I find it very disconcerting that people are trying to fend off criticism of previously published studies by calling it "bullying" or sometimes worse. What do feelings have to do with science?
Well, scientists are people too, so they have feelings and are not perfect. I think there are polite ways provide criticism and corrections, hopefully without humiliating people with good intentions. If it's a simple mistake, they can email the author and suggest an erratum. If it's more serious, then it's common to write a response in the journal. I think more public forms of criticism are perceived as bullying because a general audience can't typically judge the magnitude of the error, since they're not scientists working in the field, so it can be unjustly damaging to someone's reputation.
If someone objectively screwed up a published study, there's no room for feelings or social consideration. People might be wasting their precious time and money pursuing impossible goals based on the incorrect study.
Let's say someone finds a mistake in a math paper. Do they politely ask the author to fix it? What happens if the author ignores them? The scientific community doesn't have time to coddle and pursue every mistaken author. Everyone makes mistakes, and the scientific community knows that, but those mistakes need to be brought into then open, not (maybe) resolved behind closed doors.
It's not coddling as much as professional courtesy. Mistakes are often brought up at conferences and in peer review, but most scientists within a specific research area try to be on good terms with one another and don't see value in publicly shaming colleagues for their mistakes.
Use a bot to find tons of mistakes automatically and risk coming across as rude.
Or
Let social trivialities dominate scientific discourse and let most of those mistakes go unchecked forever because there's no feasible way to "politely" address hundreds of authors who made mistakes and keep checking back to make sure they actually fixed the mistake.
The former is clearly the preferable choice. Some individual scientists will suffer for it, but the scientific community as a whole will benefit greatly.
There is a third option that's better than either one you proposed.
Get people writing new papers to use statcheck before they publish.
The only rudeness here was an avoidable choice - publishing statcheck's results on a huge set of already published papers. The statcheck authors chose to do that for exposure, they even said so, it was not for posterity or the scientific well being of the community.
I don't personally think what they did was wrong, I don't particularly care that some people felt it was rude. But the fact of the matter is that the rude part was completely avoidable.
So they shouldn't run it on the old papers, so as to not offend anyone's sensibilities?
Do we just declare said papers completely useless then? Or do they keep getting cited by new papers, and used to guide policy? If the latter, then not vetting them using the newer and better methodology would be unethical.
That would be jumping to a conclusion I didn't state. I think I already address this comment above, I don't think what they did was wrong, and I don't care if people were offended.
But, since you brought it up - old papers are already dead, they cannot be fixed. They can only be referenced as prior work, or retracted in extreme cases. We're not talking about extreme cases here.
Statcheck can only help new papers, it cannot help old papers. Running it on old papers was done as a publicity stunt for statcheck, and nothing more. The authors said so.
> If the latter, then not vetting them using the newer and better methodology would be unethical.
On the contrary, it would be unethical to hold people to new standards that didn't exist when the work was done. If you have a beer and then next week the laws change the drinking age to 65 years old, should you go to jail?
This is simply not how things are done, in science or in society. Laws and standards change all the time, you are only subject to the laws or standards that exist when the work or action you do is performed & evaluated. For the purposes of scientific publication, we do not and will never revisit all prior work and formally re-judge whenever standards or policies change.
You may be conflating publication policy with general scientific understanding. Old papers will always be informally evaluated under the thinking of the day. But that doesn't help the old papers, nothing can be done about the old papers, they are part of a fixed record that can't change, it only allows us to publish new papers. What will and does happen now is new papers will be published that refute old papers. The new papers are subject to the new methodologies.
There is no new standard here. This is just a tool that says, "is there anything that looks like a mathematical/statistical mistake".
The expectation that a paper's calculations are correct and error free is one that has always existed.
There is no "thinking of the day", there is just mathematical correctness or not. At most you could argue that we might learn that some thing we thought mathematically true is no longer so, and warrants us reviewing papers where it had previously been used, but that is not the case here.
It is not unreasonable to hold published research to the standard of correctness, and if a paper contains errors within its calculations these should be fixed - regardless of when or who published it.
You're not holding people to new standards. You're holding their research to new standards. Which is the only sensible course of action.
And no-one suggested that those papers should be rewritten. But insofar as there's some known problem with them, why is it a bad thing to have a public record stating that much?
We may be agreeing and mis-communicating, or agreeing violently, as I've heard it called, so let's get specific. What are you suggesting should happen to a paper when it's shown to have errors?
Nothing at all is wrong with adding new information to the public record stating the issues, that's what I mentioned is already happening -- new papers reference and demonstrate the weaknesses of old papers. In my field, as I suspect most, it's a time honored tradition to do a small literature review in the introduction section of a paper that mainly dismisses all related previous work as not good enough to solve the problem you're about to blow everyone's mind's with.
In my mind, nothing is wrong with what the statcheck authors did either. My one and only point at the top was that it's not surprising it ruffled some feathers, and that it didn't have to ruffle any feathers. That only happened because the results were made public without solicitation. @wyager was trying to paint the situation as a dichotomy between rude or unscientific, that rude was the only option. Rude is not the only option.
If statcheck hadn't published the review of old papers and contacted all the old authors, then I'm pretty sure two things would have happened: 1- this wouldn't have ruffled any feathers, and 2- it wouldn't have gotten much attention, and we wouldn't be talking about it.
Please try to judge comments in their context and not look for excuses to try and humiliate someone with sarcasm. I was discussing standards with @int_19h, who brought up the issue of new methodologies. Of course being correct isn't a new standard, I agree with you, but that's not what was being discussed.
Of course morals shouldn't be compromised by scientific objectivity. Again, you're arguing a straw man - that's not the issue I was talking about.
I have stated multiple times, including my first reply to you, that I think the bot is fine. My argument in context is that a paper cannot change because it has been published. Do you disagree with that? That doesn't have any bearing on whether bots or people find & publish errors later. It does have a bearing on how people will respond to PR campaigns to publish errors when nothing can be done about it on the part of the author. Statcheck will do good things for authors who get to use it before they publish rather than after.
Maybe you're not reading all of what I wrote? Maybe I hurt your feelings?
My argument in context is that a paper cannot change because it has been published.
I think this statement is, if not completely untrue, grossly misrepresenting how existing papers are interacted with.
First of all papers, as with all publications, have errata published all the time. These errata may be included in future prints, or published in a separate location that can be looked up by people using the paper. Publishing errata is not a new occurrence, and although perhaps technically the original paper remains published unchanged, it is disingenuous to claim that this means the paper cannot change.
Modern publishing methods, such as the arXiv, allow for new versions of the paper to be uploaded, literally changing the published version of the paper.
As you point out yourself, literature reviews should point out issues with existing papers. Do you think that the original authors throw their hands in the air, thinking to themselves "oh well, it's published, nothing can be done"?? Of course not! If they are still engaged with the subject they either defend the paper, correct obvious mistakes, or continue experimentation or investigation in response.
To claim that errors should not be pointed out simply because the original authors can do nothing about the errors is diversionary at best. Of course errors in published results should be made public. How else can we trust any of the works?
If errors in existing research is always hidden, squelched, swept under the rug, we have no reason to trust it. It is the openness of research - publishing in the open, criticising in the open, discussing in the open - that allows us to trust research in the first place. Indeed, that trust is already eroded by revelations of systemic issues like p-hacking within published research.
You may be suggesting that posting these analyses to the individual papers was the wrong way to do it, that it would be better done in a literature review or paper.
I completely disagree.
It is essential that anyone looking to reference a paper with a glaring mistake in it (which many of those affected are) is able to see that mistake and correct for it. Leaving the old research be is just ensuring that incorrect ideas are allowed to propagate, and have more of an impact than they ever should.
Hoo boy. Research might be a social activity, but science is the application of probabilistic reasoning to evidence collection. Science isn't a "social activity" any more than topology is. Any social complications are entirely incidental.
Yes, but that probabilistic reasoning is applied by humans with feelings which sometimes get in the way of their reason. Wanting to have those feelings simply go away is unrealistic.
Your findings have to be accepted by the others. If they're not accepted it's like they don't exist. Think of all the great theories that didn't take off at first, because nobody accepted them (for various reasons).
When you attack someone, they are less likely to listen to you, even if you are offering valuable feedback. They care about saving face, so they will focus on defending themselves.
I realize this can be frustrating, because it means truth doesn't always prevail. However, it's what we have to work with, our emotional brains.
I find it hard to understand how something that is clearly an automated bot, posting comments that are 100% factual ("I checked this paper; N things looked wrong"), could be perceived as humiliating.
I guess it would be the case if you assumed that all people are perfect and never make mistakes. I would hope that psychologists, of all people, would know better than that.
So if it's not that, where's the humiliation part in pointing out math mistakes?
I don't necessarily think this is bullying or humiliating, but it's silly to think that being done by a "bot" and being "factual" has anything to do with it. If a malware "bot" secretly posted people's porn viewing history to their facebook page, would that not be humiliating for those people? Or would it not because it was factual and done by a "bot"? Clearly it would be.
Saying it was done by a bot is no excuse for anything. The bot didn't spontaneously pop into existence - somebody created it and decided what behavior it would have.
In this particular case, whoever created the bot could easily have made it email the authors of the mistaken papers and given them a chance to correct the mistakes before outing everybody in public.
Being done by a bot is not an excuse in general. However, when pointing out objective factual mistakes, I think there is a difference between your colleague pointing it out, and an automated tool pointing it out. Even if result is the same, the former can be embarrassing, hence why we learn to phrase negative responses in a roundabout way. But politeness cannot be expected of a brainless machine, and so it can deliver simple facts.
So it seems that it boils down to public disclosure before private?
Out of curiosity, how would you imagine the "correct the mistakes" procedure after private disclosure? The author cannot just edit the paper, it's already published. They would have to publish errata, which draws just as much attention. And, from an ethical perspective, if an author is notified of a mistake found by autonomous tool, wouldn't they be required to disclose the methodology when publishing errata? So I'm not sure how that whole situation is fundamentally different from just dumping it in the public.
Yes, and scientists don't care. Science, as it has been explained to me by scientists, is a penis length contest, where impact factor and prestige serve as ersatz penises.
The best part is that any fool can see that impact factors are a terrible proxy for real impact, and in fact the editors of several glam journals have pointed this out (disclosure: I have plenty of glam papers on my CV*).
But since it props up a myth that senior faculty like to believe (i.e. their shitty old Cell paper is great because Cell is/was great) that's the yardstick. As the director of a CCC once told me, it takes too long to see the impact of papers (citations piling up) so the JIF is used as a proxy.
Sort of like how it takes too long to do good science, so some people just publish whatever garbage they can sneak past the editors (ha fucking ha only serious). There is a LOT of crap in the literature as a result.
When I read that sentence, I immediately thought it sounded like some people were being childish and defensive.
OTOH, a bunch of people got unsolicited error reports for already published papers, and I can understand being initially irritated. This was, by the admission of the statcheck authors, a way to get attention quickly.
My guess is it'll all settle down and people won't complain about bullying once everyone just uses statcheck like they do spell-check.
To answer your question though, I think feelings have everything to do with science. There are many reasons different people do science, and they all stem from emotions. Some people do science out of curiosity, to solve mysteries. Some do science as a means to an end, to gain knowledge required to further some other goal. Some do science to gain social standing & intellectual superiority. Some do science to help others understand how the world works. In all cases, the reasons people are doing science is because of a want, some kind of desire to achieve a goal. Nature and physics will continue to exist whether we explore it or not, we do so because we care, and caring is a feeling.
> unsolicited error reports for already published papers, and I can understand being initially irritated
Please don't see this as me attacking you, i am genuinely baffled by what you said and would like to understand your thinking.
How exactly could you possibly have any sort of understanding for that? How would you feel about a software author being irritated by unsolicited error reports? If that irritation is less acceptable than the one in your quote, where would lie the difference?
> How exactly could you possibly have any sort of understanding for that?
I'm also confused by your question, so I can relate to you. :) Despite your warning, the way you phrased that question does sound like an attack, it implies that you know my experience does not allow me to speak on this subject, which you do not know. Why is it hard to think that I can empathize? What do you think you know about me that makes it implausible for me to understand this situation?
I can and do relate to it because I'm a published paper author. I imagine that it would be irritating to me as easily as I imagine it would be irritating to others. For me personally, I don't think it would make me angry, but it would give me anxiety to cast doubt on a paper I'd already published, even if the report about inaccuracies are true. It would mean that I didn't do as good a job as I thought, which of course I want to know, but a published paper is part of a record that cannot change. I'm sure many paper authors, for better or worse, have the same reaction, that something that casts doubt on their publications after the fact would cause some degree of mental anguish. That doesn't mean we shouldn't search for the truth, it means only what I said, that I can understand the reaction.
Your analogy to software errors fails. (And I also have first-hand experience with this as the owner of a software business.) Software is an on-going work that can and should be improved to remove errors at all times, and errors that get fixed do not affect my personal reputation or career. Reports of software errors can also be irritating in their own way - I don't want to know my software is buggy - but they are always welcome. Published papers cannot be improved, they are fixed in the permanent record. There are some ways to recover from severe errors, but there are no ways to recover from minor errors, and public (academic) perception of the quality and level of the errors in a paper can change the way an author is viewed.
> it implies that you know my experience does not allow me to speak on this subject
Not in the least my intention. I could not understand how anyone, regardless of knowledge level, could empathize with the quote as stated.
From your response, it seems then that your quote wasn't meant in the way it seemed to me. It's not even the unsolicited nature of the report, but any error that causes irritation, and while possibly felt in the direction of the messenger, ultimately caused by the system being ... Well. Broken.
Yes having any error pointed out can be frustrating.
However, the unsolicited nature of it may play an important role in this case. In order to empathize with the feelings of people who might have been irritated it is helpful to understand the academic paper publishing process.
The authors all went through a stressful process of submitting their hard work to a journal and then being evaluated by a panel of "experts". Many of them had to make changes to their papers and resubmit them in order to get published.
There's a level of understanding and expectation about how this process works. The papers aren't normally open for public comment before publication, and they don't normally get public comment after publication. They're evaluated by people in the field, and presented at conferences, and then referenced in other papers if they're influential.
Having a unknown third party with brand new possibly buggy software cast public aspersions on a paper after the fact, at a time when nothing can be done about it, is simply not helpful to the authors and is not how reviews normally happen. It's very easy to see why authors wouldn't particularly like this, even if they would use statcheck in the future.
The only real problem here was statcheck's authors publishing all the results and making a great deal of noise about it. They didn't have to do that, it is an aggressive move that was not designed to help authors, it was designed for statcheck to get attention. We have no idea how big of a problem it is, this article might have been mostly muckraking, and statcheck might be great and well liked.
Anyway, I don't think the system is broken. It is currently working better than it has worked at any time in the past, and it is continuing to improve. Statcheck might improve it more, but that remains to be seen. Other software tools already have improved it.
In Mathematics, if you get an unsolicited error report and the report is accurate, your first reaction is "oh my god" as you assess the damage and how much revision needs to be done to correct the paper. Then the answer is "thank you! I didn't realize so many people even read my work so closely! I'll add a correction and thank you for your contribution in an update of the paper".
Yes! And I think this is true of most paper authors in most fields. It has been rare in my experience to see anyone end up angry or upset about getting a correction in the mail. The majority of people who publish know that errors occur all the time, and are glad to hear about it, more so if it happens early enough to do something about it.
I'd bet the majority of recipients of statcheck's automated correction, whatever their initial reaction, appreciate and end up wanting to use this kind of a tool before publishing their next paper.
It is worth mentioning there's a large stylistic difference between receiving an unsolicited error report directly from a reader & having a nice conversation about it, and being notified that an unsolicited error report has been published and attached to your paper automatically, without review, for all to see.
Exactly. This isn't even subjective critique, it's math. Your math is right or it's wrong. Lastly from what I can tell there isn't even any value judgement attached, simply a notification of incorrect math.
While I am not a big fan of contemporary feminism, I am pretty sure taking issue with masculinity or "gendered" text is not the same thing as taking issue with objectivity.
Edit: Found this quote in your source "Poststructuralism “rejects objectivity and the notions of an absolute truth and single reality,”"
I'm not in any sense an expert. A lot of it seems to boil down to what assumptions are implicit.
When you consider something like math, you can pin down what axioms have what consequences. This set of rules produces a group, adding some more axioms produces a field, things like that.
When you get to more ordinary stuff like living life, it's not clear what axioms you picked, vs what axioms i picked. Most people don't think about it at all.
Imagine a coworker that just started showing up topless. That would be freakishly weird. But really, in a professional setting, why would it matter? There are some handwavy arguments about the nature of professionalism, but all of that relies on what axioms you pick for your culture.
Anyway. We all have these ideas about how we're supposed to interact, but we're all playing by different rules. So you get into these Wittgenstein kinds of discussions.
> I am pretty sure taking issue with masculinity or "gendered" text is not the same thing as taking issue with objectivity.
Well, since English is a gendered language, taking issue with 'gendered' text is taking issue with the objective reality that … English is a gendered language.
Glibness aside, the usage of gendered pronouns does not make a language gendered. That's only true if there has to be agreement between the gender of a noun and words relating to the noun.
And it's also not what people are arguing. Instead, they argue that gendered terms are the product of cultural norms and prescriptive grammar that reinforce gender roles that are oppressive to both men and women. That some view these assignments as objective when that's untrue linguistically and historically, I think only lends credence to their point.
"As these examples show, the STEM syllabi explored in this study demonstrated a view of
knowledge that was to be acquired by the student, which promotes a view of knowledge as
unchanging. This is further reinforced by the use of adverbs to imply certainty such as
“actually” and “in fact” which are used in syllabi to identify information as factual and beyond
dispute (Biber, 2006a; 2006b). For example, “draw accurate conclusions from scientific data
presented in different formats” (Lower level math). Instead of promoting the idea that
knowledge is constructed by the student and dynamic, subject to change as it would in a more
feminist view of knowledge, the syllabi reinforce the larger male-dominant view of knowledge
as one that students acquire and use make the correct decision."
A fact is a human construct. It is a symbol. You just conflated facts with reality. A cursory examination of reality will reveal that observations of reality are observer dependent. So what is an objective fact?
An objective fact must be one that is covariant in change of observer interpreting the fact. Physical laws like General Relativity are covariant in this way: the facts of relativity differ symbolically depending on the reference frame of the observer but different observers' facts are related in a coherent way.
In GR an observer is a reference frame. In order to define objective fact you need to presuppose what an observer is.
It is a masculine behavior to consider this question unimportant. A feminine science is much more interested in the study of the subjective because you can't be objective without understanding subjectivity.
Ultimately an observer in science is a human. That means objective fact can only be understood by understanding the subjectivity of the scientist. An objective fact is in fact an intersubjective fact, and intersubjectivity is an essential contribution to science by feminism. It's a good keyword to google.
And yet, would the feminist science claim that intersubjectivity is the correct view to take? Can it? Or must it be that intersubjectivity is only the view of certain feminists and itself depends on the observer -- to some observer, independent observable facts exists, and to some others, they do not as they are intersubjective?
I think your position is interesting if odd and completely alienated from the way science is done or thought about in all of human history. I think the downvotes are coming from referring to standard "incorrect" science in your view (as it does not embrace intersubjectivity) as "masculine" and the "correct" view as "feminine" -- to put gender labels on abstract philosophical positions seems contrived and silly to some (me, at least). What does masculinity have to do with belief in objective facts? Why do only women understand that facts depend on the observer? Is it just because the person who introduced reference frames and general relativity to modern science, Albert Einstein, was female? What does adding these incendiary labels to the positions you outline and contrast add to the discussion, other than encouraging your mostly male and mostly skeptical-of-gender-politics audience to not listen?
Intersubjectivity is a major part of modern psychology. It is a relatively new concept. Its influence grows slowly as more and more people find it usefully applicable to their work. Like most science, actually. Intersubjectivity is not a normative idea or a theory, but more of a point of view. It is a heuristic that says, in order to study a thing, study the subjective experiences of that thing and their relations. Observer-invariance is too strong of a constraint on what is a fact: physics already embraces this. What you want instead is covariance, which is how observations transform when you change the observer.
Studying the covariance of observations is intrinsically a study of intersubjectivity, although I need to point out here that I am merely making an analogy between human observers and the abstract observers of physics, which are themselves simplifications of human observers.
> independent observable facts
Independent of what? Observation? A fact is necessarily tied to how it is observed. That's what I'm talking about here. It is a fundamental aspect of the scientific method that scientific observations can be made by different people and then their results can be compared. The dependence of facts on observation is absolutely crucial, so I'm not sure what sort of independence you're talking about.
W.r.t. masculine and feminine, I wrote my first post on a phone while in a taxi and I think one of my paragraphs clarifying this point got eaten by a pothole. I clarified in a sibling post but I'll expound here: I don't mean anything intrinsic to men or women. I am referring to archetypal masculinity and femininity, which are social constructs. Every society has had these archetypes, for example the ideas of Yin and Yang, the feminine and masculine principles of ancient Chinese thought. There is little physical basis as they apply to the human sexual dimorphism for these archetypes and they vary from society to society.
There is well established scientific literature observing these aspects of society. For example, women are expected to understand the emotions of others far more than men are. I'm time constrained so I won't cite this; it's not hard to peruse the literature. Does this mean that men can't empathize or that it makes them girly if they do? Of course not!
> What does adding these incendiary labels to the positions you outline and contrast add to the discussion, other than encouraging your mostly male and mostly skeptical-of-gender-politics audience not listen?
I don't feel like I'm being incendiary. Why are you receiving my words that way? It's an interesting phenomenon.
And this might sound pedantic but, I don't care if you're skeptical of gender politics because gender politics are real, and they have been real for thousands of years. Masculinity and femininity as social concepts are real in that sense whether you acknowledge their existence or not. Feminists did not invent gender politics, they merely scrutinize them. There was a time when gender was considered an inviolable concept writ large across the cosmos by a male deity. Was a time? Still a time for hundreds of millions of people. The fact that people, mostly women because they were the most incentivized to do so, started critically engaging these ideas philosophically (thus laying the groundwork for scientific investigation) is a boon to me and you. I would suggest y'all stop taking gendered analysis of social phenomenon personally because it can only enrich your conceptual toolbox.
> I think your position is interesting if odd and completely alienated from the way science is done or thought about in all of human history.
I did math research a long time ago. I'm still pretty connected to the mathematical research community. These ideas are corroborated by my own experiences. We need to make a distinction between what people say is the way science is done and what the actual way science is done. We need to make a distinction between the way science is thought about and the way people think they think about science is done. This isn't pedantry or navel gazing or postmodern bullshit, this is hard-nosed critical thinking.
>This isn't pedantry or navel gazing or postmodern bullshit, this is hard-nosed critical thinking.
I don't think it is any of that -- to me it smells more like a new word for classical philosophical skepticism/relativism. Which is very hard-nosed critical thinking and perniciously difficult to dismiss (see G.E. Moore's 'rejection' of skepticism -- "here is one hand") In fact while you say it is very new, I'd posit that it is very, very old. Thousands of years old. The essence of it from what I understand as you've explained it, minus the unnecessary gendering of the concepts, is taught in undergrad philosophy courses, has been for centuries.
My first point was trying to get at this question: we have two ways to approach science, the traditional approach where we choose to believe facts are objective and try to behave that way, and the "intersubjective" one. But which one should we take? What is the right framework to even make such a decision? Even if you simply assume the goal is predictive power, do we assume there is an objective assessment of predictive power that we try to get at, or that these predictions are inherently intersubjective and can't be compared so that no determination can be made?
And sure gender politics exist. But not everything is always about gender. I think what people reject is not considering gender politics at all, but for example trying to make science about gender. The relativist/skeptical position does not need to be feminine more than the realist position must be masculine. There are social gender structures that lay the burden of expectation on members in society, yes, but they do not completely pervade and define every moment of every thought of every person -- there are some instances in which we are human first and gendered second. And most I would suggest, believe (specifically hard) science is one of those instances. Or we should treat it that way. The entire purpose of mathematics is that there is no "female mathematics" and "male mathematics".
To that point, I would really be interested in hearing a little more about how intersubjectivity plays out in the mathematics research community.
This is what skeptical-about-gender-politics is about. Not rejecting gender politics themselves, but rejecting turning every discussion about anything into a discussion about gender. Which often quickly evolves into an attack on men (abusive, 'privilege', implying the work men do means less because of their advantage, etc). Where everything bad is the fault of "the patriarchy" (read: men). Which is tiresome. And not at all what you have done.
And as to your request,
>And this might sound pedantic but, I don't care if you're skeptical of gender politics because gender politics are real, and they have been real for thousands of years.
>I would suggest y'all stop taking gendered analysis of social phenomenon personally because it can only enrich your conceptual toolbox.
I would say that you should embrace intersubjectivity in your own position and understand that your posts cannot be objective, they are observed and interpreted by many others, so what matters is not what you say, rather, how it is observed by your audience. If you want it to be a strong argument /to HN/ you should take some steps to avoid throwing up red flags that HN readers are used to using to dismiss arguments out of hand as a tribal attack (this is what I meant by "incendiary" -- I was not incensed by it but the 'men are dumb but women are smart' trope is familiar because it is as ubiquitous as it is uninteresting. Your position is not this at all, but it superficially contains some of the same characteristics).
Again thanks for your thoughtful response, I enjoyed it a great deal.
I only brought up gender because I was clarifying what the quoted author meant because the person I originally replied to found it confusing and spurious. I think the key is that the intersubjective nature of science means that it is open to social analysis, a subset of which is feminist analysis, and basically I've just been giving my interpretation of what the quoted author was saying.
You brought up a lot of interesting points but I only have the energy to respond to one of them given my reception lately :)
> To that point, I would really be interested in hearing a little more about how intersubjectivity plays out in the mathematics research community.
1. What constitutes a correct proof? A proof has to convince other humans. Two mathematicians who work together a lot can sketch out an informal proof that they both agree on, but it's harder to write a proof that is widely considered rigorous enough. A fully formal proof that a computer can verify isn't anywhere near feasible. What constitutes rigor today is different from what constituted rigor for Euler is different from what constituted rigor for Euclid.
2. Most mathematics isn't done as symbol manipulation. Mathematicians rely on their human intuitions. We share a lot of the same cognitive structures but we each have our own preferences.
"It must be admitted that the use of geometric intuition has no logical necessity in mathematics, and is often left out of the formal presentation of results. If one had to construct a mathematical brain, one would probably use resources more efficiently than creating a visual system. But the system is there already, it is used to great advantage by human mathematicians, and it gives a special flavor to human mathematics." - Ruelle (1999)
Interesting idea: if there are differences between how men and women think, there could be a male and female mathematics. I doubt there is any significant difference though. Likewise, autonomous AI will almost definitely do mathematics with a distinctly different flavor from human mathematics even though they should be mutually intelligible.
3. What we think is important to study is what we think our peers and superiors value. A grad student does mathematics their adviser thinks is interesting. A grad student chooses their adviser based on their interests. Which fields get grant money? Which are "hot"? Which fields are all but abandoned even if they have legitimate open questions?
4. Mochizuki has published a proposed proof of the ABC conjecture. That's a huge result. It has not yet been widely accepted because he worked alone for several years and the concepts he has come up with are very foreign to every other mathematician. So, a lot of the work of "proving" the ABC conjecture is teaching his ideas to other people even though he has produced a detailed proof. You can't just read the proof and understand it.
5. This isn't math, but physics. It's in the news recently that a time crystal may have been constructed. It's not entirely clear if a time crystal can even exist. How can two physicists look at the same experimental data and hold two different positions on this question?
Physicists, hardest scientists of them all, getting really emotional about QCD? But I thought science was about objective facts! "Objectivity" is what remains when the science has settled, it is not the science itself, and it certainly is not a permanent state.
Ok. So this is semantics and in this science there is a different meaning for the word "fact."
What is the utility of redefining a fact as a human construct of accepted information, rather than as data points corresponding to components of objective reality?
I think it's important to think about this because we as humans have major limitations in our understanding. For example, we are limited and biased due to the spatial and temporal scales of our senses, and we may be similarly affected by social things such as language, personal beliefs, interpersonal interactions.
Because you're putting the cart before the horse. Science is building a picture of """objective reality""" from human subjectivity. Data points aren't reality, they have to be interpreted. No matter how you try to do it, at some point you have to accept that a human being is doing science and the way science is done is fundamentally an intersubjective phenomenon. Science isn't reality. Scientific knowledge isn't reality. Science is a human activity and scientific knowledge is a relationship between humans and reality. I'm not redefining what a fact is, I'm unpacking the definition of a scientific fact and scrutinizing its dynamics.
Why is this useful? Because if you don't look at science from this point of view, you can't understand or even recognize good or bad science. The scientific method can only fail in its execution. Its execution is fundamentally an intersubjective phenomenon.
There is a deeper philosophical advantage to this point of view: This is the correct formulation of science if you want to do science about science. That is, if you want to study scientifically the method by which discoveries are made, become verified, and evolve into commonly held "objective facts", you have to formulate science in this way. If you want to study scientifically how people become scientists, you have to formulate science this way. If you want to study why scientific illiteracy is still a major sociological problem, you have to formulate science this way. Et cetera.
In light of all this, I have to ask: What is the utility of the idea of objective facts, objective reality, a science that is not intersubjective, one that is merely acquired and applied in the masculine mode? My answer to that question is engineering: Engineering is not interested in doing science, but applying it. In which case, objective reality is merely a shortcut to using scientific knowledge. I think that's an admissible use, but it is inadequate for science itself and understanding the relationship between science and society.
P.S. When I say masculine and feminine, I certainly do not mean qualities intrinsic to men or women. I am referring to archetypal abstract masculinity and femininity which are themselves diffuse aspects of human intersubjectivity the study of which reveals long-scale correlations in human politics and social structure.
There's this funny thing I've noticed with your posts where the more words you use, the less utility I get from understanding the post. It's almost like you use overintellectualization to bury that you aren't saying much at all.
I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. The people I was talking to found my posts intelligible and interesting. I doubt you want to ask me to clarify my points or point out in particular where I'm difficult to understand. I think you've just assumed I am communicating in bad faith instead of trying to communicate a complex idea but I shouldn't jump to conclusions like that :^)
This is pretty interesting. Society and science don't always get along so it's certainly valuable to study the subjective relationship.
I think most of us who would disagree with you do so from the assumption that there exists an objective reality, regardless of whether an observer is aware of it at all.
In other words, the general consensus asserts that the universe doesn't care whether you or I know, understand or agree how it works, it works that way regardless.
You, and your science/philosophy, assert that since we cannot determine any reality outside of our observation then said reality does not exist (or is, at least, irrelevant).
I still think this is just semantics, even though both philosophies will continue to assert that their point of view is more correct.
From a practical perspective a person coming from the philosophy of a true objective reality existing and science being the process of finding those facts should be no different from a person advocating your point of view. Both will make errors and will need to correct them. Both will have to overcome dogmatic beliefs that are later proven incorrect.
The objective reality philosopher would claim that reality is correcting her errors whereas the inter-subjective philosopher would claim that new observations from other subjects (observers) are correcting his errors.
Regardless of where they believe the corrections are coming from, they seem to lead to the same science, and the same convergence toward what the data tells us.
(Regarding the P.S. That's a very helpful clarification. The terms seem to confuse the issue rather than illuminate it, in my opinion)
I believe in an objective reality too, I just don't think it's a scientific concept. Perhaps we can say that the existence of an objective reality is what makes science worth doing even if science cannot directly access it. I think I can agree with that.
> Data points aren't reality, they have to be interpreted
Data points perhaps need to be interpreted for utility, but they represent facts (but those are facts of sense experience, which is ultimately subjective, though often expressed in terms of a fairly restrained conclusion of that subjective experience.)
Which is not to say I disagree with your broader point.
Based on my experience with feminist though in academia, objectivity as a mask for bias is the issue. The preferred method to address is to surface as much of the implicit bias a possible so the whole can be considered. I don't find this problematic.
Bias is a big problem, but why not call out the problem directly instead of confusing the issue with a tangential, philosophical discussion about whether or not objectivity exists?
The problem is when "as much as possible" becomes subjective personal experiences. Basically treating un-aggregated anecdotes as data, while also drawing a line at questioning the validity or applicability of it (aka "just shut up and listen").
So STEM curriculum should teach there are no objective truths? 1 + 1 is not always 2? Failure to reproduce a study could just be the result of different cultural, gender, or racial differences in the researchers and does not necessarily invalidate anything?
They weren't looking for errors in papers and trying to push for corrections or improve the science. They were using these errors as fodder for promoting their software.
It might not be bullying, but it's not coming from a place of objectivity or honest debate.
That's just not how polite human interaction works. If you become aware that someone has made a mistake you inform them privately to give them an opportunity to rectify that mistake. In the case of a scientific journal entry you might instead publish a response article. You don't put everyone on blast and practically blackmail them into purchasing your for-profit service. It was never about the science at all, it was about the profits for this product/service.
