Precisely Estimated



  • @hardwaregeek said in Precisely Estimated:

    @remi said in Precisely Estimated:

    a 5000 authors paper breaks down this system

    I've never worked in academia, but from where I sit in my fabric box, this does not seem like a bad thing.

    There is purposedly breaking a system to show that the system is broken, a la Sokal, and I would agree with you that it's not a bad thing. And there is inadvertently breaking the system by simple inertia of "we've always done so in our field", and that's much less of a good thing (in part because, as this discussion shows, many people won't even think that it is breaking the system).

    Now if you can show me that the CERN has a intentional policy of making huge author lists to highlight the stupidity of the current system of research evaluation, you would have a point. I very much doubt that this is the case, though.

    Once again demonstrating that car analogies are not always good analogies for some domains.

    That's right, we needed to add the ISS in the picture to make that analogy work. Quite an improvement, don't you think?

    *crickets*...

    [meta]
    I love how rich-text discussions still use markup initially invented in plain-text discussions to express some formatting that didn't fit in plain-text (*text*). To the point where the writers have to battle with the markup system to make it show as if it was a plain-text markup instead of being interpreted by the system (\*)!
    [/meta]



  • @japonicus said in Precisely Estimated:

    For a vast project where would you put the cut-off?

    For just a random rule-of-thumb making-up-numbers sort of answer, I would suggest that if the author section of the paper is longer than the paper's summary, then there's too many authors, and some of them should be shifted to the citation/reference section.


  • đźš˝ Regular

    @remi said in Precisely Estimated:

    @the_quiet_one said in Precisely Estimated:

    Discovering the Higgs Boson required 5,000 qualified physicists. And they each deserve credit.

    Which is what they got in the shit tons of other papers that were published around the main one. Not all of them did work that, in any other project than the LHC, would have gotten them a paper in a prestigious journal. They get the credit that they deserve in the publications related to the work that they did, and they get referenced in the summary paper that lists the overall results. Having them as authors of that paper is pointless and may even be harmful to other people. That is absolutely zero good reason for doing it.

    Ok, I'm willing to concede on that point. If they are citing separate papers from different projects and listing those people as authors of this paper, then I agree that's silly.

    OTOH, if those authors did direct work on both the referenced paper and this one, then my position stands. And I still don't find 5,000 people directly involved in this paper finding the equivalent of a needle in a Virgo-supercluster-sized haystack to be all that far-fetched.

    Oh cry me a river. Next thing you'll tell me snobby professors at Oxford won't look at UCL candidates.

    You still have no idea how the academic world works, do you? The publication list and citation index is not just some weird uni-peen. It is what is used to evaluate people.

    And I'm saying that if it's solely what's used to evaluate people, then that is what needs to change. Because no matter what, different people are going to have different roles in a research paper, whether it's 10 people or 5,000 people.

    Wait... you're telling me that you're upset that a project you're involved in is unfairly limiting their selection of co-authors on their paper, and now you're hypocritically saying that means the LHC should do the same to their work? Do you even hear yourself right now?

    Wot?? TDEMSYR. Did I ever say anything about a project I might be involved in and how that hypothetical project is limiting co-authors in an hypothetically unfair way??

    My apologies. I thought the quote you were replying to in that chain was what you said and not who you were responding to.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @the_quiet_one said in Precisely Estimated:

    And I still don't find 5,000 people directly involved in this paper finding the equivalent of a needle in a Virgo-supercluster-sized haystack to be all that far-fetched.

    However, even a single author is too many for this paper, which has 6:

    https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview/status/923900463581401088


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @pie_flavor said in Precisely Estimated:

    Rubin and Franklin point to another longstanding issue with the Nobels. In as much as they propagate the myth of the lone genius, that lone genius is almost always white and male. Women have won just 12 of the 214 prizes in physiology or medicine, just 4 of the 175 prizes in chemistry, and just 2 of the 204 prizes in physics. The most recent female physics laureate, Maria Goeppert Mayer, won her prize 54 years ago. It’s not for lack of potential honorees, either. Rubin inarguably deserved one, as did Lise Meitner who contributed to the discovery of nuclear fission alongside laureate Otto Hahn. Between 1937 and 1965, Meitner was nominated 48 times by different people, and never won. “There are great things about the Nobel Prize but we should keep in mind that demographics of the winners reflect and amplify structural biases,” said astrophysicist Katie Mack on Twitter last year.

    There's the paragraph. I was looking for that. Simply because there are cool discoveries made by women does not mean that there are not better discoveries made by men at the same time; the article fails to adequately make its point here.

    Discovering Dark Matter, doing the hard part of figuring out the structure of DNA, and being a critical part of the discovery of nuclear fission are all rather significant, and in two of those cases men who worked on it got awarded while they didn't. The article makes its point, you just don't want to listen to it.


  • Considered Harmful

    @dreikin And they were all very much back in the day. There is no evidence these problems exist anymore in this modern age of inclusivity.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @pie_flavor said in Precisely Estimated:

    @dreikin And they were all very much back in the day. There is no evidence these problems exist anymore in this modern age of inclusivity.

    :moving_goal_post:



  • @boomzilla said in Precisely Estimated:

    However, even a single author is too many for this paper, which has 6:

    Did anybody else think that abstract read like something from an academic paper generator?


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