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The more I follow academic debates, the more I think over-politeness harms our ability to converge on the truth. A lot of papers are weak enough they constitute ~zero evidence for their claim. But critics just politely refer to "questions" or "debate" around the papers... 1/n
... rather than "Uh, guys, we should not be updating on those papers, like at all" So we keep citing them, and treating them as evidence, bc we're socially obligated to. And in practice we end up using "# of papers claiming X" as a proxy for "strength of evidence for X" (2/n)
CLARIFICATIONS: - I'm complaining about over-politeness to *ideas*, not to people - Criticizing papers does cause some adjustment of belief away from their claims. But not as much as it would if the critics were allowed to say "c'mon, this paper is zero evidence for X" (3/n)
I'm not sure this is about ppl being too nice. I think it's more about ppl feeling obligated to follow certain social rules about evidence. Like, if a paper is widely cited, you have to treat it as if it provides at least some evidence for X, even if you don't think it does (4/n)
... bc it would be intellectually arrogant of you to claim otherwise, or something? So ppl will say "(Smith 1990) showed X. However, others have noted [flaws in the method]; this remains an open question" ...and the flaws are CLEARLY FATAL, but they stop short of saying so (5/n)
Recently senior doctoral student shared need to have well cited papers in the bibliography & mentioned right away in abstract/ intro to have some chance of not turning into desk rejection. Context was difficulties in being taken 'seriously' in pre-doctoral solo-paper publishing.
This is everywhere, not just academic research
I think this is basically @PsychRabble's position. Too concerned about "civility" to call out bad methodology.
Carefully reading and evaluating the claims of the paper yourself is orders of magnitude more work than saying 'it is unclear' and citing both. I would hope this is not a common motive.
I think there's an underlying assumption that the noise in the research signal is unbiased. But I suspect it's strongly biased towards confirmation.
This is not a tweet about those Kavanaugh allegations, right?
I guess there's a mutual "hey, you cite my work, I cite yours" in action. One really doesn't want a reject because they failed to cite something. Hence people cite liberally inflating the count for all (At least in CS / ML)
This goes away. Read @nntaleb's notes on Intellectuals yet Idiots.
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