nonsense."

karel-3d 6mo ago
There is a replication study of the Andrew Kling who made the claim of false claims first, I guess there is more info there https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4648438 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4648438
dash2 6mo ago
Management Studies is the top management journal, it is highly regarded and would count as fairly prestigious in e.g. tenure applications.
jkman 6mo ago
It is elaborated on in the first linked article in this one, under the section "Research Integrity Offices (Part 1)".

altairprime 6mo ago

Previously on HN, the referenced paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46752151 (2 months ago, 374 comments)

ernsheong 6mo ago

I'm very confused because there are 2 Andrews, the author in the blog post only states "Andrew", and by the list of Authors the author seems to be Andrew Gelman, but the slug in the first link is "aking", and then there is also Andrew King, lol.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
flexagoon 6mo ago
Andrew King seems to be the person who published the original exposé of the paper: > The above story came from my occasional collaborator Andy King [...]
zimpenfish 6mo ago
> the author in the blog post only states "Andrew" If you click on that "Andrew", it takes you to [0] which is clear that it's Gelman. [0] https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/ https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/

zx8080 6mo ago

Somewhat unrelated but relevant thought: from software engineering experience in large orgs, correction of any issue rarely worth any effort. AI will drive commiting more and more papers with less and less review. The review takes effort, too much in the age of easy generation. With this, science will probably lose trust even more in the coming years.

rectang 6mo ago
Brandolini's Bullshit Asymmetry Principle is the adage for our age: > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
- bonesss 6mo ago
  I’m cautiously optimistic that LLMs have a role in addressing that asymmetry to the side of good faith actors. Gish galloping bad faith trolls aren’t new. LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But now, We Have The Technology, refuting a pile of poo semi-accurately should be cheap (or at least getting cheaper). I don’t need an LLM on my phone that can do tax law in Georgia the country. But an “AI Assistant” that could highlight logical fallacies, shifting goalposts, non-responsive dialog, rhetorical obfuscations, etc, would be useful online, at the bar, and work (ie when HR tries to “HR” you, but also is lying and obfuscating about it). We already have models and people that bullshit. Maybe refutation models are the cure… Chinese needle snakes to catch the lizards, Gorillas to catch the snakes…
  - Pay08 6mo ago
    > LLMs shape their BS into fluffy BS that isn’t particularly more effective. But does take longer to disprove.
  - applfanboysbgon 6mo ago
    This is a horrendous take. The only thing this is going to do / is already doing is increasing people's creation of their own reality bubble. LLMs are not some source of objective truth, they will inevitability lean towards reinforcing either (1) prompter's position, (2) the model trainer's position, or (3) the statistically average position, none of which are guaranteed to be logically correct. But people do take them as objective truth, so now we have a bunch of fucking morons going around saying "see, ChatGPT says so, I'm right!".

zx8080 6mo ago

Hey, don't take kids joy! The paper was cited thousands of times, lots of uni students built their early career using it!

nerolawa 6mo ago

[dead]

rudderdev 6mo ago

Peer reviews need to be more transparent and accountable. Otherwise, we are sure to lose to the misinformation war that is rapidly reaching its peak, thanks but no thanks to AI.

thayne 6mo ago
How would you do that? One reason peer reviews are usually anonymous is to prevent retribution (ex. rejecting someone's paper, because they rejected yours). Not that it is perfect at doing that, but if you make it more transparent, you may trade one problem for another.

thayne 6mo ago

> their policies allow only authors to request corrections Say what now? So the only way to get a correction for a paper is if the author is willing to publicly admit they messed up? Something that an unethical researcher is very unlikely to do.

bradley13 6mo ago

Some years ago, my institution (primarily a teaching college) decided it needed an additional accreditation. The organization they went with requires faculty to publish. Including our undergrad business faculty. We all know that "publish or perish" is stupid. The premier example of Goodhart's Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Why can't our highly paid administration understand this?

flowerthoughts 6mo ago
They were pressured from somewhere to show results. They had to invent a metric to be able to prove they make results. It was easier to ask the neighbour what they are measuring, than to think it through and form a synthesis. If it works for the Jones', it'll work for us.
InkCanon 6mo ago
I think a more useful version of the law is "Any good measure requires a good person." For example, a good measure of research is to have an intelligent faculty member or members read it and decide if it's good. Converting it to a mechanical calculation is fundamentally bad.
pas 6mo ago
What's undergrad business faculty? The people who teach undergrads or undergrad TAs?

ANarrativeApe 6mo ago

Stop buying from/submitting to discredited publishers.

zahlman 6mo ago
Some problems with that: "discredited" isn't a binary; memes (in the original sense) from papers circulate easily even if nobody pays the publishers (the problem is arguably even worse, because people will read abstracts for free and distort the claims further); there might not be higher quality alternatives.

froh 6mo ago

oh how I'd love to see a gitlab GitHub like infrastructure and culture for scientific publication. let them have the repo private/authors and reviewers only until publication. but all flaws are issues, later reported issues are right next to the paper, heck there could even badges for publication and review status... a woman may dream...

neurotroph 6mo ago
There is: https://osf.io/ https://osf.io/

fergie 6mo ago

As somebody who has spent a bit of time in academia, I have often been slightly alarmed by some of the research (and opinon) that comes out of business schools. One thing is that it is often unsubstantiated and just plain wrong, another is that it often seems like the authors kind of know it, almost as if they are intentionally pandering to a lowbrow/midwit audience, and they expect everybody else to be in on the game. Its mystifying.

Lionga 6mo ago
Not at all limited to business schools
asplake 6mo ago
I had the privilege last night of attending a lecture given by Prof Sir John Kay (Obliquity, Radical Uncertainty, etc). He was scathing on two points: 1) the way the world changed in the 1970s from management as responsibility to leadership as prize, and 2) the abject failure of business schools to develop a serious body of knowledge. Taken together, business schools have become cash cows for universities while still being held in disdain by academia. This from the first dean of Oxford's Said Business School.
- AdamN 6mo ago
  There was tremendous resistance to setting up that school both because of where the money came from but more so because of the possibility that the school would not actually be academic but more 'professional' instead. I can't comment on the former as it seems mostly just xenophobic but maybe there are other angles there. The latter is definitely a concern though.
  - graemep 6mo ago
    Not xenophobic. Oxford happily takes money from people from anywhere all the time. It might be things such as his involvement in the Al Yamamah arms deal.
ycombinete 6mo ago

f30e3dfed1c9 6mo ago

Two out of three authors from Harvard Business School. The place is practically a horseshit factory.

anshulbasia27 6mo ago

The correction policy is the tell. If your journal's correction process requires the person who was wrong to initiate it, you haven't built a correction processs you've built a complaint resolution process that defaults to 'no complaint, no problem.' Medicine figured this out the hard way after thalidomide. Somehow management academia looked at that history and decided it didn't apply to them...

jltsiren 6mo ago
The policy is what you would expect from a journal that is effectively run by volunteers. While the publisher has paid employees, the editorial board in charge of the journal itself seems to consist of volunteers. When you have a volunteer organization, the impact on people's personal lives is one of the main factors driving decisions. You try to avoid getting involved in somebody else's controversies, as the impact is almost always negative. From that perspective, the policy seems clear. The authors are responsible for their papers. If someone else claims that a paper should be corrected, they are free to write a paper of their own. That way no volunteer has to take responsibility for someone else's claims.
- pas 6mo ago
  They could at least send the paper with the reported problems out to a new set of referees. And just as they decided to take responsibility for publishing, they can take responsibility after a similar review for retraction (or issuing an errata or whatever fancy way they want to signal the result of the process).
gus_massa 6mo ago
This is caused by a misunderstanding of what a journal is. It's just a curated publication, not the ultimate source of truth. Nobody should go and put a "retracted" stamp over "Principia Mathematica", or the "Special Relativity" paper of Einstein. Both are wrong, we know. In this cases cases, you may continue citing them or using them as an approximation. In some other cases they are slowly forgotten and fade away. It's impossible that the author and editors keep reading and answering the complains, that may be sound or from crackpots. Most research extends previous results that are cited, and if the previous results are wrong you can not extend them, so you don't cite them. If there is a bad paper, it will not be cited after a while. In this case, what is worrying is that people continue to cite it and that people is using the journals as a magic infalible source. Some people may write a "comment" that is a short paper in the same or another journal explaining what is wrong. It has an independent review, so the original author/reviewer/editors don't have to agree. The authors (or someone else) may write a "comment about the comment", but it's rare and at some point it becomes a slow reimplementation of Reddit. From the article: >> They did allow me to submit a comment for review, since they judged the authors non-responsive, but it must go through a lengthy review process.

devcraft_ai 6mo ago

[flagged]

throw310822 6mo ago

There's a simple rule of thumb that seems obvious to me but is widely ignored: we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values- or between what is and what we think should be. Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values, which makes any coincidence between the two extremely suspicious.

b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
>Reality is absolutely orthogonal to our values... what? that's nonsense. Not everybody's values are the same, for one thing. Especially as society has become more and more international. You should be equally skeptical of any result until proper evidence is presented and verified. Values should have no bearing either way on empirical truth-claims.
- throw310822 6mo ago
  Exactly, you're saying the exact same thing that I am. "Orthogonal" means independent, unrelated. This is why coincidence is very suspicious, because it's statistically very improbable.
  - b00ty4breakfast 6mo ago
    you also said >we should be highly skeptical of any finding that claims an agreements between facts and ethical values And I'm saying that's silly because you should hold all claims in equal skepticism. Just because something contains an ideological basis does not, in itself, make it more or less correct.

Beestie 6mo ago

Stopped reading not long after noticing the title of the paper in question. The very hypothesis is laughable. It is completely irrelevant if the hypothesis is supported or not. That paper is like flypaper for anyone seeking affirmation of sustainability policies. I could write a paper tomorrow claiming that [insert conspiracy theory here] is absolutely true and why Big [insert hated industry here] doesn't want you to know the truth and it would be cited until the earth crashes into the sun. It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation. I could write a paper about that but wouldn't hold my breath on getting any cites.

bregma 6mo ago
> It's not about the truth anymore. It's about opinion validation. But... that's exactly what Big Academia doesn't want you to know.
pas 6mo ago
the hypothesis seems pretty important and interesting, even if hard to study (and hard to classify companies, and sustainability, way too many degrees of freedom, so it would need preregistration, etc)

mgkuhn 6mo ago

I thought the proper way to correct questionable results is to conduct and publish a follow-up study that independently looks at the same question with better data and better methodology. And wait until multiple independent teams have done the same. And then write a meta-analysis on the emerging pool of independent papers. That's how scientific consent is normally formed, at least in rigorous disciplines like experimental physics or medicine. A single paper in the end is going to be just a single data point in any such meta-analysis study.

fabian2k 6mo ago
It depends on whether the paper is simply wrong for some reason, or if there is either fraud or a fundamental mistake in the procedure. But in general you're right, retractions are not the way to handle most scientific disputes. Your point about consensus unfortunately doesn't quite work in cases like this were the people using the paper are not scientists. They're not continuing work in the same area, people are using this paper to support their arguments.

Asooka 6mo ago

What does it matter that the claims are "false" if claiming them as the truth results in encouraging the society we wish to exist? That paper is a cornerstone of sustainability initiatives, if you retract it, you might as well set the whole Earth on fire. To hell with integrity, I say, it's time to do some good for the world!