MIT asks arXiv to withdraw preprint of paper on AI and scientific discovery

Impressively the paper seems to have been cited 50 times already. I don't mind much if its taken down or not, but with the old guard publishers you can at least get a redaction notice or comment about the issues with a paper embedded in the publication. If you find this paper cited somewhere and follow it to the source at arxiv, you will never be made aware of the disputes surrounding the research. Preprint servers has somewhat of a weakness here.

A weakness that goes hand-in-hand with the lack of peer review. There's moderation but shouldn't be considered equivalent to it. Trusting the study means trusting the author or reviewing the paper yourself. If a withdraw happens, either the author comments on why they did it[0] or, similarly to previous, you've to search it yourself.

[0] E.g. arxiv/0812.0848: "This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to a crucial definition error of Triebel space".

> A weakness that goes hand-in-hand with the lack of peer review

Peer review is not well equipped to catch fraud and deliberate deception. A half-competent fraud will result in data that looks reasonable at first glance, and peer reviewers aren't in the business of trying to replicate studies and results.

Instead, peer review is better at catching papers that either have internal quality problems (e.g. proofs or arguments that don't prove what they claim to prove) or are missing links to a crucial part of the literature (e.g. claiming an already-known result as novel). Here, the value of peer review is more ambiguous. It certainly improves the quality of the paper, but it also delays its publication by a few months.

The machine learning literature gets around this by having almost everything available in preprint with peer-reviewed conferences acting as post-facto gatekeepers, but that just reintroduces the problem of non-peer-reviewed research being seen and cited.

Most of the 50 citations are preprint servers (like arXiv) or aggregators (like researchgate). It would be nice to count the number of citations in research papers in peer review journals.

> you will never be made aware of the disputes surrounding the research

ArXiv is not peer review, so it's as confiable as Wordpress or Medium or Blogspot or X/Tweeter or ... The main difference is that the post is in PDF instead of HTML. There is an invitation system to avoid very stupid cases, but it's very week.

I remember a weird cryptography "breakthrough", and they published it in arXiv, and the first 5 pages were an explanation of the rule of 9 for divisibility and then a dubious fast factorization algorithm. [The preprint was linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666501 and I replied to it (s/module/modulo/g)]