9 ms·

I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the is

by hooande 13y ago

I hope this becomes a bigger story than the original. I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. A survey with a small sample size, outsized extrapolations and numbers that don't match the accompanying conjecture. There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. People have a tendency to believe anything that someone in a lab coat says, especially if it supports their point of view or anecdotal experience. In many cases the people who do the research present it with few qualifications while not standing behind assumed implications. If someone publishes sensational and link baity findings they should say, unequivocally, "I'm willing to stake my reputation on the idea this trend is real and will continue" or "These are just data and I'm not willing to say that they have any bearing on reality". Facebook may not have been right to dignify the initial post with a response, but I hope it works for the best. They say that some attention is better than no attention at all. It's important that this applies to self promotion and persona creation and not science. If somebody has something crazy to say, they should start a personal blog. Those who want to intentionally attract media attention should present themselves as such, instead of pretending to be doing any kind of meaningful experiment and hypothesis testing.

argumentum 13y ago
> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. The question you pose here isn't whether or not something is "good science", it's about who gets to decide what constitutes "good science" and "bad science". Science has been able to handle itself quite well over the centuries since it has come into existence. Publishing something, in your name, as these authors have done, is an implicit declaration of what you phrased as "I'm willing to stake my reputation on the idea this trend is real and will continue". The spirit of free inquiry, on which science is based, demands that we hold nothing sacred and immune from questions. Good science, almost by definition, requires "bad science". Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.
Fomite 13y ago
Technically, this isn't even published, it's a preprint service, and it's hardly the worst thing I've ever seen come out of arXiv. If you want to blame someone, blame an uncritical media.
throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
"There should be consequences for the people who publish these things." Many who are published deserve obscurity. And some who have obscurity deserve more funding. Can you give it to them? Do not be so eager to deal out censorship; for even institutional review boards cannot see all ends.
- OnyeaboAduba 13y ago
  That was an impressive use of the Lord of the Rings lines in your comment I must say
- deevus 13y ago
  Yes, Professor Gandalf.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- ogreyonder 13y ago
  For a throwaway, you are remarkable.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    FYI, half the people with the name "throwaway" aren't throwaways. :P
    - eternalban 13y ago
      So we have a culture of social insecurity at HN. #masks
      - saraid216 13y ago
        Nostalgia for anonymity. And also, sometimes you make a throwaway and then need to respond to a response and then you respond to something else while logged in and then you have 50 karma points and well, why not?
dsugarman 13y ago
while I think the original wasn't close to real science, don't be surprised if they are somewhat right
- tomasien 13y ago
  You're probably basing your opinion that FB may die by 2018 on better insights than they were basing the study on honestly.
  - dsugarman 13y ago
    well not necessarily die by 2018, just the fact that social media is mostly moving fads. everyone wants to be the social network that high school and college girls post their vacation photos to, if you are that then you will likely be somewhat relevant for the lifetime of these girls.
    - coliveira 13y ago
      Or maybe it's the opposite: if a teenager has an account with lots of pictures, he/she will probably want to kill that account as soon as they get to adult life to avoid awkward moments. I think this explains why many young kids are leaving FB.
      - ballard 13y ago
        The bigger issue is kids don't want to use the uncool social networks their parents use. Secondarily, that might come into play later as an afterthought.
- jrs99 13y ago
  what the heck is "real" science? A lot of the greatest science started the same exact way. Making connections that nobody else could see. Finding purposefully playful, surprising analogies. Doing things so ludicrous that everyone said would not work. Exploring ideas and sharing them.
hkmurakami 13y ago
The worst part for me is that the two authors are Ph.D. candidates in MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) [1]. They aren't even tenure track faculty at the school and aren't really in a position to carry the name of the school on their shoulders. Yet from what it seems, it will be the school itself that will be hit with most of the public shaming burden (ex: the FB post's headline). As a Princeton alum, I'm a bit saddened at the course of events :( [1] http://www.princeton.edu/~spikelab/people.html http://www.princeton.edu/~spikelab/people.html
- STRiDEX 13y ago
  The action of the two PH.D. candidates. The action of few employees. Yet they both represent the group to which they belong.
  - sabbatic13 13y ago
    Bullshit. 4500 undergrads, 1500 graduate students, and hundreds of faculty, and you think that every little paper they give or study they conduct is a product of the whole in a meaningful sense? The study was practically just a thought experiment by two grad students looking at something outside of their expertise. It _only_ got any attention, because it was about Facebook, and so the media saw a chance to sell more ads. For the same reason, they used the metaphor of pars pro toto as a rhetorical ploy, because Princeton vs. Facebook sells more ads. Like many among the unthinking masses, you got punked by it.
    - CGamesPlay 13y ago
      The students also published it online before it was peer-reviewed. I think the grandparent is more referring to the typical corporate cop-out of "the actions of a few employees", even though the damage is done regardless of who did it--and the employees (or students) did it under the name of the organization.
      - Fomite 13y ago
        These students did absolutely nothing wrong. They submitted their paper to a well known, well regarded preprint service (arXiv), which is pretty normal for a number of fields. Then, presumably, the paper would go to peer review. Where one would hope the reviewers would point out a few glaring flaws (like that an SIR model without either the creation of new susceptibles or waning immunity must go to 0 and they are 'dooming themselves to success'). The paper would get rejected, or heavily revised, and the world would keep spinning. They didn't actually do anything wrong. If you want to blame someone, blame an overexcited media that grabbed something off a preprint server and ran with it, knowing full well arXiv has no 'Is this right' quality checks, and isn't peer reviewed.
wsxcde 13y ago
> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Should there be consequences for people who publish buggy code on github? Because that situation is completely equivalent to what these phd students did. ArXiv isn't a repository of peer-reviewed accepted papers, it's just a repository of papers, just like how github is repository of code. The people to blame here aren't the students themselves. They just wrote up a mildly interesting observation and put it up on a repository. The people to blame are journalists and internet dumbasses who used this paper to serve their own selfish ends. > I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. There's no denying the existence of a lot of peer-reviewed junk science but sometimes there are perfectly good reasons why papers with faulty conclusions are accepted. The question addressed by the paper might be interesting, the experimental methodology might be interesting, the data sources used in the research might be interesting, or the editors/program committee might just want to highlight the lack of progress in an area that deserves more attention. Publishing something that is completely fault-free isn't a desirable or even an achievable goal. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of scientific publishing. The goal of scientific publication is to advance the field by stimulating discussion at the boundaries of human knowledge. This can often be done even with "buggy" results. Think of it as the scientific equivalent of fail often, fail early and fail fast mantra that drives many startups. I'm not dismissing your frustration though because the problem you've described is a real one. We aren't very good at communicating scientific results to laypersons. But unlike you, I don't have a glib solution to a problem I don't fully understand. Magazines like the communications of the ACM with accessible, professionally-edited articles written by experts in the field are probably one step in the right direction, but there is a lot more that needs to be done here.
- hrjet 13y ago
  What matters is the effect. If someone puts up code on GitHub which purports to compute the Fibonacci series, but mistakenly does a `rm -r ~/*` then surely there should be a way to flag that code or author ("consequences").
  - ameister14 13y ago
TeMPOraL 13y ago
> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Lab coats are there to bounde ideas off each other and sometimes write stupid things that will get corrected by other lab coats. Consequences should be there for the people who find such articles and take them for a media spin. It's not the paper that is doing the damage, it's the news articles, like the Guardian story. It is the responsibility of a journalist to make sure they're not posting utter bullcrap to millions, and when they fail to do that, there, here should come consequences.
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  That would be even more dangerous. The power to impose consequences on irresponsible journalists gets abused every time.
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    Could you provide an example? I haven't seen a single case of the thing I was meaning by my comment, so either we misunderstood each other, or I haven't checked hard enough.
XorNot 13y ago
Science article? So what's been thrown in your face, the published paper or the out-of-breath news article with the click-bait headline?
tripzilch 13y ago
I don't really see the problem, according to TFA, Princeton is going to disappear anyway. The problem solves itself.
OverlordXenu 13y ago
Was the science that terrible? Or rather, was the methodology so terrible or was it the data, or was it truly both? Studies are only ever useful in aggregate, anyway. It's about metaanalysis, not just what any singular study says.

by hooande 13y ago

argumentum 13y ago

> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. The question you pose here isn't whether or not something is "good science", it's about who gets to decide what constitutes "good science" and "bad science". Science has been able to handle itself quite well over the centuries since it has come into existence. Publishing something, in your name, as these authors have done, is an implicit declaration of what you phrased as "I'm willing to stake my reputation on the idea this trend is real and will continue". The spirit of free inquiry, on which science is based, demands that we hold nothing sacred and immune from questions. Good science, almost by definition, requires "bad science". Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

Fomite 13y ago

Technically, this isn't even published, it's a preprint service, and it's hardly the worst thing I've ever seen come out of arXiv. If you want to blame someone, blame an uncritical media.

throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago

"There should be consequences for the people who publish these things." Many who are published deserve obscurity. And some who have obscurity deserve more funding. Can you give it to them? Do not be so eager to deal out censorship; for even institutional review boards cannot see all ends.

OnyeaboAduba 13y ago
That was an impressive use of the Lord of the Rings lines in your comment I must say
deevus 13y ago
Yes, Professor Gandalf.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
ogreyonder 13y ago
For a throwaway, you are remarkable.
- saraid216 13y ago
  FYI, half the people with the name "throwaway" aren't throwaways. :P
  - eternalban 13y ago
    So we have a culture of social insecurity at HN. #masks
    - saraid216 13y ago
      Nostalgia for anonymity. And also, sometimes you make a throwaway and then need to respond to a response and then you respond to something else while logged in and then you have 50 karma points and well, why not?

dsugarman 13y ago

while I think the original wasn't close to real science, don't be surprised if they are somewhat right

tomasien 13y ago
You're probably basing your opinion that FB may die by 2018 on better insights than they were basing the study on honestly.
- dsugarman 13y ago
  well not necessarily die by 2018, just the fact that social media is mostly moving fads. everyone wants to be the social network that high school and college girls post their vacation photos to, if you are that then you will likely be somewhat relevant for the lifetime of these girls.
  - coliveira 13y ago
    Or maybe it's the opposite: if a teenager has an account with lots of pictures, he/she will probably want to kill that account as soon as they get to adult life to avoid awkward moments. I think this explains why many young kids are leaving FB.
    - ballard 13y ago
      The bigger issue is kids don't want to use the uncool social networks their parents use. Secondarily, that might come into play later as an afterthought.
jrs99 13y ago
what the heck is "real" science? A lot of the greatest science started the same exact way. Making connections that nobody else could see. Finding purposefully playful, surprising analogies. Doing things so ludicrous that everyone said would not work. Exploring ideas and sharing them.

hkmurakami 13y ago

The worst part for me is that the two authors are Ph.D. candidates in MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) [1]. They aren't even tenure track faculty at the school and aren't really in a position to carry the name of the school on their shoulders. Yet from what it seems, it will be the school itself that will be hit with most of the public shaming burden (ex: the FB post's headline). As a Princeton alum, I'm a bit saddened at the course of events :( [1] http://www.princeton.edu/~spikelab/people.html http://www.princeton.edu/~spikelab/people.html

STRiDEX 13y ago
The action of the two PH.D. candidates. The action of few employees. Yet they both represent the group to which they belong.
- sabbatic13 13y ago
  Bullshit. 4500 undergrads, 1500 graduate students, and hundreds of faculty, and you think that every little paper they give or study they conduct is a product of the whole in a meaningful sense? The study was practically just a thought experiment by two grad students looking at something outside of their expertise. It _only_ got any attention, because it was about Facebook, and so the media saw a chance to sell more ads. For the same reason, they used the metaphor of pars pro toto as a rhetorical ploy, because Princeton vs. Facebook sells more ads. Like many among the unthinking masses, you got punked by it.
  - CGamesPlay 13y ago
    The students also published it online before it was peer-reviewed. I think the grandparent is more referring to the typical corporate cop-out of "the actions of a few employees", even though the damage is done regardless of who did it--and the employees (or students) did it under the name of the organization.
    - Fomite 13y ago
      These students did absolutely nothing wrong. They submitted their paper to a well known, well regarded preprint service (arXiv), which is pretty normal for a number of fields. Then, presumably, the paper would go to peer review. Where one would hope the reviewers would point out a few glaring flaws (like that an SIR model without either the creation of new susceptibles or waning immunity must go to 0 and they are 'dooming themselves to success'). The paper would get rejected, or heavily revised, and the world would keep spinning. They didn't actually do anything wrong. If you want to blame someone, blame an overexcited media that grabbed something off a preprint server and ran with it, knowing full well arXiv has no 'Is this right' quality checks, and isn't peer reviewed.

wsxcde 13y ago

> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Should there be consequences for people who publish buggy code on github? Because that situation is completely equivalent to what these phd students did. ArXiv isn't a repository of peer-reviewed accepted papers, it's just a repository of papers, just like how github is repository of code. The people to blame here aren't the students themselves. They just wrote up a mildly interesting observation and put it up on a repository. The people to blame are journalists and internet dumbasses who used this paper to serve their own selfish ends. > I can't tell you how many times someone has thrown a junk science article in my face, thinking that the issue in question was now settled. There's no denying the existence of a lot of peer-reviewed junk science but sometimes there are perfectly good reasons why papers with faulty conclusions are accepted. The question addressed by the paper might be interesting, the experimental methodology might be interesting, the data sources used in the research might be interesting, or the editors/program committee might just want to highlight the lack of progress in an area that deserves more attention. Publishing something that is completely fault-free isn't a desirable or even an achievable goal. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of scientific publishing. The goal of scientific publication is to advance the field by stimulating discussion at the boundaries of human knowledge. This can often be done even with "buggy" results. Think of it as the scientific equivalent of fail often, fail early and fail fast mantra that drives many startups. I'm not dismissing your frustration though because the problem you've described is a real one. We aren't very good at communicating scientific results to laypersons. But unlike you, I don't have a glib solution to a problem I don't fully understand. Magazines like the communications of the ACM with accessible, professionally-edited articles written by experts in the field are probably one step in the right direction, but there is a lot more that needs to be done here.

hrjet 13y ago
What matters is the effect. If someone puts up code on GitHub which purports to compute the Fibonacci series, but mistakenly does a `rm -r ~/*` then surely there should be a way to flag that code or author ("consequences").
- ameister14 13y ago

TeMPOraL 13y ago

> There should be consequences for the people who publish these things. Lab coats are there to bounde ideas off each other and sometimes write stupid things that will get corrected by other lab coats. Consequences should be there for the people who find such articles and take them for a media spin. It's not the paper that is doing the damage, it's the news articles, like the Guardian story. It is the responsibility of a journalist to make sure they're not posting utter bullcrap to millions, and when they fail to do that, there, here should come consequences.

emiliobumachar 13y ago
That would be even more dangerous. The power to impose consequences on irresponsible journalists gets abused every time.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  Could you provide an example? I haven't seen a single case of the thing I was meaning by my comment, so either we misunderstood each other, or I haven't checked hard enough.

XorNot 13y ago

Science article? So what's been thrown in your face, the published paper or the out-of-breath news article with the click-bait headline?

tripzilch 13y ago

I don't really see the problem, according to TFA, Princeton is going to disappear anyway. The problem solves itself.

OverlordXenu 13y ago

Was the science that terrible? Or rather, was the methodology so terrible or was it the data, or was it truly both? Studies are only ever useful in aggregate, anyway. It's about metaanalysis, not just what any singular study says.