[HN Gopher] Using Pokemon to detect scientific misinformation
___________________________________________________________________
Using Pokemon to detect scientific misinformation
Author : wizeman
Score : 131 points
Date : 2020-11-08 10:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.the-scientist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.the-scientist.com)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| That paper is a hoot, especially the bibliography :
|
| > 5. Joy MP, Joy DD, Joy TP (2006) Rabies outbreak in Pokemon
| daycare center. Infectious Diseases 33: 377-378
|
| > 9. Mazzetti D (2016) Fraud in exercise science journals: Do you
| even peer review? Archives of Broscience 112(7): 896-902.
|
| > 11. Crichton M (2013) Origin and Defeat of the Andromeda
| Strain. Journal of Cryptovirology 116(6): 1360-1363.
|
| > 18. Joy SM (2006) Pangolins do not cure cancer any other
| diseases. Journal of Please Stop Eating Endangered Species 21:
| 420-430.
|
| and on and on and on XD
| l3s2d wrote:
| This is an interesting solution to a problem I hadn't given much
| thought to in the past.
|
| On the one hand, it's demoralizing that we've reached this point
| where misinformation spreads at the same rate as good
| information. On the other, it does seem like a decent way to
| expose predatory journals.
|
| Could this method be extended to other fields?
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| There's that classic double joke about fad technology names
| being gibberish and hapless tech recruiters:
|
| "I typically ask recruiters to point out which of these are
| pokemon" https://imgur.com/gallery/r0SEEoh
| grawprog wrote:
| Hmmm that onyx one almost had me, was gonna say it's both a
| pokemon and a language...but the Pokemon's spelled Onix.
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| At the time that was doing the rounds (2015 or so) someone
| expanded it into a "Pokemon or Big Data" quiz game, which
| is startlingly difficult:
| https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/
| dilippkumar wrote:
| This is fantastic. You should submit this as a post on HN
| - it deserves its own thread :)
| boogies wrote:
| I'll steal that karma:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpixelastic.github
| .io...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Damn, got the first one wrong :
|
| > ADABAS was NoSQL from a time when there was no SQL. The
| technology now is owned by Software AG. "Software AG:
| We're not sure what we do either."
|
| Damn, I seem to get only half of them right, not better
| than random chance ! EDIT : Ok, 59% correct. (Eventually
| you get a 'victory' screen.)
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's easy if you know your Pokemon well. It's really hard
| if you kinda know names because many of them have
| lookalike names ;)
| creata wrote:
| I thought that was extremely easy, but only because the
| Pokemon didn't go past Generation 3. Flink sounds a whole
| lot like Klink, a Pokemon from Generation 5.
| codetrotter wrote:
| > only because the Pokemon didn't go past Generation 3
|
| That's about two generations too many for me to be able
| to know :P
| grawprog wrote:
| Yeah...the first one's pretty much burned permanently in
| my mind forever, I can recognize most of the second ones,
| but after that I don't really know them.
| 0_____0 wrote:
| i can easily understand and accept the idea of an
| infinite gender spectrum and associated naming
| conventions but there are ONLY 150(+1) pokemon and
| nothing anyone says will change my mind
| toast0 wrote:
| The trick is that a lot of Pokemon names make good tech
| names. Metapod would be a great name for a perl documentation
| suite, or a container orchestration tool. And that makes
| caterpie a questionable, but valid, name for a partial
| container orchestration tool; and maybe butterfree could be
| containers evolved.
|
| Onix is clearly a unix-like or linux distribution that's
| shaped around some software with first letter O (Opera?
| OpenOffice? I dunno), in addition to a Pokemon.
| xenophonf wrote:
| MetaPOD is a thing:
|
| https://metacpan.org/pod/MetaPOD
| t0astbread wrote:
| Onix is shaped around Operator Framework. It's all
| containers.
| munificent wrote:
| _> it 's demoralizing that we've reached this point where
| misinformation spreads at the same rate as good information._
|
| This has _always_ been true. It 's a fundamental part of the
| human story, an emergent property that arises from the cost to
| produce misinformation compared to the cost to discover the
| truth.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
| recursive wrote:
| I would expect that generally misinformation spreads faster.
| People that verify authenticity before spreading are slower
| because they're verifying authenticity.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Verifiers may be slower to repeat, but those with a good
| track record of authenticity presumably have larger
| networks willing to take them at their word. It may take
| longer for Nature to publish something than a random crank
| journal, but Nature's impact factor is orders of magnitude
| higher.
| martin_a wrote:
| I'd like to add the Stone louse to this list:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_louse
| philplckthun wrote:
| This really reminded me of SCIgen, made to generate non-sensical
| CS papers with the same intention https://news.mit.edu/2015/how-
| three-mit-students-fooled-scie...
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > To make matters worse, my Pokemon-inspired paper on the novel
| coronavirus has already been cited. A physicist based in Tunisia
| published "The COVID-19 outbreak's multiple effects," which
| claimed that COVID-19 was human-made and is treatable with
| "provincial herbs," in another predatory journal, The
| International Journal of Engineering Research and Technology. He
| not only cited my article, but also cited one of my made-up
| references, "Signs and symptoms of Pokerus infection," as the
| paper that first identified SARS-CoV-2.
| _Nat_ wrote:
| Funny stuff! Gotta love Pokemon papers!
|
| That said, since people shouldn't just believe whatever they
| read, even if it's published in _Nature_ or _Science_ or
| something, it 's a tad redundant to point out that papers
| published in academic formatting can be complete nonsense.
|
| A solid peer-review can _help reduce_ quality issues, but it
| doesn 't mean that whatever's published is true, reliable, or
| trustworthy. It's weird that so many folks seem to think that
| journal articles are gospel. That's just not what peer-review
| does.
|
| Related: People shouldn't believe things just because they're
| written in math or Latin.
| jariel wrote:
| If you publish a paper with fake 'good' data, why would some
| spurrious animal names even be relevant? 'Zubat'? Epidemiologists
| probably don't know the English-Chinese translation for the
| million species in China.
|
| This is not really spoofing, this is just plain fraud, right?
|
| When they fill papers full of jargon, data that doesn't make
| sense, crazy political posturing so that the paper reads as
| something fantastical - and it gets by - that's a problem.
|
| But this seems to be merely a real concern that it's quite a bit
| of work to reproduce scientific results and that someone doing a
| quick review of a paper has no material way of validating
| 'everything'.
|
| The paper 'looked promising' because it was promising, assuming
| those sending it in weren't completely making everything up.
|
| You could make a fake passport that might fool a lot of people,
| that doesn't mean the system is broken.
|
| Science maybe has problems but I'm not sure this one strikes at
| it very well.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| > One should not automatically trust all documents formatted as a
| scientific paper.
|
| Yup, I recently got fooled there...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24966950
| rkapsoro wrote:
| This looks like a very similar approach to that taken by
| Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay in using a prank to test and
| illuminate journals engaged in poor scholarship.
|
| Entertaining, but clearly very necessary.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
| jedimastert wrote:
| cf. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Cello_scrotum
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| The value of one single article, however presented in
| "scientific" form, whichever magazine publishes it, is
| practically 0. The sooner one realizes that, the sooner one can
| stop debunking each and every homeopathy "paper"... the earlier
| one can move to do real science.
|
| Yes, it's sad, you will not be able to detect small effects
| because they will have a very hard time getting reproduced above
| noise level, but there is just no alternative.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Several articles, and one of them was then cited at least once.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-11-09 23:02 UTC)