I appreciate your measured response to my harsh criticism.
I agree with you that some claims are too important to ignore. I can tell that you believe that you were adding value, and I cannot fault you for that. However, the red flags which you see as a useful heuristic, I tend to see as anti-useful. Perhaps we may just disagree on that.
A: A CS researcher who specializes in 5G networks, and who does not describes his interests as including astrophysics, makes a breakthrough discovery that provides a correct alternative to dark matter
B: non-A
Which one is more probable? I would say B easily by a factor of 100.
Let's consider 2 other hypotheses:
C: someone who can read a paper and point to its conceptual flaws lists some red flags about its authors
D: that person actually can't read the paper
I guess D is about 100 times more likely than C, isn't it?
Considering that we all engage in probabilistic inference like that, why is it wrong to communicate its conclusions?
You may have 2 answers to that:
1. it's against the old adage to critique the work, not the person; I'm pretty sure that's the answer
2. the uneducated masses should refrain from criticizing the ivory tower. And considering that they can't really understand the math, that means they shouldn't even try to use lateral heuristics, even if they try to give them the mathematically sounding label of "probabilistic inference". If there was no Markov Chain Monte Carlo or variational Bayes involved, it's not probabilistic inference :)
Comments
I appreciate your measured response to my harsh criticism.
I agree with you that some claims are too important to ignore. I can tell that you believe that you were adding value, and I cannot fault you for that. However, the red flags which you see as a useful heuristic, I tend to see as anti-useful. Perhaps we may just disagree on that.
I hope to be able to change your view.
Consider hypotheses A and B below:
A: A CS researcher who specializes in 5G networks, and who does not describes his interests as including astrophysics, makes a breakthrough discovery that provides a correct alternative to dark matter B: non-A
Which one is more probable? I would say B easily by a factor of 100.
Let's consider 2 other hypotheses: C: someone who can read a paper and point to its conceptual flaws lists some red flags about its authors D: that person actually can't read the paper
I guess D is about 100 times more likely than C, isn't it?
Considering that we all engage in probabilistic inference like that, why is it wrong to communicate its conclusions?
You may have 2 answers to that:
1. it's against the old adage to critique the work, not the person; I'm pretty sure that's the answer
2. the uneducated masses should refrain from criticizing the ivory tower. And considering that they can't really understand the math, that means they shouldn't even try to use lateral heuristics, even if they try to give them the mathematically sounding label of "probabilistic inference". If there was no Markov Chain Monte Carlo or variational Bayes involved, it's not probabilistic inference :)