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Comment by salty_biscuits | Hacker News Reader

"If this were true, that would mean all previous researchers were wrong."

It's poor phrasing, but in a review I would interpret this statement as "I made a strong claim, and my discussion wasn't strong enough to address the concerns of a reviewer who has only interacted with my work via this document." not as "you must be wrong because everyone else says something different". Reviews are a weird social process though.

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To be honest, I'm not sure what the reviewer is arguing, but your suggestion seems reasonable. Perhaps it's bad English. On a reread I get the impression that they were trying to say that I was being rude. Maybe I've misinterpreted them.

To add to that, it is better to explicitly point out disagreements with previous experiments. That shows that you have read the literature, seen that it is in disagreement, and are willing to stand by your measurement. Not pointing it out comes across as there being something to hide, and that the disagreement in the measurements is being snuck past the reviewers.

Overall, you are absolutely correct that reviews are a really weird social context.

Aren’t you supposed to review the work, rather than the implications of said work?

The two go hand in hand. After all, one way of proving that a statement is false is to prove that it leads to a contradiction.

Yes, but it's so likely that your work is somehow wrong (in that it was misimplemented), that hueristics are employed to fail it early. If you can't easily point out why your work comes to a different conclusion than prior work, then it's likely you've failed to actually look into the prior work effectively.

And it's very unlikely you've managed to upend a body of work you didn't even know existed, and has probably run into several errors before (which you probably didn't avoid, because you didn't look into it).

If you did read through the previous literature, it shouldn't be difficult to specify and compare.

It's possible for you to come from no background and upend everything.. but the chances are simply (and largely) in favor of a mistake being made. The onus is really on you to double-check and triple check your radical conclusions

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