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I think people (like me) should be free to do shoddy scholarship, to invent bullshit models or engage in speculation way outside their area of expertise. Most of the time this will result in useless work that makes no real contribution. But on rare occasion ...
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... there will be something unusually creative or valuable. We should welcome all possibilities for that, no matter how unlikely. The only crime a researcher can commit is pretending that shoddy work isn't shoddy, or speculative work isn't speculative.
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Posing, or refusing to admit the limitations of what you've done is (in my mind) the one great crime in research, that I think should not be tolerated. But I have no problem with people being naive, speculative, and/or lazy, so long as they admit it.
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Replying to and
One more point, neither for or against the case you set out here - you may want to be careful with words like lazy, they tend to be ableist - doing a *full* literature search is hard, disproportionately for some groups (e.g. dyslexics, ASD and ADD)
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that's very fair - i don't think there's any external offense in what you said - but I question if it's even a fair put-down on yourself*? ascribing something to laziness is, paradoxically, lazy *you of course are the final arbiter of this
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Replying to and
Laziness is good. I like Shalizi and Tozier but I don’t buy their theory in that note at all. I’m in favor of aggressively ignorant rediscovery/reinvention (much more robust guarantor of QA than formal replication). Full lit survey is an especially dumb burden on preprints.
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You don’t actually know if your phase transition result is already known in mathematical sociology do you? The lazy but principled way to diligence this paper is to send it to a friendly mathematical sociologist to vet, and then collaborate/co-author to beef it up if needed.
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I don't know that this fault is in "academia" as opposed to one of the "humanity" pathologies. Humans seem obsessed (in a way that makes no sense if you understand technology) with who invented/discovered something first... eg so many dumb "company X just copied Y" args...
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