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Comment by qtplatypus | Hacker News Reader

So what if the tone is good. The arguments that he made are not supported by the evidence.

I agree that the arguments he made are not supported by evidence, but this is our judgment of his paper, not a reason to retract it and prevent other people from reading it.

The fact that the paper is written in a scholarly tone is obviously relevant. If it was spam or "junk mail", or some sort of violent sermon or political philippic, then of course there is no reason for it to stay online. But it's not. It's obviously a real, genuine academic paper.

Looking for errors in the paper is exactly what peer review and retraction is for. Even if it mimics the form of an academic paper it doesn’t progress the debate if all it is using is already discredited or unsupported. As other commentators have pointed out the cites that he uses are way out of date and this isn’t advancing the field.

It serves no ones to repetitively rebut the same mistakes over and over again. While at the same time such papers lend false credibility to damaging ideas.

Couldn't you make the same argument for basically every retracted paper?

What do you think about this retraction?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/

Much like "free speech", the specific things it's used to support and not support is often more revealing than the claimed position itself.

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