
Software-Generated Paper Accepted At IEEE Conference - naish
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08%2F12%2F23%2F2321242&from=rss
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gcv
So it was post-modern cultural studies first with Alan Sokal
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair>), then theoretical physics with
the Bogdanov brothers (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair>), and
now it's the turn of computer science. As good CS people, the meta-authors of
this article used a random generator rather than faking the text themselves. I
guess the discipline is growing up. :)

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kwamenum86
The abstract was craptastic but it is no different from the craptastic
abstracts of several human-generated papers.

I think part of the problem is the people expect academic papers to be
complicated/cutting edge/forward thinking, and therefore not immediately
comprehensible.

Now I have to admit, the first sentence of the abstract sounded really good
but it was all downhill from there. Again though, it was downhill in the same
way as many other abstracts I have read.

Maybe this means that academics need to stop trying to sound so smart in their
papers and just get the point across...or maybe it just exposes one (or
several) of the reviewers as utterly incompetent.

~~~
fgimenez
When I was writing my first paper, I legitimately tried to write it so anybody
could understand. My test was to have my girlfriend read it and tell me what
she thought it was about (not that my girlfriend isn't smart, but she had
absolutely no clue what I was working on). When I showed it to the PI, he said
I had to revise it all because it was "too juicy."

More specifically, he said there were two reasons against understandable
writing:

1) Scientists are lazy, and do not want to read long passages. Coupled with
the fact that they are usually pretty smart, they _can_ understand the terse
language.

2) Scientific (read: incomprehensible) writing removes all biases. There is no
room to interpret something incorrectly if the precise words are used.

I agree though, it's not a very inviting culture that promotes these ideals.

~~~
kwamenum86
That's my point though. Even extremely smart people can stumble on a dense
abstract. It is the nature of language- just because I know what I mean does
not mean that you do. Even if you write something that can only be interpreted
correctly in one way, there is still room for misinterpretation or total lack
of understanding.

I was really trying to say that if a paper with no meaning made it through
screening (no matter how light) then maybe the papers are too dense.

In response to 1), I have always found that scientific papers provide more
verbose explanations for even simple concepts. I have reread entire paragraphs
three times only to discover that I already have a firm grasp of the concept
being discussed and can explain it in a single sentence. But it probably just
depends on the author and the verbosity could be explained by your 2):
removing all uncertainty by explaining exactly what you mean.

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rtw
It was actually accepted as a "poster" which is not a rigorous thing. I still
think it's an embarrassment. This has been done before, and accepted as a full
CS paper (search for "scigen").

The best example is the "Sokal affair" (search for "Alan Sokal") which is
awesome because it doesn't just demonstrate sheer negligence with a randomly
generated paper: it was carefully crafted to sound like it made sense.

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asciilifeform
Computer science has failed the pseudoscience test:

[http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-w...](http://unqualified-
reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html)

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Very interesting article. Should be a submission here.

~~~
gcv
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43074>

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raheemm
"In this work we better understand how digital-to-analog converters can be
applied to the development of e-commerce." LOL :)

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jackowayed
people don't like admitting that they don't know something. Especially that
they don't know something when they're supposed to be very knowledgeable about
it.

But come on! They could have rejected it as "incomprehensible" or "needing to
explain what it was talking about better" or "not staying on one topic".

The abstract started talking about the Internet and OOP and ended up talking
about digital-to-analog converters and e-commerce.

Just because you're smart and you can't understand it doesn't mean that it's
smarter.

