WSJ: Flood of Fake Science Forces Multiple Journal Closures

Wall Street Journal | Archive

"Wiley to shutter 19 more journals, some tainted by fraud"

 

Also discussed by Joanne Nova: So much for “peer review” — Wiley shuts down 19 science journals and retracts 11,000 gobbledygook papers

 

In hindsight, quality control for the main source of knowledge our civilization depends on being done as a voluntary process involving a few overworked peers who all share the same perverse incentives may not have been the best idea.

In foresight it was pretty obvious, but in hindsight it's also just as obvious.

Weird how this basically used to be a real argument: "is it peer-reviewed?" And then it turns out that it often means... nothing. It's not as arbitrary as being nominated for the Nobel peace prize, but it's basically no better.

Because for all that it's a legitimate argument that a lot of it is basically AI gobbledygook sandwich, sometimes derided as "stochastic parrots", things are even worse in health care, where you can find gobbledygook so complete that no AI trained after 2023 would ever come up with it, but it's basically praised and elevated because human bias can be even worse than AI gobbledygook sandwich.

In obviously fake papers like what's discussed here, some of the terms are complete nonsense, but in the case of most psychosomatic ideology, the words are legitimate, but no one involved understands them any better than the AI gobbledygook sandwich. And they use statistics, ironically how AIs work, but in an even worse way, doing many of the things that wreck AI models, like overfitting and feeding bad data. So while AI "stochastic parrots" are a problem, there is a much deeper problem where beloved nonsense that most AIs would flag as being nonsense makes it through humans.

 

I despair. It is so pervasive and behind every example is a corrupted human being acting with intent to deceive others.

There was an interesting thread today from Donald Robertson who writes about Stoic Philosophy & Philosophers. There is so much irony in other authors submitting manuscripts to him for review on this subject matter and they are flagrant in their violations of stoic virtues.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1795201843213033509

 

Sabine Hossenfelder recently made one of her shorts about her personal disillusionment with academia and why she quit for a career on YouTube. It is very telling and I am afraid it points to an academic career mill which leads to papers for the sake of papers which is apparent to me reading the plethora of papers on ME, none of which get to the point. It reminds me of the line from the poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

"My dream died, and now I'm here", 'fessing up by Sabine Hossenfelder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8

 

Which is why I’m not a big cheerleader for the “we need lots more publications” camp.

Having said that, I think even worse are the researchers that hype a lot of strong claims but rarely publish anything of note (looking at you Jared Y*unger and Nancy Kl*mas).