Preprint Server Removes 'Inflammatory' Papers in Superconductor Controversy (science.org) 108
sciencehabit writes: A debate over claims of room temperature superconductivity has now boiled over into the realm of scientific publishing. Administrators of arXiv, the widely used physics preprint server, recently removed or refused to post several papers from the opposing sides, saying their manuscripts include inflammatory content and unprofessional language. ArXiv has also banned one of the authors, Jorge Hirsch, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), from posting papers for 6 months.
The ban is "very unfair," Hirsch says. "I can't work if I can't publish papers." To some other scientists, arXiv's ban and removal of papers amount to stifling scientific debate. "The scientists that care about the issue and have the expertise to evaluate the arguments on both sides should be allowed to do so by accessing the preprints in question," Nigel Goldenfeld, a physicist at UCSD, wrote in an email to a wide range of physicists last week. "The alternative is that for cases such as this, we'll return to the pre-arXiv days when the science of the day is discussed in privately circulated preprints that are not accessible to the wider community." Daniel Arovas, another UCSD physicist, agreed: "Squelching what is essentially a purely scientific exchange -- even one where the respective parties engage in some distasteful accusations -- is highly problematic." But arXiv administrators argue the decision wasn't about science. "There are no papers in this whole chain that were rejected because we did not like the scientific content," says Ralph Wijers, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam who is the preprint server's board chair. "People's emotions became too affected. They got acrimonious."
The ban is "very unfair," Hirsch says. "I can't work if I can't publish papers." To some other scientists, arXiv's ban and removal of papers amount to stifling scientific debate. "The scientists that care about the issue and have the expertise to evaluate the arguments on both sides should be allowed to do so by accessing the preprints in question," Nigel Goldenfeld, a physicist at UCSD, wrote in an email to a wide range of physicists last week. "The alternative is that for cases such as this, we'll return to the pre-arXiv days when the science of the day is discussed in privately circulated preprints that are not accessible to the wider community." Daniel Arovas, another UCSD physicist, agreed: "Squelching what is essentially a purely scientific exchange -- even one where the respective parties engage in some distasteful accusations -- is highly problematic." But arXiv administrators argue the decision wasn't about science. "There are no papers in this whole chain that were rejected because we did not like the scientific content," says Ralph Wijers, a physicist at the University of Amsterdam who is the preprint server's board chair. "People's emotions became too affected. They got acrimonious."
I, for one, welcome our new inhuman AI scientists (Score:2)
Scientists gotta stop being human, too? I don't think so.
Having said that with tongue firmly in cheek, there is something to be said for social rules to constrain antisocial behaviors. Rude ad hominem attacks aren't really related to the question of recognizing bunkum, no matter how firmly you believe (= think you know) that room temperature fusion is bunkum.
Which leads to questions of motivations... Yeah, the human scientists have that problem, too.
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You can be as human as you want, but when publishing scientific research, the snarky parts are supposed to be kept out. Everyone in the communities in question seems to be familiar with them anyway, so there is no need to include any of that kind of material in papers submitted for peer review and dissemination to a broad audience. Let the science speak for itself.
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I was trying to joke, but I lost my joke about not recognizing a good joke if it bit me...
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Scientists gotta stop being human, too?
Scientists have many forums where they can be emotional, snarky, childish, unprofessional, etc. Journal publications are not one of them.
room temperature fusion is bunkum.
Yes, it is. But this is not about RT fusion. It is about RT superconductors, which are much more plausible.
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What? I should have read the story? Shades of RTFM!
My bad, but apparently I'm one of those lumpers, not a splitter.
Or can I claim there is nothing special about the liquid water zone (AKA human room temperature)? So though I'm only deeply skeptical about room temperature superconductors, there's still no excuse for confusing that topic with the room temperature fusion kerfuffle. From 1989 or so?
An AI researcher wouldn't have have that mistake. (I mean an AI that is doing research, not a human who is doing r
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While room temperature superconductors are more plausible than room temperature fusion (at more than trivial rates) this doesn't make either of them inherently bunkum. Evidence on both should be publishable, and in neither case are emotional attacks desirable.
But what I think arXiv should have done is reject the papers *as is* and demand a rewrite.
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Drat. I hate it when that happens. I should have written more to prevent FP.
To make it worse, I forgot to mention my recent and relevant visit to arXiv in relation to another (not very good) book on the Riemann Conjecture. I stumbled across an 18-page paper from some Toshiba guy. The paper claimed to be a proof of the Riemann hypothesis, but I was sure there must be something wrong with it since I haven't heard any news about such a major breakthrough. Now I can't even find that paper, but my failed search
Just chill, people... (Score:3)
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The discussion is about how cool those heads need to be. And the hot heads are currently fighting the cool heads over the room temperature heads.
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Mod parent funny and it should have been FP.
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Whiners (Score:2)
Because arxiv is the gateway to the internet. There is literally no way to post something to the internet without it.
Missing the Point (Score:2)
Because arxiv is the gateway to the internet. There is literally no way to post something to the internet without it.
As even the summary points out there are ways to share information between scientists that do not involve arXiv. The point is that if arXiv is going to start filtering valid scientific papers because they do not like the tone of them then it damages their usefulness as a place for the free exchange of ideas for scientists.
Preventing someone from posting scientifically valid papers because they are making what arXiv regard as distasteful accusations is a terrible position to take. If someone has publishe
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There is a difference between "dr John made a mistake in equation" from "dr John made a mistake in equation because he is a moron". I believe we have a second case here.
Thems the breaks. (Score:2)
The ban is "very unfair," Hirsch says. "I can't work if I can't publish papers."
This is the analogous to a professional YouTuber getting suspended for posting crap that violates the ToS. It's what they do for money and yet it happens.
I will say that six months seems a bit long but he should clean up his act and improve upon his work.
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I will say that six months seems a bit long
The six-month ban happened after multiple warnings that he ignored.
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I think they should have started with a month suspension after ignoring a second warning then moved to six for immediate violations after the month. If what you say is true then earned this suspension.
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Why? He's not a little kid incapable of understanding that his actions have consequences until they're enforced.
He's a professional researcher engaging in professional activities. And out here in the real world if you ignore a few official warning from your boss you're liable to be fired - why should a journal *that is providing them a service* be more forgiving?
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He's not a little kid incapable of understanding that his actions have consequences
Do you know any professors?
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I think they should have started with a month suspension
I think they should have started with 2 years, as he was warned and this would be long enough that it is more likely to impact employment, and so would serve as a stronger incentive to others.
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this would be long enough that it is more likely to impact employment, and so would serve as a stronger incentive to others.
You greatly overestimate the human capacity to learn from the emotional mistakes of others.
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Not at all. I don't expect them to learn anything. I merely expect them to be economically incentivized. They're still whine to their friends about how oppressed they are, and something about frozen peaches.
Yeah. That's what science is all about. (Score:2)
Still is. (Score:2)
Science is absolutely about seeking the truth. In publishing scientific papers, there needs to be certain amount of decorum or the scientific process suffers as a result of personal feuds.
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"Science as a tool is often useful. Science as an institution is always problematic."
So they've sorted out the replication crisis? (Score:2)
Wrong question. (Score:2)
I'm talking about why this person got suspended from arXiv. If you want to whine about an adjacent topic then that is your prerogative but I will not be responding to it any further.
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Truth can only be defined in a mathematical context. In other areas it's just "This is what the available evidence indicates to me". (That's a gross paraphrase of something Einstein once said.)
The available evidence? (Score:2)
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If you're saying "reports ought to include the data that allowed the conclusions to be drawn", then I agree.
Re:Thems the breaks. (Score:4, Informative)
But what was his act? The article doesn't say clearly, but:
About a month later, Hirsch asked Dias for the raw data from some of the experiments. He says Dias rebuffed him repeatedly. Eventually, Hirsch did receive some data from one of Dias’s co-authors, and in August 2021, Hirsch submitted his own analysis to both the arXiv and Physica C. The paper was titled “On the ac magnetic susceptibility of a room temperature superconductor: anatomy of a probable scientific fraud.” After publishing it online in September, Physica C removed the article in November because it contained data published without the original team’s permission, and arXiv took it down in December.
On 29 November 2021, Dias and one of his collaborators, Ashkan Salamat, a physicist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, posted on arXiv a response to Hirsch’s criticisms, and included some of their raw data. In early December, Hirsch submitted two papers analyzing those raw data, and then followed up with three more papers, all of them responses to work by Dias and his colleagues. ArXiv administrators blocked all five. (Hirsch also says posting of multiple submissions has been delayed for weeks or more and papers were taken down even after they were posted.) Last week, the site also removed a paper from Dias and Salamat “due to inflammatory content and unprofessional language.” Dias and Salamat did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
So note that "inflammatory and unprofessional language" was from the original researchers, not against Hirsch. It's unclear without seeing the original emails and papers what was being said. And you cannot take ArXiv's claims at face value otherwise. However physicists who have seen the papers and email exchanges are also opposing this move by ArXiv.
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Agreed. The person presenting the rebuttal to this groundbreaking claim (if true) is the one who got banned. These are all pre-prints though, possibly they expected to get their paper published before there was a huge scientific outcry,
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The person presenting the rebuttal to this groundbreaking claim (if true) is the one who got banned
An accusation of fraud is not a rebuttal, it is new original research, that itself should be proven before being published. And given that he wasn't able to access all the original data, he simply didn't have the information that he would need to be able to do that research and come to his conclusion.
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Proof is for math, natural science works on evidence.
Re: Thems the breaks. (Score:2)
The same researcher got away with claiming to have produced metallic hydrogen, with no evidence to backing it up so why not this?
"distasteful accusations" are not (Score:2)
"purely scientific exchanges"; you can have one or the other but unless your distasteful accusations have scientific evidence behind them, they don't belong in your scientific paper. That's what social media is for.
"unless they have scientific evidence behind them" (Score:2)
That's how it works.
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Nonsense. You can read the papers - just email the author and ask for them.
There is little more inflammatory in scientific research than to accuse someone of fraud with very specific evidence. As we've seen in the Theranos case, on a legal basis fraud requires not only incorrect or inflated assertions but actual intent to defraud. While this is not a legal case, there are many ways to say that the research was not correctly or rigorously done that do not personally impugn the researchers.
Jorge Hirsch coul
Just email the author and ask for them? (Score:2)
Oh wait. how do we find out the papers even exist?
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...and know we'll never know whether they did or not. Because we don't get to read the papers.
That's how it works.
Completely wrong. We can measure what information you would need to support a claim, without having access to that information.
Here, he accused others of fraud, be he's admitted that he didn't have access to their original data. So we don't need the details at all. It doesn't matter if he is right or wrong about his analysis of what data he did have; we can say for sure that his accusation was not supported, because he admits that he didn't have access to the data he would need in order to support it. In f
Results were published without the data? (Score:2)
But the fact remains we have no idea what the paper did or didn't say. For example, whether it said "unsupported" and just let that stand as obvious.
No matter which way you spin this, the publisher looks bad.
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Luckily, he put the accusation of fraud right in the title, so we do know about that.
And he had previously complained about not having access to the data, so we know about that part too.
We have both the facts needed to know that he's making an unsupported accusation, and disguising it as some sort of "science."
The only reason the publisher looks bad is that it took them over a month to retract such specious bullshit.
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Presenting evidence in the form of a gas chromatography readout that supports the assertion that said researcher "smells funny"?
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LOL. I love the point that personal insults are appropriate if they scientifically supportable.
I can mathematically prove that Tod is a dick.
There is Evidence (Score:2)
"purely scientific exchanges"; you can have one or the other but unless your distasteful accusations have scientific evidence behind them
That's the point though - they do. A colleague of mine was a co-author on the paper in Nature that kicked this whole debate off. You do not get published in serious peer-reviewed journals like Nature (as well as Phys Rev B, Physica C etc.) without serious scientific arguments and evidence to back you up, especially when you are refuting the claims of another paper published in that journal.
I don't know which side is right but it is not going to find us out and advance science if one of the major players
Controversy (Score:3)
The summary didn't say what is the actual controversy, which is more interesting than whether people are getting angry. Here it is:
the discovery of a hydrogen-containing material that under intense pressure superconducts at near–room temperature
Sounds great, and the polemic is:
he paper was titled “On the ac magnetic susceptibility of a room temperature superconductor: anatomy of a probable scientific fraud.” After publishing it online in September, Physica C removed the article in November because it contained data published without the original team’s permission, and arXiv took it down in December.
Seems like the solution is to try to reproduce it, although I imagine not many people have the equipment to make high pressure helium.
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Unless there's something strange at high pressures, compressing air heats it, whereas decompressing it cools it off.
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Unless there's something strange at high pressures, compressing air heats it, whereas decompressing it cools it off.
Yes, thanks for reminding me of my woefully inadequate understanding of nuclear fusion!
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Er, no, compressing a gas makes it heat up. That's the principle that the most common method of refrigeration uses: Compress your refrigerant, which heats it up so it is hotter than the ambient outside temperature and can radiate heat into the cooler environment. Then once your refrigerant has finished cooling to close to the ambient temperature, decompress it, which cools it further so it is cooler than the space you want to refrigerate and let it absorb heat from the refrigerated space. Continue repe
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Technically, mechanically compressing a gas does work on it and raises its' temperature, no heat flow involved. Unless, of course, it's done slow enough for it to lose heat to it's surroundings, and therefore doesn't raise it's temperature.
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Technically, mechanically compressing a gas does work on it and raises its' temperature, no heat flow involved. Unless, of course, it's done slow enough for it to lose heat to it's surroundings, and therefore doesn't raise it's temperature.
Isn't this a "bit of both" sort of situation? Yes, compressing the gas adds energy to the system, but merely compressing the gas into a smaller volume will increase the system's temperature—even if we somehow didn't increase the system's energy—by virtue of nothing more than the same amount of energy occupying a smaller volume. When you have the same amount of energy in a smaller volume, it necessarily has a higher temperature, regardless of how you reached that state.
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Nope - regardless of pressure, temperature equalizes with the environment. The only way to get a super-cold sample is to create a super-cold environment.
In fact that is the defining property of temperature - if you put two objects at different temperatures in contact there will be a net energy flow from the warmer to the cooler until they are at the same temperature. If there's no net heat flow, then they are by definition at the same temperature. And if you have a tiny sample the temperature will equali
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Wellll. . . ..sort of. One can say that an isolated electron is cool, even if it's moving very quickly.
Actually, temperature only really exists where you have masses of particles, and you are concerned about their average speed (not velocity). If one were to compress things enough everything might be forced into the lowest quantum state (emitting lots of photons along the way) and that could reasonably be called "cold". I don't think anyone's ever even vaguely approached that, however. It would basicall
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> One can say that an isolated electron is cool, even if it's moving very quickly.
Oh, I've never heard such a thing, care to provide a specific example of that usage, preferably in a scholarly context?
As you say, temperature = average speed. Even in a particle accelerator such as the LHC or the cathode ray tube in an old TV, where you're firing small groups of particles with a tightly grouped velocity (= low average speed from the perspective of their collective reference frame), or even single particle
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I'm not sure that a neutron star has enough pressure. Everything would need to be forced into the same quantum level. That said, it may well have enough pressure far enough below the surface that we can't see what's happening. I've heard such predictions. But there's no way to validate them. (I did mention that I didn't think anyone could do this.)
As for the temperature of an isolated particle, it's only related to other particles around it, and since it is, by definition, isolated, there's no reason n
Pressure and Temperature Independent (Score:2)
But wouldn't the intense pressure also cool down the material
No, pressure and temperature are independent variables. Depending on how you change one you may well change the other as well but if you are careful you can change either one to whatever physical value you want. For example, at some depth, the pressure in the sun will be the same as the water pressure on the ocean floor but the temperature of those two locations is extremely different.
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Distateful accusations? (Score:2)
To be fair, it looks like Hirsch is correct on this. However, he got a bit too frustrated and couldn't control his emotions. The acrimonious accusations could have been better worded, however they do seem warranted in this case.
Sometimes. calling something what it actual is can be acrimonious.
So take down particular papers, not 6 month ban. (Score:2)
To be fair, it looks like Hirsch is correct on this. However, he got a bit too frustrated and couldn't control his emotions. The acrimonious accusations could have been better worded, however they do seem warranted in this case.
If they were taking down his poorly worded paper, I could see it. But a 6-month ban of ANY papers, regardless of content, does block actual scientific debate, not just flamage.
Granted arXiv may be a small operation in comparison to the flood of papers they're handling, and not equip
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If the only punishment for trolling is the removal of your trolling post, then what incentive do you have to stop trolling?
Similarly, if the only punishment for theft was giving back what you stole, there would be no incentive not to steal. Sometimes you have to give it back, sometimes you don't get caught and keep it. On average you come out well ahead, and so everyone would have an incentive to steal.
If you want to maintain a civil community, there needs to be actual punishments for anti-civil behavior.
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Yes, and if you want to maintain a truthful community, there needs to be actual punishments for spreading falsehoods.
We know that arXiv punishes for anti-civil behavior. Do they also punish for anti-truth behavior? The answer will tell us which they value more, truth or civility.
Re: So take down particular papers, not 6 month ba (Score:2)
No, there must not be any punishment or penalty unless it can be proven beyond doubt that the person stating the falsehood did so knowingly. The problem is that truth and false are often a matter of opinion. If I say it is possible that humans descended from monkeys, people who grew up thinking the Bible was fact will consider me lying. The only solution is to allow everything into the arena, and hope that people decide correctly. It is not a perfect system, in fact it sucks badly, but it is better than one
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Why wouldn't think you're lying?
I like how you're pretending not to be a creationist, yet you use their language. You're a troll.
Re: So take down particular papers, not 6 month ba (Score:2)
It gets annoying to keep trolling for one thing. If there is no rise, only the persistent trolls with a clear mental illness will hang on. I mean, look at slashdot with its moderation system. We have a few mentally ill trolls on here but for the most part they are more amusing then anything, unless they snap or get triggered. Slashdot is still quite usable, even with its trolls. Going nuclear to get rid of the trolls on slashdot would cause more harm than good, so we have to be tolerant of it. There has to
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Amen!
One of the reasons Slashdot has survived so long is that the community moderates out trolling. Over the years we've even done a pretty good job reducing pointless flame wars through good moderation.
Hirsch may well be right on all the merits, but he violated community norms. It is a very serious charge in science to claim that someone has behaved fraudulently, and you typically need more than just re-analysis of the data to prove it. You can say lots of things to the same effect, like:
"not reproducib
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You can't be traipsing around, endlessly snipping a little here and a little there with repeat offenders. At some point you've got to drop the ban hammer to re-institute a modicum of self-regulation for a while.
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To be fair, it looks like Hirsch is correct on this. However, he got a bit too frustrated and couldn't control his emotions. The acrimonious accusations could have been better worded, however they do seem warranted in this case.
If they were taking down his poorly worded paper, I could see it. But a 6-month ban of ANY papers, regardless of content, does block actual scientific debate, not just flamage.
There is no requirement to put a pre-print on arXiv. He can still submit papers to every journal that exists, the peer review there (assuming they are valuable journals) will remove intemperate language before publication. The thing is - the privilege and convenience of using arXiv comes with it a responsibility to be self-police what you write. If you can't do that yourself, you can have a colleague or friend proof-read the article.
He can still send his drafts to people directly via email, or post it to hi
I'm confused (Score:2)
On one hand, you have people who say "the science is settled" when it comes to scientific research and debate prohibited, now you have others that won't allow debate because somebody used off language or a "snarky" comment? I also think cold fusion is a complete hoax but if there were only some scientific research showing both sides of the argument it could all enlighten us. Oh wait, we can't see that because someone tends to be a jerk. If that were the case in all things we wouldn't have Linux, the FSF, or
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On one hand, you have people who say "the science is settled" when it comes to scientific research and debate prohibited, now you have others that won't allow debate because somebody used off language or a "snarky" comment?
I don't see where your confusion lies.
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You are misreading the incident. Debate is allowed, decorum is being asked for and not provided. At some point bad behaviour can require meaningful consequences to stop it. (I have no idea what line may have been crossed or not, as TFA didn't really say, so I'm not passing judgement.)
Act like a child (Score:2)
"Room temperature" superconductivity (Score:2)
I'm not sure at what point in history that term began to mean superconductivity at higher temperatures regardless of the energy required to sustain the required environment as opposed to being comparable to the environment of what most people would ordinarily consider a "room".
I thought that the point of the search for this superconductor holy grail is not simply bragging rights of who got the highest temperature, but who can get superconductivity that can be maintained at a the lowest cost. Higher temp
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Ambient temperature, high pressure superconductivity is interesting because it approaches the problem (of cheaper superconductivity) from a different direction than the more traditional ambient pressure-low temp stuff. As the theoretical side of the science matures, all this research is going to be valuable because the end goal is a combination of these accomplishments.
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It won't be valuable if the data is inaccessible. The claims don't matter if there's no data to back them up.
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I never recall "room temperature" having anything to do with pressure.
You might recall from your high school chemistry classes something called SATP? Standard Air Temperature and Pressure?
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Outside of matters pertaining to superconductivity, the entire notion of "room temperature" is generally one that connotes an environment in which a person could expect to comfortably dwell. What's the point of calling it "room temperature" if it isn't reflective of what you would expect to find in, you know, an actual room?
High temperature, perhaps? Or maybe simply ambient temperature, which can be reflective of the fact that no furth
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The great thing about standard temperatures and pressures is that there's so many to choose from. [wikipedia.org]
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We called it "STP". Forget the air, most of our reactions we done in water.
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>Higher temperatures don't help that much when you require insane levels of pressure.
Actually they do. Temperature is a very difficult thing to manage - it's impossible to stop heat from constantly flowing from warmer objects to colder ones, the best we can do is slow it down. So if you want to keep something really cold you have to provide an active cooling system that's constantly consuming considerably more energy than the heat-flow from the environment to the cold thing (and is constantly heating u
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>Higher temperatures don't help that much when you require insane levels of pressure.
Actually they do. Temperature is a very difficult thing to manage - it's impossible to stop heat from constantly flowing from warmer objects to colder ones, the best we can do is slow it down. So if you want to keep something really cold you have to provide an active cooling system that's constantly consuming considerably more energy than the heat-flow from the environment to the cold thing (and is constantly heating up the environment in the process).
In contrast it's quite possible, even trivial, to keep something under pressure.
Not at the reported pressure of greater than one megabar, which is more than three times the pressure of the highest pressure high explosive and can only be sustained in a diamond anvil in a microscopic volume.
It could assert with much better evidence that low temperatures are trivial since the heat leakage in a high performance Dewar is tiny and very little energy is needed to maintain the differential. You will find large magnets cooled to liquid nitrogen and even liquid helium temperatures all over the w
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That's kind of a big deal, just so you know.
The point, as I said, is to reduce cost. And the insane levels of pressure required here are no cheaper to obtain than cooling with liquid nitrogen, and can easily end up being even more costly.
If superconductivity were achievable by putting the conductor under stress that itself could be maintained at no additional cost in standard atmosphere and temperature, as you described, that'd be a b
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IIRC, "room temperature" superconductivity has always been about temperatures achievable by ordinary refrigeration. And has nothing to do with pressures.
Emotion is weakness to be mastered, not indulged. (Score:2)
Scientists if anyone should be intelligent enough to react without the degenerating input of unmastered emotion.
If they cannot I suggest deliberate self-guided emotional desensitization. There are many ways but all trigger the weak.
Unless you have legitimate PTSD or similar mental illness there is zero excuse for PERMITTING yourself to be triggered by anything. That does not in any way require becoming numb or robotic, a fact lost on the clue-averse.
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As someone who spent far too many years ruthlessly managing their emotions - don't, it's really unhealthy.
Emotion is what makes us better than a computer or threshing machine. It's the source of virtually all our virtues, as well as our vices.
However, it is the responsibility of an adult to be able to manage their inappropriate emotional responses. And scientific publications are a professional medium where *any* emotional expression is generally regarded as inappropriate. And there's no excuse for not d
Ruthlessness not required and doesn't work. (Score:2)
Self-mastery by relinquishing weakness is not repression, it's strength.
One may discard childish things without regret. Understanding childish thoughts are silly makes discarding them easily then avoiding them effortless.
"And scientific publications are a professional medium where *any* emotional expression is generally regarded as inappropriate."
Of course. Emotion is thought pollution. Emotion is enemy to rational thinking. Emotion like masturbation has its value and once that's understood it can be master
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>Emotion is enemy to rational thinking.
Yes it is. However rational thinking can easily become an enemy to everything that gives humanity value. Rational thought cares nothing for empathy, compassion, beauty, love, or anything else that makes life worth living.
Rational thought offers no values to uphold, nor goals to pursue. Like a hammer, it is only a tool. The only value it has is what the wielder imparts to it.
I could host a web site on a $10 router (Score:2)
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Well, they kind of are, for the next six months. At least the debates occurring on arXiv.
But yeah, if they had hosted their flamebait themselves it wouldn't be a problem - they've been banned specifically for repeatedly submitting it to arXiv as a legitimate scientific papers.
use Fire poker (Score:2)
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Settle the issue in private discussions with a fire poker.
Is that you, Wittgenstein's ghost?
So, subjective science? (Score:2)
Whoosh. That's the _only_ reason a paper should be rejected.
Inflammatory papers? (Score:2)
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"Top" journals have the most errors, fraud and otherwise. The reason they're "top" journals is that they cherry pick things that are hot, which means they publish mostly preliminary, rushed, poorly validated stuff.
They're the tabloids and Twitter of the scientific publishing world.
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"Top" journals have the most errors, fraud and otherwise. The reason they're "top" journals is that they cherry pick things that are hot, which means they publish mostly preliminary, rushed, poorly validated stuff.
They're the tabloids and Twitter of the scientific publishing world.
It's some sort of general rule. Just like, the guy who is known as "the best guitar repairman in the State!" is the guy who tells the most stories about how he's really great, and that time that the Other Famous Guy couldn't fix something, and he could. But the Other Famous Guy doesn't tell stories to make Best Guy look bad, so he'll never surpass him.