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This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018 or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph

by calebh 2y ago

This stuff happens in Computer Science too. Back around 2018 or so I was working on a problem that required graph matching (a relaxed/fuzzy version of the graph isomorphism problem) and was trying algorithms from many different papers. Many of the algorithms I tried to implement didn't work at all, despite considerable effort to get them to behave. In one particularly egregious (and highly cited) example, the algorithm in the paper differed from the provided code on GitHub. I emailed the authors trying to figure out what was going wrong, and they tried to get funding from me for support. My manager wanted me to right a literature review paper which skewered all of these bad papers, but I refused since I thought it would hurt my career. Ironically the algorithm that ended up working the best was from one of the more unknown papers, with few citations.

ammbauer 2y ago
Name and shame :)
- robotelvis 2y ago
  Calling out bad work is career suicide. You are defecting on your tribe. That’s half of the problem.
  - bernawil 2y ago
    can't you do it anonymously?
creer 2y ago
Beautiful. And thanks for the testimony. Ironically, this may have helped your product or research: Yes you spent more time on the BS, but in the end you found and used an algorithm both better and more obscure. While your competitors struggled with worse ones. Messed up incentives again.