michael_nielsen

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)

Much of this depends on an insider/outsider dichotomy, at least in the fields I know well. Insiders will know what work to ignore (& may occasionally tell others), without needing to waste time & create enemies by explicitly saying so.

Internal to the field this seems to me like a pretty good (albeit imperfect) solution. But it's not great for outsiders, who often can't evaluate easily, and it may lead to the public having a very inaccurate view.

It also relies on those fields having pretty good ways of determining whether something is correct. Eg, I ignored a lot of quantum information papers that had obviously wrong (or not even wrong) mathematics in them. In some fields it's much harder to say what "progress" is at all