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Comment by lightsighter | Hacker News Reader

It feels like there should be some kind of tool analogous to valgrind/ASAN/TSAN/UBSAN for code that is just run on all the images of any kind of paper before it is published to check for these kinds of things. Some of them just seem to be honest mistakes like linking the same image in two different places and this would fix that so nobody needs to bother checking for it in the future. It would also have the byproduct of catching all the malicious image doctoring that some people do which is just horrific for science in general.

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Wouldn't that just give the fakers a tool that lets them easily tweak their fakery until it can't be easily caught?

The saving grace here is that many of these scammers don't have the sophistication or expertise in the wide possibility space of fraud discovery techniques to know where they're exposing themselves. Every type of check that we make automatable and trivially repeatable by anyone will immediately cease to detect anything except the most lazy or incompetent scammers.

Publications should be responsible for the veracity of the content they publish. Instead they just shift the blame. They are 100% about profits and provide zero advantage, no wonder they are being replaced by free alternatives. But it doesn't solve the problem with fake papers and plagiarism.

> Publications should be responsible for the veracity of the content they publish

That is ridiculous and betrays a serious misunderstanding of the role of publications. The publications are a forum for discussion. People say incorrect things in discussions all the time, and they can’t be corrected until they’ve been said. Where do you propose they get said? How do you propose the publication “know” what’s true or not? There’s no way to do it, otherwise why would you be publishing what you’re publishing? The whole point is that people don’t already know what you’re telling them.

Scientific publishing is super broken in many ways but this is a terrible solution.

And yet, they do try to reject papers for various issues that at least approximate veracity. No journal will accept a paper proposing a perpetual motion machine. What is that but a veracity check? What is peer review? Glorified spellcheck? No, we expect publishers to at least catch the obvious stuff.

If you design a publisher around the idea that it truly has no responsibility for veracity, then you get... Arxiv. In that scenario traditional publishers truly provide no value.

Yes it is glorified spellcheck. They’re checking your methods. If you claim to have built a perpetual motion machine they almost certainly will not reject your paper on the basis that “perpetual motion machines are impossible,” but on the basis that your methodology [almost certainly] has an error.

"Your methodology probably has an error [because you got the wrong answer]" is not meaningfully different from "we're rejecting your paper because it's false". My point stands.

Ed: your other comment about how publishers used to just be mailing lists is actually kind of funny in how it proves my point. If we wanted publishing to just be a mailing list... we can just have a mailing list. Or use Arxiv. But today's publishers have to at least pretend to do better than that, which they mostly do by supposedly filtering papers on quality, which in turn is, you guessed it, 80% veracity checks (oh, and also increasing the right people's citation counts).

Well yeah when you add stuff I didn’t say, it does sound ridiculous.

I didn’t say they would reject it based on the result and presuming an error. They would find and reject the error (or on the basis of a million far more superficial issues which are actual good targets for reforming scientific publishing).

What did I add that's meaningfully different from what you said, i.e. in terms of outcome?

Ed: ok, I think I get it, you mean they'll somehow identify a specific method error, and if they can't then they'll... Just accept it? I simply don't believe that. I think the journal both should and actually will reject papers that violate the second law of thermodynamics without finding a specific methodological flaw.

If the paper is completely methodologically sound and the only problem is that it violates the second law of thermodynamics, then we need to take another look at the second law of thermodynamics

You're assuming that (a) reviewers not finding any methodology flaws in the paper means there are none, and (b) no flaws in the paper means no flaws in the work. Neither of those are good assumptions. And that's just the generically applicable arguments.

For the Second Law, Arthur Eddington had this to say:

> ...If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations... But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/947685-the-law-that-entropy...

> You're assuming that (a) reviewers not finding any methodology flaws in the paper means there are none, and (b) no flaws in the paper means no flaws in the work

No, you are assuming that with your flawed understanding of what a journal is and what peer review does. Like this isn’t a matter of opinion. Peer review in fact and by design is not a stamp of veracity. The reason is exactly the conundrum you’ve backed into.

If someone produces apparently high-quality science that challenges a well-regarded theory, it is only under your model that paper cannot be published. Under our model (the one currently in use today), the reviewers are expected to try to find holes in the methodology and, if they can’t find them, publish the paper anyway even if they disbelieve the conclusion. That way the broader scientific community can attempt to blow holes in the paper, and they frequently find things the authors and the peer reviewers missed. That is not a shot against the publisher: that is how science must work because of exactly the dynamic you’ve identified.

You're still not paying attention to what I'm saying, which is that journals are expected to catch the easy errors, not make an absolute determination of truth. I said this in my first comment on this thread.

Remarkable you can have this opinion about what should happen and then one comment later run into the exact reason that this is a terrible idea.

Failing to find an error doesn’t mean the paper is true. Correct! That’s why passing peer review isn’t and cannot be a badge of truthfulness.

That seems more like what blogs and posts are for, not academic journals. Unfortunately things have degraded so much that there is very little difference between a blog and a research article, but there should be a very large distinction.

No, this is what journals are and always have been. Historically they were much looser even. Essentially just mailing lists of interested parties.

Such tools exist, ex:

https://imagetwin.ai/

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