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Comment by gautamcgoel | Hacker News Reader

As was pointed out on Twitter, this paper, while amusing, should not have made it through arXiv moderation, as the arXiv specifically prohibits "joke" submissions in favor of papers which are, at least ostensibly, serious scientific contributions.

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https://www.ellipsix.net/arxiv-joke-papers.html

To me, this undermines the credibility of the other content since the "joke" tries to portray as genuine by being published on arxiv. It sort of dilutes to credibility of others.

Arxiv isn’t supposed to be a badge of credibility. It’s literally the place any academic can dump a paper to have it stored free forever. Many academic papers that never make it into journals are stored there. From their homepage they say:

> Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv

That said, they shouldn’t actively accept joke papers of course.

Which is good, since people shouldn't get the impression that arxiv implies credibility

There is normally at least a credibility of "this is earnest work"

What outlet of serious rational reviews and outputs should be considered?

Not quite related to joke articles, potentially worse though: https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-did-a-peer-reviewed-jo...

Back in the day, this got published in SIGGRAPH proceedings: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220721478_Ray_traci... .

It has "Comments: This is a silly article". Was that not there initially?

I don't mind joke publications on the arXiv as long as they at least save it for April 1.

At least it knows it's a joke.

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