But what actually happens is you do something you read in a paper, then you fail, get super frustrated, publish a paper titled “Doing X doesn’t lead to Y”, and several people suddenly start telling you they all knew that but never bothered to tell anyone.
Normalize and incentivize publishing negative results!!
That’s like 3/4 - 7/8 of science, the being wrong part!
Normalize and incentivize publishing negative results!
+ Normalize and incentivize attempting to replicate existing findings!
With these two recommendations we’d speed up discovery exponentially.
Big respect to the McBriens of the world, your lit reviews make a lot of things easier
Pro- and anti-Chomsky’s Universal Grammar papers were flamewars and a touchstone of mine for a while.
(Everett convinced me Chomsky might be wrong).
Not sure if you’re still into it, and if you knew this already, but I’m name-dropping “Constructive Grammars” as an interesting thing
I got a citation from a group once, in a footnote, which was just basically “we think the conclusions of [32] are wrong, but we will not comment on why”. 1., its because your conclusions were in conflict with ours, and 2. Well, OK then, I’ll do better in the future will all the constructive critisism you are providing!
To make it even worse, the academic field of these authors is linguistics.
Did a whole review on human evolution and how it correlates to how birds, dolphins, and primates have developed the ability to use tools. There was one paper from the 90s that everyone seemed to be replying to, I got a lot of good info
