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@djsumdog Wikipedia has high quality good content and is relatively not biased (it is sometimes bias).
Snopes on the other hand is a bias piece of shit.
They do have a perspective. But is a democratic system so their perspective is little more than the perspective of experts on any one subject. There is a lean, as I said, but that lean is towards those facts which are accepted by the expert community on a subject. That said it is only their language that leans towards accepted consensus, they still include contrary opinions no matter how absurd.
Well yes and no. On wikipedia the gatekeepers are the general public, not the experts. However the policy adopted by the general public agrees that experts should be differed to, so you will see the votes generally favor an experts opinion on a matter, but they are free to vote to the contrary.
So the gatekeeping of academics doesnt really apply to Wikipedia since it isnt the academics themselves who have any voting power compared to the general public.
As for the gate keeping of academics, as a side note, while true, and in this case the academics themselves and not the general public get the say, it is generally not much of a gated community. If you wish to submit a paper for a journal there is no requirement you be an expert or hold a degree. The paper is judged on its own merrit, and not based on if the conclusions are agreed upon but rather if the process used in the paper is free from errors, and the quality of the sources used by a similar standard.
Highly controversial topics with generally unaccepted conclusions get posted all the time should the proper scientific rigor be present.
Sauying a person proved a thing does not mean a think is proven... If you wish to argue how such a claim is proven and thus prove your point go for it. But its pretty weak to just claim as an axiom for it to be proven.
The irony is that peer-review is just as open as submitting journals in many cases. So if you can identify a case where the data itself is clearly and provably false you can submit it just like anyone else.
As for wikipedia voting, reversion wars are capped at 2 reverts per person. So if someone reverts your changes you can revert back. If you run out of reverts and still feel your contribution is correct then you go to the talk page and assert your point and ask for a community vote. The result of the vote determines if the edit stands.
So yea, pretty much everything is constantly up for vote should you feel another editor or group of editors are wrong.
Taking a democratic vote about facts is stupid.
The irony is that peer-review is just as open as submitting journals in many cases. So if you can identify a case where the data itself is clearly and provably false you can submit it just like anyone else.
Publishing is the only metric of legitimacy, and publishing is highly, highly subject to clout.
I think your confusing clout with proven expertise and mastery of a subject.
@freemo I’m really not.
@freemo I have never spoken to or heard from a scientist who agrees with this assertion, unless they already have clout within that system. Everyone else acknowledges that it operates this way.
While I kind of expect people who lack expertise but still think they are scientists to share your opinion. I'd also expect the people who worked hard to become experts and are recognized as such to agree with the system.
So you really arent saying anything useful there, yes, I'd expect wanna be scientists who lack expertise to complain that people see them for what they are.
@freemo You’re backpedaling on the idea that peer review is “open,” and in fact saying it shouldn’t be, since “wannabes” might infiltrate the system.
No I'm not.. peer review is open, but the weight of your arguments comes from the expertise demonstrated by your arguments. If you cant make your argument with the level or rigor and correctness that an expert can then your argument will not be considered valid. Doesnt make it any less open to you.
To be more specific, experts tend to prefer systems that have experts... yes. Experts do love being in communities where they can be productive and get to the bottom of facts without all the noise of uneducated people who cant even make an evidence based argument that isnt riddled with obvious errors.
Its almost like experts would rather be more productive by working with other experts than to waste all day arguing with a flat-earther who insists they are right because they dont know any better.... Funny that.
So Wikipedia is valid because it is democratic, while journals are valid because they aren't democratic.
Normalcy bias is a hell of a drug.
@anonymoose @djsumdog
Wow you really are struggling here.. no I didnt say anything remotely like that.
Wikipedia is democrat and open to all to vote. Ergo the original assertion that there is gate keeping by academics is erroneous.
Similarly journals have value because anyone can submit peer-review and objections and that peer-review process is discussed, usually openly. Thus ensuring that any objections or corrections are considered and open to the reader to review and thus judge the merit of the journal.
Its about open processes, not democracy.
Wikipedia is not democratic, because that would be stupid. In practice, it is controlled and narrated by a relatively small percentage of participants.
Peer-review is also not open, as the parameters for credibility are 100% decided by an in-group who inevitably function as "tastemakers" for their field. The end result is obvious modification to scientific consensus in response to political consensus.
Stop pretending that these are not centralized system just because you think it would be bad optics to approve of it.
@djsumdog @anonymoose
No it is 100% democratic. All issues are held to public votes and the result is binding. This includes article edits when there is a conflict as well as wikipedia policy itself.
Peer-review is open in the sense that anyone can submit peer-review. In doing so your feedback is included and must be responded to. The result is that it goes on record with he article and thus. demonstrates the credibility of the process (or lack thereof).
> Peer-review is open in the sense that anyone can submit peer-review. In doing so your feedback is included and must be responded to.
I don't know why you keep making this claim. I suppose bureaucrats under Lenin also believed they lived in an open meritocracy.
@djsumdog @anonymoose
Yes yes, experts are pure angels working tirelessly for the betterment of man, they do not have base human emotions or motivation DON’T EVER QUESTION THEM!
Truly this is the way of science Lysenkoism . 🙄
I recommend you read less Neil Degrasse Tyson more Richard Feynman
>Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true. You must here distinguish–especially in teaching–the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, “We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that.” You can copy that form exactly. But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
>It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.
Never claimed experts are angels or perfect, this is why the system is open to anyone objecting and thus reviewed... But yes, you do need to be an expert on a subject if you wish to have any valuable contribution to the bleeding edge of a topic (research)
I have read everything Feynman has published, I have read nothing Neil Degrasse Tyson has published... nice try.
>Sauying a person proved a thing does not mean a think is proven… If you wish to argue how such a claim is proven and thus prove your point go for it. But its pretty weak to just claim as an axiom for it to be proven.
In this case, yes; axiomatically having peer reviewed journals publish (and give awards for excellence to) garbage papers with physically impossible ‘research designs’ proves that peer review filters on factors other than scientific rigor.
Except that you havent proven that that is the norm in the scientific community, so no, you havent "proven" anything. You just stated it as proven and expect people to accept that assertion.
You do realize the Sokal Affair involved the submission of a nonsense paper to a **non-peer reviewed** publication right? Even if it was submitted to a peer-reviewed publication it is not an indication of the entire community or all publications in that community anyway.
So no I dont deny the Sokal incident, it just isnt remotely relevant to the discussion of peer-review
>As for the gate keeping of academics, as a side note, while true, and in this case the academics themselves and not the general public get the say, it is generally not much of a gated community. If you wish to submit a paper for a journal there is no requirement you be an expert or hold a degree. The paper is judged on its own merrit, and not based on if the conclusions are agreed upon but rather if the process used in the paper is free from errors, and the quality of the sources used by a similar standard.
[search in text: “Peer review” 0 results]
Moving the goal-posts are we?
Are you nuts, the entire conversation (once we started mentioning journals) was about peer-reviewed journals.
So now your just saying "there are examples of random scientists writing papers that reflect their own opinions that lack intellectual rigor"... yea no shit, we have peer-review for a reason.
No wikipedia was completely correct... The issue is you linked a page on a topic that was not the topic being discussed.. funny how that might cause problems huh?
Also one important note is that, as I stated earlier, good peer review and good journals are not about only accepting correct conclusions, it is only about ensuring the **empirical** evidence presented is correct and scientific.
Notice in the incident we are discussing wrong emperical evidence **was** in fact rejected from the papers. Those that were accepted may have had absurd premise or conclusion, but were empirically sound. There is a reason this incident had to focuse exclusively on gender studies topics rather than something like physics.
No the link and screen shot you just published was **not** the Sokal Affair. The Sokal Affair was submitted to non-peer reviewed sources. You are referring to a different effort that was inspired by the Sokal Affair but in but sometime later, its a different incident.
In the case of the Grievance Studies Affair they did submit to peer-reviewed journals, but not ones that were respected by the community at large. This is a huge distinction, the original Sokal affair wasnt peer reviewed but had published experts in the past. In this case it was peer-reviewed but no one with expertise, established or otherwise, was in on the peer review process. They picked fringe journals that already were known for posting nonsense and lacked rigerous **expert** review.
>No the link and screen shot you just published was not the Sokal Affair. The Sokal Affair was submitted to non-peer reviewed sources. You are referring to a different effort that was inspired by the Sokal Affair but in but sometime later, its a different incident.
Zoom and Enhance:
Fair, though in every other place you refered to it simply as "Sokal".. honest enough mistake.
Either way your assertion is still erroneous since we are talking about papers submitted to journals that lacked academic credibility to start with. For Sokal to be a demonstration of the general community one would have to actually randomly select credible journals. Handpicking a handful of small journals you feel are most likely to post nonsense is not a demonstration of the scientific community as a whole.
No one is arguing that there arent journals out there that happen to post with a lack of scientific rigour. Of course they exist, doesnt mean they are the norm.
Yup, and journals known to lack scientific integrity... It is very clear from anyone who reviewed the affair that they specifically selected low-quality journals most likely to accept papers without good quality review.
They didnt even have a control group or random selection of journals, both of which would be needed in order to make any inference from the process.
>they weren’t big important journals, they were small, irrelevant ones.
1) We live in a world where 2/3rds of peer-reviewed studies fail replication. A ‘scientific’ result is 2:1 more likely to be false than true. Even absent post-modernism, academic science is just broken. Too much incentive to publish [anything] too little incentive to only publish [true result].
2) I’m curious what limiting principle you think will prevent post-modernism from working its way up the food chain? I only see more wokeness in big journals (e.g., Nature, Science), not less since 2017.
The Coffee Break guy did an interesting analysis of various reproducibility problem with scientific journals comparing it to the evolution of the giraffe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fq8HOguXGFI
The trouble with physics was really eye-opening vis-a-vis hard sciences still need to produce results.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108939.The_Trouble_with_Physics
Apparently a large percentage of the world's physicists have basically occupied their time with little else besides writing cleaver equations that make no new predictions, and patting each other on the back for how cleaver their equations are since the invention of string theory 😬
1. It's not so much that there too much incentive to publish any old crap so much as there is there is absolutely zero incentive to publish results on your recreation of another researcher's experiment. Even with replication studies, an incorrect initial conclusion means that there is a decades-long process of subsequent replication studies inching closer to the true result because jumping there directly would be rejuected for being outright incorrect.
2. Today's real research seems to be published in field-specific medium-prestige journals. The big journals publish for too large of an audience for real scientific discussion to occur.
@pupperipherals @Moon @djsumdog @natsock
I think it’s true that replication is discouraged, but I also think publication eo ipso is incentivized. If not in fact, at least in the subjective estimation of the researchers themselves, which amounts to the same thing from the perspective of the effect on the quality of output.
https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-019-0066-6
And this is not a new or unforeseeable problem:
>The pressure on university scientists to publish research papers in great quantity is relentless; and the motive behind it is clear. More papers mean more prestige for a researcher’s department—and the prestige will translate, department heads hope, into more financial support from the university. Unfortunately, this pressure is likely to prompt disreputable, unethical, and even fraudulent publication practices. At the very least, the pressure encourages scientists to adjust their priorities, putting more important work off in order to-prepare for publication material that otherwise would not be submitted….
-The Scientist, Jul 1989
It is also the case that researchers, departments, and journals all benefit from lax publication standards that lead to highly publicized headlines about exciting new findings, and barely noticed blurbs when they don’t replicate.
You are a hair away from being blocked. Not because of your opinion or disagreement, but because you are arguing like a 9 year old intentionally taking things out of context and acting like you are too stupid to understand what I said in the hope that by misrepresenting me you may convince yourself of being right.
Up until this conversation I had a great deal of respect for your ability to disagree maturely, thoughtfully, and charitably. You are quickly loosing that respect, you are not this stupid and you know it.
Honestly I know your not this stupid, so stop acting like you are just to be right.
At no point did everyone claim that every publication that happens to call itself a journal or has some review process in place is automatically high-quality or scholarly.
Obviously scientists evaluate the quality of a journal when determining if it is posting articles of scholarly merit, and you are smart enough to know that.
Who reviews the reviewers is easy... the readers, and the scientists who cite the journal. Which in turn reflects on that scientist as well.
I wouldnt be engaging in disucssion with you if you didnt have a point worth discussing.
As I said it isnt your conclusion or the topic that makes it look like your "acting stupid" it is the way you are arguing it. As I said your tactic has devolved to taking what I said out of context and misrepresenting it when you know damn well what was meant.. You are better than that, or at least, I thought you were. It looks more like a liberal having a tantrum at this point where they take what you said and misrepresent it knowing damn well what was really meant... Dont be that idiot, you are smarter than that.
I'm not sure what you mean by "voting" on Wikipedia, I've edited an article or two in my day, I've never seen a vote on anything. But any article that is the least bit contentious is locked, and only a wiki editors get to weigh in. That the public gets a say in topics about which there is no debate is meaningless to the question about how debated topics are handled.