Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by hatmatrix on Monday March 04, 2019 @05:01AM
(#19300071)
There is also this paper (which I may have gotten from a Hacker News post in the past):
Tsai, A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves, Diabetes Care 1994 Feb; 17(2): 152-154. [1]
Related blog post: "Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations" [2]
Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by soVeryTired on Monday March 04, 2019 @05:16AM
(#19300136)
The economist Gary Becker's paper "Crime and punishment: an economic approach" [0] is up there for me.
He argued that prior to committing a crime, the perpetrator weighs the potential benefits of the crime against the probability of being caught and the ensuing severity of punishment. If the benefits exceed the costs, the criminal commits the crime. It is then noted that enforcement costs money. Becker concludes that the maximally efficient way to deter crime is to do relatively little enforcement, but to hand out severe penalties to criminals who are caught.
Becker was a respected economist at the time of publishing this paper. One can always defend a publication like this with the claim that 'it's just a model' but there is some evidence that the theory was used to justify crime policy from the 70's onward.
Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by Nasrudith on Monday March 04, 2019 @08:21AM
(#19300986)
That also isn't a novel idea at all - Chinese legalist ideas called for the same thing. Of course said policy and its implementers were so stupid they had only a /15/ year dynasty.
Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by 0815test on Monday March 04, 2019 @06:33AM
(#19300465)
> there is some evidence that the theory was used to justify crime policy from the 70's onward.
In non-coincidental news, the crime rate is also a lot lower today than it was in the 1960s and early 1970s. So we can finally afford to lower the severity of punishments, because the overall costs/benefits profile has been shifted and a lower crime rate also makes enforcement easier. Sounds like the marker of a successful social policy to me - score one for Becker!
Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by codeulike on Monday March 04, 2019 @05:23AM
(#19300167)
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity - Alan Sokal 1994, published in Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996).
Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by sidkhanooja on Monday March 04, 2019 @04:49AM
(#19300030)
For those not clicking on the link (like me), it's Andrew Wakefield - who published a blatantly false paper in The Lancet in 1998 [1], linking MMR vaccines to autism [2] - triggering the anti-vaccination movement, leading to a resurgence of hitherto eradicated diseases [3].
Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by bibyte on Monday March 04, 2019 @03:53AM
(#19299774)
Maybe link to all the answers instead of just this one ? IMO the other answers are much better. It's crazy what journals will publish without even looking at it.
Re:What are some of the worst academic papers ever published?
by weberc2 on Monday March 04, 2019 @07:52AM
(#19300824)
How did they even get a link to a single answer? I’m trying to share a different answer and Quora is trying really hard to prevent it.
EDIT: I figured it out and feel like a total doofus. The intuitive UI flow is to share to Facebook, grab the URL, dig out the relevant bit, and URL decode it (/s):
Tsai, A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves, Diabetes Care 1994 Feb; 17(2): 152-154. [1]
Related blog post: "Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations" [2]
[1] http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract
[2] https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...
It even thanks a Professor of Electrical Engineering for his expert review.
[1] https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=2712
He argued that prior to committing a crime, the perpetrator weighs the potential benefits of the crime against the probability of being caught and the ensuing severity of punishment. If the benefits exceed the costs, the criminal commits the crime. It is then noted that enforcement costs money. Becker concludes that the maximally efficient way to deter crime is to do relatively little enforcement, but to hand out severe penalties to criminals who are caught.
Becker was a respected economist at the time of publishing this paper. One can always defend a publication like this with the claim that 'it's just a model' but there is some evidence that the theory was used to justify crime policy from the 70's onward.
[0] https://www.nber.org/chapters/c3625.pdf
But if you think Becker's theoretical model itself is dubious, it's got nothing on Kopczuk and Slemrod's "Dying to Save Estate Taxes" paper... http://www.columbia.edu/~wk2110/bin/dying-final.pdf
In non-coincidental news, the crime rate is also a lot lower today than it was in the 1960s and early 1970s. So we can finally afford to lower the severity of punishments, because the overall costs/benefits profile has been shifted and a lower crime rate also makes enforcement easier. Sounds like the marker of a successful social policy to me - score one for Becker!
https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_si...
Just perfect.
[1] - http://briandeer.com/mmr/lancet-paper.htm
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_MMR_autism_fraud
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Wakefield#Epidemics,_ef...
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
EDIT: I figured it out and feel like a total doofus. The intuitive UI flow is to share to Facebook, grab the URL, dig out the relevant bit, and URL decode it (/s):