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504 points puttycat | 19 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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WWWWH ◴[] No.46184528[source]
Surely this is gross professional misconduct? If one of my postdocs did this they would be at risk of being fired. I would certainly never trust them again. If I let it get through, I should be at risk.

As a reviewer, if I see the authors lie in this way why should I trust anything else in the paper? The only ethical move is to reject immediately.

I acknowledge mistakes and so on are common but this is different league bad behaviour.

replies(3): >>46186748 #>>46189798 #>>46191195 #
1. stainablesteel ◴[] No.46186748[source]
this brings us to a cultural divide, westerners would see this as a personal scar, as they consider the integrity of the publishing sphere at large to be held up by the integrity of individuals

i clicked on 4 of those papers, and the pattern i saw was middle-eastern, indian, and chinese names

these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.

some people would say it's racist to understand this, but in my opinion when i was working with people from these cultures there was just no other way to learn to cooperate with them than to understand them, it's an incredibly confusing experience to be working with them until you understand the various differences between your own culture and theirs

replies(5): >>46187026 #>>46187049 #>>46187534 #>>46188119 #>>46188532 #
2. ribosometronome ◴[] No.46187026[source]
Where do you see the authors? All I'm seeing is:

>Anonymous authors

>Paper under double-blind review

replies(3): >>46187151 #>>46187208 #>>46195791 #
3. Aeglaecia ◴[] No.46187049[source]
im not sure if you are gonna get downvoted so im sticking a limb out to cop any potential collateral damage in the name of finding out whether the common inhabitant of this forum considers the idea of low trust vs high trust societies to be inherently racist
replies(2): >>46187229 #>>46206578 #
4. titanomachy ◴[] No.46187151[source]
Yeah WTF? Both authors and reviewers are hidden. Is this comment just an attempt to whip up racist fervor?
replies(1): >>46188569 #
5. sureMan6 ◴[] No.46187208[source]
Either op mistakes the hallucinated citations for the authors (most likely, although there's almost no "middle eastern names" among them) Or he checked some that do have the names listed (I found 4, all had either Chinese names or "western" names) Anyway the great majority of papers (good or bad) I've seen have Indian or Chinese names attached, attributing bad papers to brown people having an inferior culture is just blatantly racist
6. CoastalCoder ◴[] No.46187229[source]
I think it's an interesting question. Whether or not it can be discussed well here isn't so obvious.
replies(1): >>46188589 #
7. zsdfgyu ◴[] No.46187534[source]
This sort of behavior is not limited to researchers from those cultures. One of the highest profile academic frauds to date was from a German. Look up the Schön scandal.
8. throw10920 ◴[] No.46188119[source]
> these are cultures where they think this kind of behavior is actually acceptable, they would assume it's the fault of the journal for accepting the paper. they don't see the loss of reputation to be a personal scar because they instead attribute blame to the game.

I have a relative who lived in a country in the East for several years, and he says that this is just factually true.

The vast majority of people who disagree with this statement have never actually lived in these cultures. They just hallucinate that they have because they want that statement to be false so badly.

...but, simultaneously, I'm also not seeing where you see the authors of the papers - I only see hallucitation authors. e.g. at the link for the first paper submission (https://openreview.net/forum?id=WPgaGP4sVS), there doesn't appear to be any authors listed. Are you confusing the hallucinated citation authors with the primary paper authors?

In that case, I would expect Eastern authors to be over-represented, because they just publish a lot more.

9. ssivark ◴[] No.46188532[source]
PSA: Please note that the names are hallucinated author lists part of the hallucinated citations, and not names of offending authors.

AFAIK the submissions are still blinded and we don't know who the authors are. We will, surely, soon -- since ICLR maintains all submissions in public record for posterity, even if "withdrawn". They are unblinded after the review period finishes.

10. nyc_data_geek1 ◴[] No.46188569{3}[source]
Don't understand why you're being downvoted, here.
replies(1): >>46189293 #
11. nyc_data_geek1 ◴[] No.46188589{3}[source]
What are you people talking about. Have you even looked at the article?

The names of the Asian/Indian people GP is referring to, are explicitly stated to be hallucinations in the article. So, high vs low trust society questions aside, the entire assertion here is explicitly wrong. These are not authors submitting hallucinated content, these are fictitious authors who are themselves hallucinations.

You are making up a guy to get mad at

12. Dylan16807 ◴[] No.46189293{4}[source]
Because the second sentence is inflammatory.

The side comment is right, it's about low versus high trust societies. Even if GP made a mistake on which names are relevant, they're not being racist about it.

replies(3): >>46189990 #>>46195711 #>>46207863 #
13. titanomachy ◴[] No.46189990{5}[source]
Yes, on looking more closely it’s possible that they made an honest mistake.
replies(1): >>46213441 #
14. ◴[] No.46195711{5}[source]
15. stainablesteel ◴[] No.46195791[source]
you can google the papers and find the arxiv articles where the authors are listed
16. mrwrong ◴[] No.46206578[source]
in general, if the question is "can I divide this heterogenous population into two mutually exclusive groups based on fuzzy subjective criteria" the answer is... no
17. nyc_data_geek1 ◴[] No.46207863{5}[source]
That's one opinion. Here's another - they were waiting with their commentary locked and loaded, and failed to even read the source material in any detail before unloading it.

They're making broad assertions about specific societies, when those assertions are in this instance in no way related to TFA.

18. nyc_data_geek1 ◴[] No.46213441{6}[source]
In that case, the edit button exists. It seems rather late in the day to be erring on the side of the benefit of the doubt in every case, for things like this. Much of the population is unabashedly, vociferously, aggressively racist and proud of it, these days.
replies(1): >>46213631 #
19. Dylan16807 ◴[] No.46213631{7}[source]
> In that case, the edit button exists. It seems rather late in the day to be erring on the side of the benefit of the doubt

The edit button exists for 2 hours and this is not a person that frequently comments.

> That's one opinion. Here's another - they were waiting with their commentary locked and loaded, and failed to even read the source material in any detail before unloading it.

Well almost a day later they replied "you can google the papers and find the arxiv articles where the authors are listed". Unless that is a blatant lie, it seems like a pretty good reason to think they're using good-faith and non-racist reasoning here.