Peer review is a joke still and exists now to please deans (for hiring and promotion) and enrich publishers. Bad papers get published if it reaffirms the biases of editors, and actually good and original stuff gets rejected. Rather than facilitating the exchange of knowledge, it acts as a barrier, especially when it cannot even be relied on for quality control.
sillysaurusx•27m ago
> and actually good and original stuff gets rejected
This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true?
In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context.
Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time; anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.
qsi•26m ago
Ooops, sorry... I cannot edit the URL in the submission. I should have checked.
sillysaurusx•18m ago
No it's fine, it thoroughly amused a HN nerd like me. I've been keeping track of how HN works for well over a decade, and noticing small changes like this is something that's genuinely gratifying. The mods will no doubt be by to clean up the url shortly.
I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.
t0lo•26m ago
So we're firmly in the era of few people caring about few things now aren't we.
lotsofpulp•21m ago
I have always assumed the further away from math and physics a field is, the higher the probability of any given “research” to be false. Even biology, I might give 50% odds at best, but that is due to the difficulty of observing and measuring in that field. Anything past biology might as well be as fiction due to how easy it is to come up with whatever results you want.
erikerikson•16m ago
I appreciate that physics and math are simple, reductive, and first principles enough to be tractable. Solving easier problems always has better optics so long as all problems look equivalent. I'm guilty myself, only rising to neuroscience and relatively superficially at that...
austinjp•16m ago
Oh I'm sure the grifters will find ways in. The other disciplines may have provided a "moat" for the past few decades, but it won't last forever.
p-e-w•5m ago
I fully expect that future programs for formalizing mathematics will reveal that most sufficiently complex proofs are riddled with gaps and errors, and that some of them actually led to false results.
Annals of Mathematics once published a supposed proof (related to intersection bodies IIRC) for a statement that turned out to be false, and it was discovered only by someone else proving the opposite, not by someone finding an error.
paulpauper•54m ago
sillysaurusx•27m ago
This seems to be the key part. Are you sure that's true?
In other news, (a) apparently you can now submit URLs with anchors to HN, previously a perennial problem; (b) this submission anchors to a comment that just says "I will try this. Suggestions welcome" with no further context.
Ironically, (b) was exactly why (a) was disallowed for the longest time; anchors are usually a mistake by the submitter, since whatever's being anchored to usually has a permalink. Except Github. Hello, Github comments.
qsi•26m ago
sillysaurusx•18m ago
I'm just relieved you can submit anchored URLs now. I once stayed up for a few hours trying to submit some work I made as a github comment only to be disappointed that it would always redirect to the toplevel issue.