An academic press book MUST make at least one claim that is controversial or it will not be published. In the humanities at least, where scholarship consists of new interpretation and fuller understanding, the entire process is a matter of challenging other people's interpretations and understandings, and their defending it.
As for journals there is no large scale publisher that does not publish journals of varying quality., and no journal which has not published dubious articles. The scientific method leads to secure [progress in knowledge, but that does not apply to the work of any one particular scientist, and certainly no one paper.
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 2:40 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
(At any rate, someone knowledgable might want to check over our own relevant math/physics articles and make sure there's nothing fishy there).
A fair bit of the material in question is patent nonsense of the highest degree, arguably no better than the output of a fairly unsophisticated nonsense paper generator.
I think the event is more of a statement about how often works in specialist publications go pretty much totally unread.
I find it rather depressing:
The popular press frequently prints grievous untruths, statements of uncontested falsehood apparent to anyone with expertise on the subject matter, and they infrequently correct themselves even though the errors are widely seen, known, and discussed... unless the error becomes a scandal of its own. (A recent example: The overwhelming majority of the major media in their depiction suicide of Megan Meier describe the activities of Lori Drew in a manner which is completely at odds with the facts uncontested by both the prosecution and the defence in the trial; Of course, Wikipedia currently repeats these 'verifiable' falsehoods, citing mass media sources which show no evidence of their investigation, sources which are likely just regurgitating older inaccurate stories without validation, or even Wikipedia).
The world knows the mass media sources are of full of errors but they are not corrected.
And on the flip side, the niche publications and scientific journals which gain their value almost exclusively from their reputation as reliable sources apparently do not have sufficient readership to even reliably detect patent nonsense not so far more advanced than Wikipedia "penis!" vandalism.
The reality outside of Wikipedia is not ours to change. But how can we avoid contributing to these problems?
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