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Comment by huitzitziltzin | Hacker News Reader

IMO there is a pretty simple partial explanation: no one reads anyone else’s research.

When you’re a grad student you have to read a few methods and applications papers. When you’re a professor you have to stay on top of what matters in your field but you mostly attend conferences and seminars for that.

Other than that… we don’t read anyone’s work. Indeed nearly all research isn’t ever cited and the fraction of cited papers not in the “central methodology” category above which are actually carefully read is probably extremely low.

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yeah but how many people are reading math papers? if anything, math papers are harder to read compared to psychology papers . yet math does not have this problem.

I have no idea of the scale of this problem in math. Maybe you do.

The average scientific field has hundreds of journals. In Econ there are five to ten which matter. It’s too time consuming to read more than a small fraction of the work that comes out even in my own sub-field. I would have thought math was even worse but I don’t know the field.

In math you have subsets of researchers who read each other's papers and work over a few decades to explore something, returning various nuggets and conclusions to the general body of mathematicians along the way until the whole thing is worked out. Eventually, in the most successful cases, the work is condensed into a book or something and a lot of people read it. It is a lot, perhaps thousands of times, harder to come up with theorems than it is to teach them, and atop that even harder to come up with broadly applicable yet effective conceptual systems (which can be introduced in a couple pages once you know which axioms are going to produce all the right facts later on), which is the basis for the whole enterprise.

But math builds directly upon other work: the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem is a house of cards, if any one of those various conjectures and proofs was proven false it would all come crashing down.

So, math papers are read, like blue prints, for building on top of them.

Psychology papers are, apparently, not the basis for anything.

Math can be structured and proven verifiably true or false. Things are labeled as conjectures when it's unknown if it's true in all cases. In less formal fields (all other scientific fields) there are more unknowns since experimentation failures cause issues. As the scale of the experiments' unknowns increase so does the difficulty for reproduction etc...

Psychology, sociology, economics and other high level scientific forms have so many unknowns that it's extreamly difficult to verify if a claim is scientifically true so its not surprising to me that fraud is easier in these fields than others.

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