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Evaluating a function using a densely spaced grid and plotting it does work. This is brute-force search. You will see the global minima immediately in the way you describe, provided your grid is dense enough to capture all local variation.

It's just that when the function is implemented on the computer, evaluating so many points takes a long time, and using a more sophisticated optimization algorithm that exploits information like the gradient is almost always faster. In physical reality all the points already exist, so if they can be observed cheaply the brute force approach works well.

Edit: Your question was good. Asking superficially-naive questions like that is often a fruitful starting point for coming up with new tricks to solve seemingly-intractable problems.


Thanks!

It does feels to me that we do some sort of sampling, definitely is not a naive grid search.

Also I find it easier to find the minima in specific directions (up, down, left, right) rather than let’s say a 42 degree one. So some sort of priors are probably used to improve sample efficiency.


From main text:

> Discussions with different stakeholders suggest that many currently perceive systematic fraudulent science as something that occurs only in the periphery of the “real” scientific enterprise, that is, outside OECD countries. Accumulating evidence shows that systematic production of low quality and fraudulent science can occur anywhere.

From supplement (section about the output of the "ARDA" paper mill):

> We obtained 20,638 documents and were able to impute country of authorship for 13,288 documents (64.4%). Of these documents, more than half were solely from India (26.4%), Iraq (19.3%), or Indonesia (12.2%).

The identity and reputation of the authors, and the publication venue, is (for now) still a strong signal when evaluating the credibility of an article.

The article is spot-on though in that there is a real risk of paper mills infecting formerly reliable journals, and this is not helped by the publishers' commercialism. For example, it used to be easy to ignore Hindawi journals (they are characteristically low quality); then Wiley started publishing them under its own brand. The good is now mixed with the bad under the same label. Practicing scientists can fall back on whether they know the authors personally but that doesn't really help non-practicing professionals or the general public.


I find going by citation good for established work. Harzing's publish or perish is useful for this.


True, but the RF coils do get turned on & off. Heating of non-magnetic metal from the radio waves used for scanning is another concern, not just magnetic force.


> Don't we have decades of research about the improvements in productivity and correctness brought by static type checking?

It seems messy. Just one example that I remember because it was on HN before: https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/this-is-how-science-happens...


Even extremely privacy-conscious authors could submit their paper to the service at the same time they publish their preprint v1, then if the service's feedback is useful, publish preprint v2 and submit v2 as the version of record.


...or run it themselves. The code is open source: https://github.com/robertjakob/rigorous

Note: The current version uses the OpenAI API, but it should be adaptable to run on local models instead.


Industry research is generally R&D (applied science, engineering research), not basic research (basic science). Not to disparage either; both are needed, but they are quite different and a person may be suited to one but not the other. It can be hard for someone looking for work to determine where an organization's focus is, as an outsider.


Multiple comparisons and sequential hypothesis testing / early stopping aren't the same problem. There might be a way to wrangle an F test into a sequential hypothesis testing approach, but it's not obvious (to me anyway) how one would do so. In multiple comparisons each additional comparison introduces a new group with independent data; in sequential hypothesis testing each successive test adds a small amount of additional data to each group so all results are conditional. Could you elaborate or provide a link?


Publications with public funding have already escaped the paywall, partially as of 2013 and completely as of this year:

https://par.nsf.gov/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

https://ospo.gwu.edu/overview-us-policy-open-access-and-open...

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...

https://www.coalition-s.org/plan_s_principles/

The intent of the Bayh-Dole Act was to deal with a perceived problem of government-owned patents being investor-unfriendly. At the time the government would only grant non-exclusive licenses, and investors generally want exclusivity. That may have been the actual problem, moreso than who owned the patent. On the other hand, giving the actual inventors an incentive to commercialize their work should increase their productivity and the chance that the inventions actually get used.


Once something has a predictable ROI (can be productized and sold), profit seekers will find a way. The role of publicly funded research is to get ideas that are not immediately profitable to the stage that investors can take over. Publicly funded research also supports investor-funded R&D by educating their future work force.

The provided examples do not clearly support the idea that industry can compensate for a decrease in government-funded basic research. Bell Labs was the product of government action (antitrust enforcement), not a voluntary creation. The others are R&D (product development) organizations, not research organizations. Of those listed, Xerox PARC is the most significant, but from the profit-seeking perspective it's more of a cautionary tale since it primarily benefited Xerox's competitors. And Hinton seems to have received government support; his backpropagation paper at least credits ONR. As I understand it, the overall deep learning story is that basic research, including government-funded research, laid theoretical groundwork that capital investment was later able to scale commercially once video games drove development of the necessary hardware.


The median sample size of the studies subjected to replication was n = 5 specimens (https://osf.io/atkd7). Probably because only protocols with an estimated cost less than BRL 5,000 (around USD 1,300 at the time) per replication were included. So it's not surprising that only ~ 60% of the original biomechemical assays' point estimates were in the replicates' 95% prediction interval. The mouse maze anxiety test (~ 10%) seems to be dragging down the average. n = 5 just doesn't give reliable estimates, especially in rodent psychology.


This should be the top comment on HN where most users claim to have some grasp of statistics. N=5 implies a statistical uncertainty of about 45%, so they measured what one would expect, which is essentially nothing. Also this is specifically about Brazilian biomedical studies, and contains no evidence to support people's various personal vendettas against other fields in other countries. At least read the article people.


Yikes! Yeah, worthless.


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