Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

The article quotes Peter Norvig: When a published paper proclaims "statistically, this could only happen by chance one in twenty times," it is quite possible that similar experiments have been performed twenty times, but have not been published.



It occurred to me that this means there is a real advantage to academia's "publish or perish" phenomenon. It means that when an experiment's results are not what was hoped, those results are still likely to get published. The experimenter would like to have his name on some ground-breaking results, of course, but, failing that, he still must have publications. So he publishes anyway. Not so true in industry.


Are you sure about that? Journals don't (in general) publish negative results. The result of the pressure to publish is not that negative results get published; it's that the scientist has an incentive to create positive results. Not necessarily through data falsification, but through choosing experiments very likely to generate "results", which, unfortunately, also implies that the information content of such experiments is necessarily lower than it could be if the scientist had more freedom to perform an experiment that had a higher likelihood of failure.


Googling "journal of negative results" gives a few hits. I think it's probably possible to get negative results published, but I doubt that they look good on the resume.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: