It is absolutely outrageous that you are accusing the authors of this work of dishonesty because of limitations they explicitly called out in their introductory post as well as the paper.
Instead of stating the assumption the be flawed, they've termed it as a lie. While I disagree with the lawsuit, accusations of lying seem a little outlandish.
No journal should encourage publication of accusations of lying
It's sufficiently untrue that the author or publisher should know that it is untrue and misleading. I conclude they did it on purpose for clicks. However, I am not a scientific sample.
It is worded as an accusation for what might’ve been an innocent mistake. Look how many times the author uses the word “weird”, a very subjective word to use in a seemingly technical analysis.
It is exactly what they are doing. You are playing with semantics. The public as well as private companies use the claims as an argument for validation of truth.
The troubling aspect is it comes with some level of authority backing the claims. There are consequences for not aligning with the positions of the claims.
I think you're assuming bad faith from someone who has proven very competent, technical, and coherent.
It might simply be truthful. And if the author is proud of that, it is both irrelevant and perfectly okay.
Let's focus on the facts and arguments relevant to the article, not personal attacks.
The articles are ridiculous. The point is that they didn't get published anywhere meaningful, and that they were deceptive about what did and didn't get published. If they're willing to be deceptive about something as silly as this, why should I think they're unwilling to be deceptive about other stuff?
Oh, it might be valid, in regards to the magazine, alright. It just smacks of hypocrisy when their research is pretty much bound to be used for unethical purposes.
Agreed, simply having a conflict of interest isn't a reason to disregard the complaints. But the problem is that failing to disclose it up front creates the appearance of dishonesty, which undercuts the message. But it's important for us as readers because it makes us more aware that we should be looking for some of the techniques that can be more confounding or misleading.
I want to be clear, I am not saying that the post is wrong, just that we would know to be more careful in reviewing claims.
I could perhaps see a charitable interpretation if the author of the blog post (Guzey) did not accuse the author of the book (Walker) of "deliberate data manipulation", gave the opportunity to the target of the accusation to explain himself, did not misrepresent himself as a "researcher" (pointing to his blog posts as examples of his "research"), did not link to a friend's blog post for "UC Berkeley’s official response", etc, etc.
The author of the blog post is not leaving a lot of room for charitable interpretations.
But in any case, what charitable interpretation do you propose?
I did not mean to assail? The original comment was lengthy and I did not understand what the overall message was (is the author of the article a fraud? Or not?). So I asked for a TL;DR which seems to be "maybe there is a problem or maybe there isn't", which for me condenses to zero content. How is that assailing?
Perhaps my tone came across as snarky because the person providing the TL;DR actually "assailed" me for asking for a TL;DR. Sorry about that.
Given the conflict of interest in this article, I'd say that's the least of what the authors should be accused of.
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