Hacker News Reader

Comment by vinay_ys | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is curious like I was to read the actual paper and look at the source code, you can find them here:

The paper authors made a mistake, fine. But the scientific process and peer review process should have caught it. It didn't. The author caught it accidentally and then luckily decided to come forward (bravo!). This begs the question of robustness of the whole scientific publishing process. I hope they adopt the practice of doing a blameless RCA and improve the scientific and academic peer review process.

View on HN

>This begs the question of robustness of the whole scientific publishing process

It raises the question. Begging the question is an unrelated logical fallacy. Unfortunately, there have been a ton of examples of the peer-review process being essentially useless. Things like people deliberately putting things in to test if the paper is even being read and none of the reviewers notice it.

"This begs the question" is same as "This raises the question" – What is the logical fallacy in how it is phrased?

>"This begs the question" is same as "This raises the question"

No it isn't, that is a common error in modern English. Raising the question means bringing a question into focus. Begging the question means to assume the conclusion is correct in the premise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Thanks for pointing out that wiki link. It lead me to another link

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/beg-the-questi...

which seems to indicate my usage is quite acceptable in modern English.

Normalizing errors in language is how language degrades. We no longer have a word for literally, because people use literally to mean figuratively. We are losing the ability to talk about begging the question, because people think it means raising the question. The fact that English has degraded is not a reason to give up and let it get worse.

As a prescriptivist, surely you do not wish to assign "begging the question" that meaning then since it's wholly from a mistranslation from Latin https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2290

That information is also present in the Wikipedia link.

No, I do not wish to assign that meaning, that meaning was already assigned a long time ago. And you don't need to be a prescriptivist to want a language that is capable of communicating our thoughts with each other.

Haha, no, it's not a pejorative. It's literally one of two schools of thought: descriptivism vs. prescriptivism. What you're describing is prescriptivism.

I didn't suggest it was pejorative, and I know what it is. There are not two school of thought, that's a false dichotomy. That is like saying "there are two schools of thought, catholic and protestant". You can want to prevent the decline of language without insisting on trying to bring back already lost definitions like a prescriptivist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com