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> We wanted to see why Uzbekistan didn’t jump out, so we reproduced it in our comment (Extended Data Fig 1). It turns out that Uzbekistan wasn’t even the bigges
by Aurornis 2mo ago
> We wanted to see why Uzbekistan didn’t jump out, so we reproduced it in our comment (Extended Data Fig 1). It turns out that Uzbekistan wasn’t even the biggest outlier, but that the version they had published had the axes cropped so you couldn’t see the outliers (see red boxes in our version). This seemed indicative of a different issue, which is why we documented it in the comment.
Cropping the chart to hide the outliers is so bad that I can't tell if they're incompetent or malicious. I wouldn't be surprised if this is the kind of thing an LLM would produce in the hands of an operator not paying too much attention, but the paper was published in the time period before LLMs were everywhere in publishing.
- zmgsabst 2mo agoThis is partly why I don’t worry about “LLM slop” — we had plenty of artisanal human slop before.
- renegade-otter 2mo agoCreating misleading data still took effort. Now there is none needed. Slop will simply flood the zone and good content will become increasingly rare. See the problem?
- saaaaaam 2mo agoArtisanal human slop took time - hours, days, weeks - and some effort to produce. AI slop can be produced in seconds, minutes or hours, at the click of a button.
- throw310822 2mo ago> Cropping the chart to hide the outliers is so bad that I can't tell if they're incompetent or malicious It reminds me of the famous "hide the decline", when the climate scientists working on the famous "hockey stick" paper discussed how to hide in the graphs the recent decline of proxy temperatures while measured temperatures kept growing (which would put in question the general reliability of the proxies).
- WarOnPrivacy 2mo agoPSA: The divergence issue (aka hide the decline) refers to some tree rings in certain high altitude regions where the width of rings after 1960 would flatten or decline. However, there is evidence in the literature that the use of the bristlecone pine series as a temperature proxy may not be valid (suppressing "warm period" in the hockey stick handle); and that bristlecones do exhibit CO2-fertilized growth over the last 150 years (enhancing warming in the hockey stick blade). Further driving misreadings of the report is where the researchers refer to a a standard scientific practice as a trick. This standard practice is replacing the unreliable tree-ring data from 1960 onwards with actual thermometer readings. ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wegman_Report The hockey stick report does not refer to a decline in rates of warming. And since then, subsequent data has not only confirmed the hockey stick graph, it has pulled it slightly sharper. Featured two decades later now in the AR6 SPM is a longer Hockey Stick with an even sharper blade. And no longer just for the Northern Hemisphere, it now covers the whole globe. The recent warming is seen not only to be unprecedented over the past millennium, but tentatively, the past hundred millennia. ref: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2021/08/a-tale-of-two-hockey-sticks/ I feel keeping science safe from bad actors and their misguided followers is our duty to do. My personal thanks to all who toil against corruption machines.