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Comment by crimsoneer | Hacker News Reader

This is how science is meant to work.

No, it's not how math works at all. Math is not experimental science. Results take years to formulate and are generally known to be true by colleagues via correspondence and seminars before a paper is even written. Retraction is very rare.

I don't know why people are talking about something like this that they are clearly not familiar with.

Most good scientists work hard to prove results to themselves before going public.

Peer review is then done _in private_ before publication as a check on quality and significance.

Retracting a paper is pretty embarrassing. And not considered science as usual.

Retraction is after publication and peer review, no?

The greatest proof ever written by man, Andrew Wiles' FLT, was published with a flaw before being retracted and reworked. It's _completely_ normal in mathematics to find flaws in the argument. That's what peer review in mathematics is _for_.

Besides which it's not clear if these papers are considered published or preprint since they appear in no journal, so it's not really a retraction.

It's also very very normal to post preprints on Arxiv before peer review, so it's not the case that mathematics is kept private during review.

Not true. Wiles presented his proof in a series of lectures in 1993. The error was found by a reviewer, and he spent over a year trying to fix it. Once he did fix it, he asked colleagues to review it again, and only once it passed that review did he actually publish it.

Yes. A researcher who achieves a reputation of making mistakes carries that reputation.

No, scientists check their work before releasing it. Slop is still slop if you wrap it up as an academic result.

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