What Happens When a Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Retracts A Paper? (bbc.com) 132
An American scientist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry just retracted their latest paper on Monday. Professor Arnold had shared the prize with George P Smith and Gregory Winter for their 2018 research on enzymes, reports the BBC (in an article shared by omfglearntoplay):
It has been retracted because the results were not reproducible, and the authors found data missing from a lab notebook... "It is painful to admit, but important to do so. I apologize to all. I was a bit busy when this was submitted, and did not do my job well."
That same day, Science published a note outlining why it would be retracting the paper, which Professor Arnold co-authored with Inha Cho and Zhi-Jun Jia. "Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper."
Professor Arnold is being applauded for acknowledging the mistake -- and has argued that science suffers when there's pressures not to:
"It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it... We should just be able to do it and set the record straight... The very quick and widespread response to my tweets shows how strong the fear of doing the right thing is (especially among junior scientists). However, the response also shows that taking responsibility is still appreciated by most people."
Those remarks come from a Forbes article by the Professor of Health Policy and Management at the City University of New York. His own thoughts? What the heck happened with scientific research? Exploring, making and admitting mistakes should be part of the scientific process. Yet, Arnold's retraction and admission garnered such attention because it is a rare thing to do these days...
If you need courage to do what should be a routine part of science, then Houston and every other part of the country, we've got a problem. And this is a big, big problem for science and eventually our society... [T]ruly advancing science requires knowing about the things that didn't work out and all the mistakes that happened. These shouldn't stay hidden deep within the recesses of laboratories and someone's notebook.
That same day, Science published a note outlining why it would be retracting the paper, which Professor Arnold co-authored with Inha Cho and Zhi-Jun Jia. "Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments. The authors are therefore retracting the paper."
Professor Arnold is being applauded for acknowledging the mistake -- and has argued that science suffers when there's pressures not to:
"It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it... We should just be able to do it and set the record straight... The very quick and widespread response to my tweets shows how strong the fear of doing the right thing is (especially among junior scientists). However, the response also shows that taking responsibility is still appreciated by most people."
Those remarks come from a Forbes article by the Professor of Health Policy and Management at the City University of New York. His own thoughts? What the heck happened with scientific research? Exploring, making and admitting mistakes should be part of the scientific process. Yet, Arnold's retraction and admission garnered such attention because it is a rare thing to do these days...
If you need courage to do what should be a routine part of science, then Houston and every other part of the country, we've got a problem. And this is a big, big problem for science and eventually our society... [T]ruly advancing science requires knowing about the things that didn't work out and all the mistakes that happened. These shouldn't stay hidden deep within the recesses of laboratories and someone's notebook.
It's part of the scientific method (Score:3)
What Happens When a Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Retracts A Paper?
Then the science can be said to have worked, as reproducible results are part of the crucible new discoveries must pass.
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Then the science can be said to have worked
I'm not saying that THIS guy in particular is incompetent (or worse), but why is it that his results and the results of so many others are not reproducible?
Seriously whats going on here? While Forbes asks why admitting mistakes is so newsworthy, I ask why mistakes so easily get published to begin with while at the same time crucial lab notes are missing.
Sure, through randomness an effect can be legitimately observed that is far away from the center of the bell cu
Re:It's part of the scientific method (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying that THIS guy in particular is incompetent (or worse), but why is it that his results and the results of so many others are not reproducible?
TFS goes to ridiculous pains not to mention the gender of the scientist in question. FYI, Professor Frances Arnold is a woman.
Re:It's part of the scientific method (Score:5, Informative)
>.and what of the peer review process?
Umm... it's working great? Publishing is the first step in the peer review process. How can your peers review your work unless they know it exists?
Reputable journals typically have a few other scientists in your field review your *paper* before publishing - but they're volunteers, and it's mostly just to catch the most obvious and egregious flaws in your writing or research procedure. Then the paper is published, and hopefully some of your peers start learning of your results and get interested enough to try to replicate them. *That's* when peer review of your research starts.
If peer review then exposes flaws in your work sufficient to convince you that you shouldn't have published, then retraction is the responsible thing for you to do, as it tells future researchers that they probably shouldn't waste their time reading your paper.
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"Review" is exactly what it says, ie. reading papers and seeing if they pass the sniff test. If a paper sounds plausible to somebody proficient in the field and doesn't break any known laws of physics then it probably passes.
Actually reproducing scientific results usually requires special equipment and investment in time/resources. It simply isn't possible to do this for every paper before publishing.
After publication it's a different story. After publication the entire world is free to examine the results.
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Where is the profit in reproducing someone else experiment. Which means, before you can publish papers, you kind of should repeat the experiment yourself, just to be sure and not after you publish.
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Then the science can be said to have worked
You do not reproduce experiments when doing peer review. You just do plausibility checking. Keep in mind that peer-review is unpaid work in almost all cases and work that you do in addition to your regular work.
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Problems with papers can be really hard to catch just from reading them, and the unfortunate reality is that there are few people interested in just reproducing results, and there is essentially zero funding to do so. This was an issue that came up in my graduate research, where existing work had come to incorrect conclusions based on flawed observations. But no one would have reasonably been expected to catch the flaws. The methods were commonplace and the results made sense, they just weren't complete,
More to it than that? (Score:3)
There appears to be more to this story than "we couldn't reproduce the results."
If there is an error in a paper, I see no reason to retract this paper that is already part of the literature record. Have the next paper explain the error, what the consequences of the error are, if any, offer the correction and then move on.
This is a case of a third author not being presented with key documentation from a first author, leading to retracting the paper? The last author is usually the senior person running
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The omissions and errors are perfect reason to retract a paper; they made it wrong. To stay in the body of literature, they need to be correct as read and reproducible, which they weren't.
If they're wrong, they should be pulled, reworked, re-tested and re-published.
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What Happens When a Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Retracts A Paper?
Then the science can be said to have worked, as reproducible results are part of the crucible new discoveries must pass.
Yep, this person just joined the ranks of The True Scientists(tm).
(and we await the day when a religious leader or politician does something similar...)
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A Nobel prize means that something you observed, or the way you observed it, is or was of great interest to the scientific community and maybe it was even useful. It does not mean that the observation was absolutely correct, or that the prize winner is better than anyone else. Like it ways about moderation points on /., a noble prize do
Ethnic drug dealers (Score:2)
There are shortcomings in the aforementioned claims about what was said be a man with Orange Hair and also in claims regarding the Nobel Prize.
The dude with Orange Hair claimed that a neighboring nation state was encouraging persons on the margins of society to migrate outside that nation state. And that the people encouraged by the leaders of their country to leave, in the process making the country in question a better place for its remaining citizens, included drug dealers. The claims made by Orange
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> Obviously he was because Quantum is the key factor to us knowing that there is something wrong with Relativity, as the two do not get along.
Quantum theory and special relativity get along just fine (-> QFT). How to combine general relativity and quantum theory is an open question.
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What Happens When a Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Retracts A Paper?
Then he willingly gives back his Nobel Prize!
Right?
It's easy when you can afford it (Score:2)
The guy's got a Nobel prize, that's like winning gold in the science Olympics. Retracting a sloppy paper is minimizing a risk it'll tarnish his reputation and put his other achievements into question. For the unmerited scientist trying to secure a position or research grant "So your latest work was so sloppy you had to retract it, why should we give this to you?" is the kiss of death. Owning your mistakes is never going to be as good as not making the mistakes, if you can get away with it.
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This, folks, is anti-science.
Sometimes people get confused and think being wrong is anti-science, but no. Here is a real-life example of a person promoting an anti-science position.
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Yep. Being wrong is the purest form of science.
Positive results mean nothing, it's the negative results that make or break a theory.
(...which is why they're called "theories" - any theory must be falsifiable if it is to have any credibility)
Re: It's easy when you can afford it (Score:2)
Sheâ(TM)s not a guy.
Negative results (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, those negative results only become known about by retractions of papers which erroneously claimed positive results. Editors and reviewers aren't keen on papers which say, "We tried this and it didn't work".
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Editors and reviewers aren't keen on papers which say, "We tried this and it didn't work".
The trouble is they can not work for a variety of reasons. It might be that the original paper was wrong. Or it might have been a difficult experiment and the second paper screwed up. Or (and I have seen this happen to a colleague) it might be malfeasance on the part of the "rebuttal" because someone hates the original author. Don't get me wrong it should be possible to negate bad papers, but one risks having a slew of
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> You could have a dark side and a bright side with no temperature difference,
And sometimes continue to promulgate the error because it's an interesting one that reinforces their world view. This is what happened with the Lancet's article by Andrew Wakefield, linking vaccination to autism:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
Wakefield and his peers retracted the paper, but it still gets cited by anti-vaxxers.
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Editors and reviewers love those sorts of paper. But in many fields they very rarely see them. "We did the experiment and got a p-value of 0.51, therefore we conclude that X et al. are full of shit" is not a refutation.
A research assistant came running down the hall one day and told me that two very interesting papers had been published about the long term affects of a particular drug. "But their results are contradictory!" he exclaimed, and immediately planned a journal club to discuss them. On actually re
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My e-mail does:
doi:10.1001/jama.2012.7625
doi:10.1177/1352458512445941
The first paper is an example of what people call a "negative" result. The conclusion: "Among patients with relapsing-remitting MS, administration of interferon beta was not associated with a reduction in progression of disability." They found a hazard ratio for treatment with 95% confidence interval between 0.58-1.02 (HR 1). This is expected, since most modern patients that are not treated are usually not treated because their disease is
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Editors and reviewers aren't keen on papers which say, "We tried this and it didn't work".
Which is a major failing of the modern publishing-academia complex. Negative results are as valuable as positive results. Science lives by learning, and learning what DOESN'T work is as instructive as learning what works. My first lead engineer I worked for had a saying:
You never learn from success, only failure. Success can be dumb luck, but failure is all you
. This is why science relies upon the ability to predict positive AND negative results, and being able to replicate both is a requirement of t
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The problem is very basic - there is an infinite number of things that don't work. How to record and organize them all in a manner systematic enough to be worthwhile is not obvious at all.
In a few cases there are good reasons why it's surprising that something didn't work - like when a study fails to find support for what has become common medical practice. But in those cases, you do hear about it.
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Editors and reviewers are a massive problem for scientific quality. That has been true for a long time. Just refer to one Claude Shannon, that could not get a paper titled "Theory of Information" published, because the reviewers thought it was uninteresting.
The key phrase (Score:2)
"Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments."
In other words, one of her co-authors faked their results.
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Only non-scientists treat this as a bad thing. (Score:2)
Scientists have no problem with "failing". We know that you can only learn new stuff from failures.
So we are happy he retracted it, instead of just keeping it due to ego, and ruining their career later when somebody else finds out. (Or worse: Nobody finds out.)
(Not trying to pull a "no true scotsman" here. I think it's key to the accepted definition of the word "scientist".)
(And saying "nobel-prize winning, as if that would imply his papers are more right, is an "argument from authority" fallacy anyway.)
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A citation of title is only a fallacious argument from authority if that authority is used to assert the truth of a statement without further proof. At least as far as I could see, nobody does this there. TFA is all about how retraction should be a normal process in science and that people should not need to be courageous to admit their mistakes. Furthermore it's concerned with the fact that retractions like this have become a rarity
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Given the current state of scientific publishing (and its effect of people's careers) I don't see that there's any argument from authority.
Or perhaps more accurately, it *is*, but it's addressing the far more egregious "argument from insecurity" that currently pervades the scientific establishment that admitting to flawed research is bad. (just look what it can do to someone's career) And rational arguments don't work well against irrational ones - in fact they can often make the problem worse.
Scientists a
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> We know that you can only learn new stuff from failures.
That's incorrect.
While it IS more important to know what NOT to do -- it is JUST as important as knowing WHAT to do.
i.e. Just because you know what not to do doesn't imply that you know what to do.
Success and Failure go hand-in-hand. You can learn from BOTH.
A bit of good, a bit of bad. (Score:2)
Okay, yes, they had to retract a paper.
They did so.
Was their work sloppy? Yes..
If you wait for a perfectly formatted, nicely orthagonal paper, it becomes less about the research and more about how to make pretty papers.
They goofed. They owned up.
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No, someone needs to find out what happened and why.
There are a myriad ways this could happen. Jumping up and down and yelling "Fraud" is not in the slightest helpful.
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^ T ^ H ^ I ^ S ^
Simply slapping "fraud" on something helps nothing.
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Look at what she says. She says that she was not able to reproduce it, and that upon investigating the original authors book, that she could find neither the entry nor raw data. The prof would NEVER have written that paper without supposedly multiple times of the experiment. She trusted the tech. S?he obviously lied.
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"Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments.
Assume that first author simply did not record it down the way that you assume it was. How many times do you think that the experiment was performed before the paper? Just 1 time? Nope. It would have supposedly occurred MULTIPLE times. So, if the author is claiming that the experiment was successful, then s?he is claiming that they performed it MULTIPLE times. Yet, the fact that s?he had NO DATA and was not able to replicate it, shows that the experimenter simply lied.
Applause (Score:2)
This scientist did the right thing. They have gained respect and lost nothing.
This should be routine (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientists admitting their own mistakes should be routine, so common it's not even worth mentioning. The whole point of science is that it's a fact-based error correction process which repeatedly identifies and corrects its own mistakes, to asymptotically converge on truth. Einstein showed how to correct Newton's errors, so we updated our view, for example. Various issues in cosmology and our inability to unify relativity and QC demonstrate that physics is currently wrong, so we're looking for how to fix it. These are grand-scale errors, but small-scale errors obviously exist as well. Humans are fallible, and everyone screws up. We all need to have the humility to admit our mistakes, and nowhere is this more critical than in science.
The problem is that this runs counter to deep-seated social norms, which are themselves probably baked deeply by evolutionary processes into the structure of our brains. Social and political power derives primarily from being seen to be right about important things, which means that we naturally tend to trumpet our successes and bury our mistakes. And science, like every other human endeavor, is a social and a political process. To the extent that we can overcome this, in every field, not just science, we'll progress faster.
By all rights, no one should be better at admitting error than software engineers. Our professional lives are dominated by finding and fixing our own mistakes. We build elaborate test and integration systems (themselves at least as buggy as the software they're testing), for the purpose of finding mistakes as early as possible. We accept that there's a non-trivial probability that any given line of code contains an error. Yet that expectation of fallibility not only doesn't seem to extend to other areas, in many ways it seems like software engineers compensate by being more deeply convinced of their own infallibility.
In recent decades humanity, or at least academic humanity, has begun to learn a lot about the cognitive biases baked deeply into our brains, biases which make it hard for us to be objective and analytical in the ways that we can logically see that we should be, and wish to be. I don't know how we fix this, but it should be a major focus. I'd guess that it starts with education, with teaching the next generation about the ways their own thinking fails them, and how to compensate.
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admitting their own mistakes should be routine, so common it's not even worth mentioning
No, it should not be routine. There is a very significant cost to retractions and bad science that needs to be retracted.
There is a high cost, sure. But the cost of people being unwilling to make retractions is far, far higher.
This is the equivalent to software that isn't properly tested before release "because we can just issue updates". If you make the corrections too easy, the quality declines.
Utter nonsense. There is no evidence whatsoever that software that can't be updated easily is of higher quality. Obviously there are specific situations in which the cost of bugs is so high that people are willing to invest intensively in ensuring they don't occur. Avionics, for example. But that doesn't happen in more typical contexts because it doesn't make sense. Trying to build all software to
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There was a time when video games for consoles couldn't be updated after they were released. In that time, although bugs certainly existed, they were rare, and showstopper bugs were vanishingly rare except for no-name publishers. The fact that these two went together is coincidence, I'm sure.
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There was a time when video games for consoles couldn't be updated after they were released. In that time, although bugs certainly existed, they were rare, and showstopper bugs were vanishingly rare except for no-name publishers. The fact that these two went together is coincidence, I'm sure.
Your memory is failing you. Bugs in games were always common, and finding and exploiting glitches was a big deal, even going back to the arcade era, when games were much, much smaller and simpler than they are today. If there are more bugs today (and I'm not at all certain there are), it's due to the vastly greater size and complexity.
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That's just correlation. Because at the same time, games were simpler - to develop a game for these platforms often only
I blame social media (Score:2)
"It should not be so difficult to retract a paper, and it should not be considered an act of courage to publicly admit it... "
The writer fails to consider the modern environment in which all science takes place.
Sure, this retraction will affects hundreds of scientists in the field, and for the sake of that science the retraction should be easy and relatively painless.
But in the era of social media, this retraction could be discussed everywhere, and the social consequences of the retraction could affect bill
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Would be helpful of people stopped attacking just to feel superior first. Once you get past that, maybe people will learn "I don't know" again.
Hopefully Nothing Unless it Affects the Prize (Score:2)
What a ridiculous question-- "What Happens When a Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Retracts A Paper?"
The headline itself encourages readers to postulate what SHOULD be done based on their (thus far) under-educated understanding of the sciences, academia, research, the Nobel prize, and error.
(sarcasm)
"The Nobel prize winner? Well they MUST be an exemplar of Messiah-level scientific endeavor and lead a perfect life, too. If they retract a paper, it calls into question EVERYTHING they've ever done in their field.
Re:Their? (Score:5, Funny)
"Their" has been acquiring a secondary definition as a singular gender-neutral alternative to "his" or "her" for at least a couple of decades now. Did you not get the memo?
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Re:Their? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Their? (Score:5, Informative)
Singular they/their has been in common usage in English since the 14th century, typically with an "unspecified antecedent" (ie. for someone who is not specifically known like the person who left *their* umbrella in the office). And "criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error".
From:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Singular they is the use in English of the pronoun they or its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (or themself), as an epicene (gender-neutral) singular pronoun. It typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent, as in sentences such as:
"Somebody left their umbrella in the office. Could you please let them know where they can get it?"[1]
"The patient should be told at the outset how much they will be required to pay."[2]
"But a journalist should not be forced to reveal their sources."[2]
The singular they emerged by the 14th century,[3] about a century after plural they. It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since then, and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[4][5][6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the change toward gender-neutral language,[5][7] though many style guides continue to describe it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing.[8][9]
In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals, as in the following example, emerged for those who do not identify as male or female.[10]
"This is my friend, Jay. I met them at work. They are a talented artist."
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Excellent, thank you. I had a feeling it had been around a lot longer - but I only recalled for sure the kerfuffle a couple decades ago when it had a surge in common usage, alongside one or two other specifically singular pronouns lifted from other languages. Personally I was rooting for one of the new-to-English words catching on for numerical clarity, but if "they" has a history as a singular pronoun going back almost to its origins I suppose it's not surprising that it's the one that won out.
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Yeah, I don't like the way it sounds either, but have been warming to it. Admittedly, none of the options sounded that good either.
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In the early 21st century, use of singular they with known individuals, as in the following example, emerged for those who do not identify as male or female.
IMO, singular they is inadequate to this use. The unspecified antecedent use is uncommon enough that it rarely creates ambiguities, but if you work in an environment with a non-trivial number of non-binary individuals you regularly encounter situations in which it's unclear which of the meanings of "they" was intended: plural, unknown singular or known singular. Some people try to fix this by using singular conjugations when referring to known singular non-binary persons, but that is so grammatically off
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The unspecified antecedent use is uncommon enough that it rarely creates ambiguities, but if you work in an environment with a non-trivial number of non-binary individuals you regularly encounter situations in which it's unclear which of the meanings of "they" was intended: plural, unknown singular or known singular.
I don't see any cases where it matters if you need to distinguish between "unknown singular or known singular".
"Chris left their umbrella on their desk" is a good usage in my mind, regardless of your knowledge of Chris' gender identity.
I agree with the more narrow point that the ambiguity of plural vs singular is more of a problem.
"Chris and Pat left their shoes and keys in their hotel room." is more ambiguous than "Chris and Pat left her shoes and his keys in their hotel room", but not much more ambiguous
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The unspecified antecedent use is uncommon enough that it rarely creates ambiguities, but if you work in an environment with a non-trivial number of non-binary individuals you regularly encounter situations in which it's unclear which of the meanings of "they" was intended: plural, unknown singular or known singular.
I don't see any cases where it matters if you need to distinguish between "unknown singular or known singular".
I agree, which is why I said we need gender-neutral singular pronouns to cover both of those cases.
I agree with the more narrow point that the ambiguity of plural vs singular is more of a problem.
Yes, that is the problem.
"Chris and Pat left their shoes and keys in their hotel room." is more ambiguous than "Chris and Pat left her shoes and his keys in their hotel room", but not much more ambiguous than "Chris and Pat left his shoes and his keys in his hotel room". I probably wouldn't say it that way in the first place. "Chris left his shoes in his room, and Pat left his keys." (Who's keys? Did Pat leave Pat's keys or Chris' keys? Even without they/their we end up with awkward sentences or ambiguity)
I suspect that this "problem" is rare enough (though not super rare by any means) that the English language evolution is not going to do much to address it. If singular they/their becomes very common, maybe we will create a different plural form?
It's not at all uncommon, but not in the form you describe. It's a problem when you're describing the actions/thoughts/whatever of a group, in a context where you could also be meaning a non-binary individual. We're accustomed to having different singular vs plural pronouns and restructuring sentences to make this distinction clear is very awkward. Most often people just end up repe
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"Chris left their umbrella on their desk" is a good usage in my mind, regardless of your knowledge of Chris' gender identity.
This doesn't work for me at all. The only reason I know that we're talking about Chris' umbrella and Chris' desk is the context from your other sentences. This sentence on its own suggests that the umbrella belongs to some other entity.
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"Chris left their umbrella on their desk" is a good usage in my mind, regardless of your knowledge of Chris' gender identity.
This doesn't work for me at all. The only reason I know that we're talking about Chris' umbrella and Chris' desk is the context from your other sentences. This sentence on its own suggests that the umbrella belongs to some other entity.
I also feel a bit uncomfortable with this structure, but have become more accustomed to it recently. I think my lack of comfort is mostly a function of unfamiliarity.
When you think of it, any use of pronouns comes with a potential increase in ambiguity. The only reason we know that we are talking about Chris' umbrella and Chris' desk or someone else's stuff in the sentence "Chris left her umbrella on her desk" is the context from the other sentences. Things change if proceeded with: "Pat is complaining abou
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I think my lack of comfort is mostly a function of unfamiliarity.
Well yeah. If I tell you that the word "spoon" refers to an eating tool with tines, used for piercing and lifting food, you would be uncomfortable with it when people kept using the word to refer to forks. ... Until you got used to the new meaning of the word, then it would be fine.
The question is, what do you lose in this scenario? Well you have to go through a period involving a lot of miscommunication and confusion. You may be able to suffer through that, but given that the whole purpose of language i
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I don't really have any disagreement with your points. There are numerous problems with "singular they", and better solutions are do exist.
Regardless of what we might decide is the "best" solution, English is such that the language (ie the people speaking it) will do whatever the language will do. I do not think that there is any cultural pressure to "spoonify" the fork, but if there was, I doubt that us old folk complaining about how kids these days don't know how to talk about utensils would do much to ho
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I think we need new gender-neutral pronouns which can take both the unknown singular and known singular non-binary cases.
Richard Stallman had a suggestion [stallman.org] for this which I liked.
As I see it, whether we go with Stallman's suggestion or not this problem requires a new word. The confusion and the issues stem from the fact that people are trying to repupose an existing word, one which is already very commonly used for something else (something related, but not the same).
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The grandparent was talking about the use of a singular "they" being using without an unspecified antecedent, and the parent was saying that this is happening more often. Your comment is about the use of "they" in a different context, with
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The grandparent was talking about the use of a singular "they" being using without an unspecified antecedent, and the parent was saying that this is happening more often. Your comment is about the use of "they" in a different context, with an unspecified antecedent.
I had not considered that subtle point. (I do agree that the sentence about the article is crap considering the authorship of the paper to begin with.)
I'm not a lexical historian, but the quoted article does state: "It typically occurs with an unspecified antecedent..." which I took to mean that it occasionally occurs with a specified antecedent, and has done so since the 14th century, and that in the 18th century people started complaining about it.
Anyone wanna look up some better references than these?
htt [oed.com]
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"Their" has been acquiring a secondary definition as a singular gender-neutral alternative to "his" or "her" for at least a couple of decades now. Did you not get the memo?
Acquiring. Decades. Er...
I mean it's not like Shakespeare used singular "they" (and derivatives) at all, dating it's use back at least as far as Early Modern English. And the Oxford English Dictionary dates it back to 1375, well into the Middle English era.
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry... [oed.com]
Oh the irony (Score:3)
Re:Oh the irony (Score:4, Informative)
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but factually there should not have been a single antecedent before the pronoun because the paper had three authors
Well, that's the "bad writing part".
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It's not singular, it's indefinite, which is a characteristic of English plurals in general.
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Yes, English plurals, including "they", are usually indefinite. Usually though they're specifically plural and can not be properly used in a singular subject.
"They" though can *also* be used as a singular-indefinite pronoun (see definition 3: https://www.merriam-webster.co... [merriam-webster.com]) - and as others have noted has been used as such almost since the word was coined, with the first documented complaints against such usage not arising until several centuries later.
Personally I'd much rather have a separate singular-
Re: Their? (Score:3, Informative)
Couple of decades? At least until the last decade, if the gender was unknown "he" (the male pronoun) should be used in proper English text.
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But if you want to add more Indo-European then I'd like to add German which can be even more confusing because the genders of many nouns are arbitrary.
In German the the indefinite "someone" and "somebody" of an unknown person can be used with either gender. But is typically used with masculine pronouns.
For example: Jemand hat seinen Regenschirm im Büro vergessen. (Somebody left th
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In German the the indefinite "someone" and "somebody" of an unknown person can be used with either gender. But is typically used with masculine pronouns.
What you're actually saying is that the indefinite pronouns have only masculine forms, and that due to concord, other parts of the sentence adapt to it. Which is exactly the thing I was pointing out; German simply is one o
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Are you really trying to tell me that if I said "Professor Arnold was here a minute ago, you just missed him.", most people wouldn't automatically assume that the professor is a man? Bullshit.
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And yet, exactly the context in which we are discussing, and "their" is profitably used. The fact that Arnold is a woman (as you can see in the photo of her) is irrelevant to the conversation, and referencing it in the context of an unusual activity invites sexist commentary and assumptions (slanted every which way, all of which are probably irrelevant to the topic)
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The fact that Arnold is a woman (as you can see in the photo of her) is irrelevant to the conversation
In languages with grammatical gender such as most IE languages, that fact would be very relevant
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The context where you are referring to a specific individual, but choose not to specify their gender, either because you think it would distract attention from your point, or because you don't know and don't want to spread misinformation.
Though you're correct, the writing is poor enough that it's hard to tell if the writer actually intended for "their" to refer to Arnold or the whole group.
We don't routinely specify height, hair color, etc. when discussing someone, and I see no reason why we should be lingu
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We don't routinely specify height, hair color, etc. when discussing someone, and I see no reason why we should be linguistically forced to specify their gender
Because gender is a grammatical category and height isn't. In my native tongue the past forms of words don't contain information about people's heights, so I don't need to know people's heights to talk about them. But they DO contain information about their gender and so I have to know people's gender in order to be able to talk about them in the past tense.
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Except that in English gender really isn't a grammatical category - pronouns are pretty much the only place it's relevant.
So - how do you talk about someone whose gender you don't know in your native tongue? Say - if you met an interesting androgynous person at a convention and their gender never came up. And while I understand that your native language usally feels more natural than any others, do you truly believe that having to assign arbitrary genders to inanimate objects and abstract concepts in orde
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Except that in English gender really isn't a grammatical category - pronouns are pretty much the only place it's relevant.
The funny thing about grammatical categories is that generally in linguistics they exist until they don't. Even if just pronouns keep them alive, it's still a grammatical category.
So - how do you talk about someone whose gender you don't know in your native tongue?
Well, you don't. At least not easily.
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Perhaps so but I doubt such narrow grammatical categories matter much to anyone but linguists. And doesn't the fact that there are gender-neutral alternatives to all the pronouns rather undermine the idea that English has such a grammatical category?
>Well, you don't. At least not easily.
To me that sounds like a major flaw, especially in a world where we're finally accepting that gender (and even sex) are non-binary.
And it's a flaw which English already includes a solution to in the form of "they".
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I disagree. You say that "he" in the generic implies specific gender, but couldn't it also imply that men have no specific gender pronoun where women do?
she - singular - woman
he - singular - unknown gender
he - singular - man
Thus, by default, "he" is ungendered unless you personally add gender to it in your own mind. How is that bad?
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I'll recycle the same example I posted to another comment just above.
If I told you "Professor Arnold was here a minute ago, you just missed him."
Would you assume Arnold is a man, a woman, or that you don't have enough information to judge?
I think it's a safe bet that the vast majority of people would assume Arnold is a man, so obviously "he" isn't primarily a gender neutral term.
I suspect the double-use of male pronouns as gender neutral is largely a result of English historical norms where you had "women",
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If I told you "Professor Arnold was here a minute ago, you just missed him." Would you assume Arnold is a man, a woman, or that you don't have enough information to judge?
A reasonable listener would assume that you know who and what you're talking about and that you're not making such basic mistakes as labeling a man as a woman, or vice versa. Clearly you're saying that there's a male professor Arnold that has just been here.
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They would, though they could easily be wrong - I've known several androgynous people whose gender I never knew. I would have had to have asked them to find out, and it was never relevant to our relationship, so why would I?
Thus, when speaking of them my options are to either use "they", or to falsely imply that I am sharing knowledge of their gender.
Re: It's hard because it's admitting a mistake (Score:2)
I was about to say the same thing, publishing a paper requires you to pretty much have done all the data analysis and then gone back and reviewed work, as well as peer review and multiple times where raw data was publicly released as soon as possible.
At least that's a requirement on NIH and NSF RO1 grants. I would be pretty suspicious of a professor that admits he did not regularly review his lab's workbooks so much that entire chunks of data were missing and pretty much made up - because that's what he's s
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Right, because like doctors, scientists are superhuman beings capable of never making mistakes.
Or, just maybe, unlike doctors, scientists recognize that *nobody* is so superhuman, and designed the entire scientific method is to minimize and correct for the inevitable mistakes that even the best scientists will make, knowing that the people making a mistake are usually the ones that will have the hardest time spotting it.
Publishing is step one in the peer review process. Reputable journals recruit a few vol
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Granted.
There is of course the question of who forged the data, and who knew about it. Because obviously everybody you have trusted has always proven 100% worthy of that trust, right?
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Scientists regularly do things so complex that they've never been done before. They put thousands of hours into a paper. They take meticulous records.
Occasionally something gets missed, by simple human error. If you've never made a mistake, then it's highly likely you've never actually done anything, as humans are extremely fallible.
This paper would be far from sloppy, and be highly meticulous in nearly every aspect, but contain one flaw (quite a serious one, but one).
This was (as is designed into the sc
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What proof, evidence and process are you basing this one, or is it just conjecture and attack on your part?
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"Efforts to reproduce the work showed that the enzymes do not catalyze the reactions with the activities and selectivities claimed. Careful examination of the first author's lab notebook then revealed missing contemporaneous entries and raw data for key experiments.
Assume that first author simply did not record it down the way that you assume it was. How many times do you think that the experiment was performed before the paper? Just 1 time? Nope. It would have supposedly occurred MULTIPLE times. So, if the author is claiming that the experiment was successful, then s?he is claiming that they performed it MULTIPLE times. Yet, the fact that s?he had NO DATA and was not able to replicate it, shows that the experimenter simply lied.