[ExI] randomly generated math paper accepted for publication

[Giulio Prisco]

I forgot to say that "Peer Review" is actually "Pee Review," pissing
on other scientists and pissing on science itself.

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 8:33 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>
>>... It does mean the traditional peer-review process, with its ridiculous delays of months and even years, is broken beyond repair.  Giulio
>
>
> Thanks Giulio, your commentary made my day.  You bring in another element: not just laziness or incompetence, but possible actual corruption in the process.  I can imagine far too easily a referee-bot, set up to make vague and gentle criticisms, randomly chosen from a table in Excel or database, auto-replying to paper authors, while the actual human running the "scientific journal" vacations for a month, collecting the publication fees from the authors for the privilege of appearing in a journal no one actually reads.
>
> That system is not only broken beyond repair, it isn't clear exactly where all the fractures are located.
>
> {8-]
>
> spike
>
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Giulio Prisco
> Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2012 10:54 AM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [ExI] randomly generated math paper accepted for publication
>
> This is super cool! I have seen other examples of randomly generated crap published in "respectable" journals, I think one example had a certain notoriety a few years ago.
>
> Once in an AI lab we played with one of these automatic article generators, able to put together something that looks vaguely plausible at a first glance, using other writings of the same authors and a knowledge base. We thought of sending a particularly good example to a journal, I guess it would have been accepted.
>
> Does that mean that referees don't even read the papers that they should review? No, because there are two cases where they do read them very carefully: 1) when the paper is from a competitor whose prestige they want to destroy, 2) when they want to publish similar results first. We should never forget that scientists are people like everyone else.
>
> It does mean the the traditional peer-review process, with its ridiculous delays of months and even years, is broken beyond repair.
>
> On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 7:24 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Not only is this hilarious, it makes me feel so much better:
>>
>>
>>
>> Mathgen paper accepted!
>>
>> Posted on September 14, 2012
>>
>> I’m pleased to announce that Mathgen has had its first
>> randomly-generated paper accepted by a  journal!
>>
>> ________________________________
>>
>> On August 3, 2012, a certain Professor Marcie Rathke of the University
>> of Southern North Dakota at Hoople submitted a very interesting
>> article to Advances in Pure Mathematics, one of the many fine journals
>> put out by Scientific Research Publishing. (Your inbox and/or spam
>> trap very likely contains useful information about their publications
>> at this very moment!) This mathematical tour de force was entitled
>> “Independent, Negative, Canonically Turing Arrows of Equations and
>> Problems in Applied Formal PDE”, and I quote here its intriguing
>> abstract:
>>
>> Let ρ=A. Is it possible to extend isomorphisms? We show that D′ is
>> stochastically orthogonal and trivially affine. In [10], the main
>> result was the construction of p-Cardano, compactly Erdős, Weyl
>> functions. This could shed important light on a conjecture of
>> Conway-d’Alembert.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/archives/102
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Here’s the paper:
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> http://thatsmathematics.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/mathgen-13
>> 89529747.pdf
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> So why does it make me feel better?  On occasion I have struggled
>> through some of the papers, or unsuccessfully attempted to comprehend,
>> some of the material in the more arcane publications in mathematical
>> theory, but have always come away dismayed and discouraged.  It feels
>> like a hundred lifetimes would be insufficient to understand the
>> material there.  It makes me feel dumber than a box or rocks.
>>
>>
>>
>> Now I know that even referees can be snowed by this, I realize that
>> this practice could go undetected: a real human writes a reasonable
>> abstract and the first page or two (which is usually about my
>> endurance level in trying to comprehend the papers) then let MathSpew
>> fill out the paper, which is then published in an attempt to not
>> perish.
>>
>>
>>
>> In reality, the joke is on anyone who attempts to publish in this
>> journal, paying the 500 dollar fee.  If you look at the referee’s
>> comments, it is not at all clear to me those were generated by an
>> actual human either.
>>
>>
>>
>> spike
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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