Merged Arday life and death

[W.D.Clinger]

Three of those are more like the exceptions not the rule, but I will disagree about philosophy. The rules of logic are only a tiny subset of it, and you can't even get a degree in just logic.

University of California, Berkeley:

In 1957, a group of faculty members, most of them from the departments of Mathematics and Philosophy, initiated a pioneering interdisciplinary graduate program leading to the degree of Ph.D. in Logic and the Methodology of Science. [....]​

​

Ph.D. work in logic can also be carried out entirely within one of the departments of Mathematics, Philosophy, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (see Graduate Study in Logic at UC Berkeley). The program in Logic and the Methodology of Science is intended for students whose interests lie in more than one of these fields.​

Carnegie Mellon University, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences:

Bachelor of Science in Logic and Computation​

And there are many, many departments of philosophy and departments of mathematics and departments of computer science that award undifferentiated BA, BS, MS, or PhD degrees to students whose course work and research focus upon logic.

A freshman-level philosophy course on logic for poets does not cover the entire field of logic.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Granted, but notice the Mathematics in there. You technically don't even NEED philosophy for it at all. Boolean logic is just a trivial case of Bayes, where the probabilities involved are constrained to either 0 or 1. And that's just pure maths. You literally get the same true and false tables. I'm not aware of any school of philosophy that even touches Bayes with a 10 ft dick.

Well, I say Bayes, but some stuff doesn't even need that equation. Like, for "and" you only need to understand it's P(A)*P(B)

I suspect the only need for any philosophy in there is just for the methodology part... but then you don't actually need it for any other methodology. You don't need to know any philosophy to understand stuff like that you need to consult the ethics board to use human subjects. (Chosen because Arday didn't do that. But then he also didn't actually do the data gathering on those, so I guess he didn't really need to)

Just like I don't need a minor in law (if that's even possible) to understand that the legal department needs to be consulted for some of our corporate programs. (The EULA is the most trivial example.)

 

[Elaedith]

Agreed that shows there were serious issues with his work, not just copying words.
The argument that his impact factor was high enough to justify his hiring is plausible but not solid. I think if I could be bothered it might be interesting to check the history of how he was quoted. Ie did multiple authors quote his work independently which would be impressive or was he quoted by someone whose own work led to Arday being quoted which would be less impressive. For example a friend of mine appears as an “et al” on several physics papers as he wrote the Fortran code to analyse the results, often outside his own area.

If somebody plagiarises then it is not actually their work being cited. The person they plagiarised should be receiving the credit.

 

[Darat]

Not true at all. All hard sciences are highly abstract at the higher theoretical level. As for being objectively black or white: not so! My ex-SO did double Philosophy and Physics (as a science). He specialised in Quantum Theory. There is a HUGE amount of fierce debate, disagreement and controversy at the Quantum Physics level because it is so abstract.

Was that in a Canadian university?

 

[Ziggurat]

I'm not aware of any school of philosophy that even touches Bayes with a 10 ft dick.

I... don't think Bayes wants to be touched by a 10 ft dick.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Granted, but notice the Mathematics in there. You technically don't even NEED philosophy for it at all. Boolean logic is just a trivial case of Bayes, where the probabilities involved are constrained to either 0 or 1. And that's just pure maths. You literally get the same true and false tables.

No. You don't even understand boolean (propositional) logic. Boolean logic has nothing to do with probability. The meaning of a boolean proposition is not simply 0 or 1, but is instead a mapping from interpretations to truth values.

The meaning of a proposition or (more generally) a formula becomes far more complex in standard first order logic. The semantics becomes even more complicated in modal logics. And there are many other kinds of logic, including a few (such as intuitionistic logic) that have important practical applications.

And you are probably making the mistake (quite common among engineers, and propagated even by Wikipedia) of thinking all Boolean algebras are two-valued. In reality, the category of Boolean algebras is essentially the same as the category of Stone spaces, which are the compact Hausdorff totally disconnected topological spaces. That fact is known as the Stone representation theorem for Boolean algebras.

I'm not aware of any school of philosophy that even touches Bayes with a 10 ft dick.

Bayesian versus frequentist is a well-known philosophical controversy with important implications for statistics and data science.

Well, I say Bayes, but some stuff doesn't even need that equation. Like, for "and" you only need to understand it's P(A)*P(B)

And that isn't true even for probability. P(A∧B) = P(A)*P(B) doesn't hold unless A and B are statistically independent.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

The Bayes Theorem applies to frequency just as well, not just expectations. And when the probabilities are constrained to 0 or 1, it doesn't really matter anyway.

You might be thinking of Bayesian learning or such. Possibly.

And hell, it even trivially covers informal logic, since that IS about expectations.

And that isn't true even for probability. P(A∧B) = P(A)*P(B) doesn't hold unless A and B are statistically independent.

Nope, it always applies. For that to be 1.0, both literally have to be 1.0, regardless of anything else. If they both depend on the same, yay, an easy case, but they still both have to be 1.0. You might be thinking of P(A|B), which is more like the "=>" case. Like why one can't do the affirming the consequent.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

I'm sorry, Hans, but you are completely out of your depth here.

Nope, it always applies. For that to be 1.0, both literally have to be 1.0, regardless of anything else. If they both depend on the same, yay, an easy case, but they still both have to be 1.0. You might be thinking of P(A|B), which is more like the "=>" case. Like why one can't do the affirming the consequent.

Simple counterexample: Take A to be an event with probability 1/2. Take B to be the same event as A. Then P(A∧B) = 1/2, but P(A)*P(B) = 1/4.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

That's not the binary logic sub-case I was talking about. You can't have a probability of 0.5 in binary logic. It's either 0.0 or 1.0.

Yeah, you can have it in informal logic, but that's a different thing, and yes, there it matters.

 

[Vixen]

Was that in a Canadian university?

¿Que?

 

[W.D.Clinger]

By way of apology for the brief derail into logic and probability, I will say a few words about the Dunning-Kruger effect and its relevance to this thread.

I don't know anything about sociology, but I know I don't know anything about sociology, so I haven't said anything against sociology. That doesn't have anything to do with whether I think sociology is a hard science or mickey mouse, and it doesn't have anything to do with my opinion(s) of Arday; it's just a matter of keeping my mouth shut when I don't know enough to add to the conversation.

I did have something to say about running marathons, because I do know something about running long distances almost every day. It's something I've done. (Even if what Arday said about his marathons is true, which I'm inclined to doubt, I was a better athlete at 24 than he was at 27.)

I haven't had anything to say about plagiarism and academic standards, not because I'm completely ignorant of those things, but because I'm ignorant of this specific case and don't care enough about Arday's situation to learn. Ignorant speculation would be counterproductive, so I leave the important matters to those who have taken the time to learn about them.

 

[theprestige]

Am I the only one horrified by the idea that Arday may have had a large impact on his peers in academia? Referencing him in your own work can't possibly be good for your work

 

[Ziggurat]

Am I the only one horrified by the idea that Arday may have had a large impact on his peers in academia? Referencing him in your own work can't possibly be good for your work

Horrified? This is a deserved reckoning. Even absent the fraud, Arday's work was garbage. Nobody should ever have been citing it. My only regret is that the fraud angle may conceal this, along with the fact that Arday isn't alone in producing tripe. Most of the people citing Arday are probably producing similar garbage, even if they're doing so honestly.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Am I the only one horrified by the idea that Arday may have had a large impact on his peers in academia? Referencing him in your own work can't possibly be good for your work

Semantic Scholar shows 30 publications, 751 citations, and an h-index of 12. So yes, a number of people were citing him.

(ETA: Something's screwy with Semantic Scholar. The link above reports the numbers shown. A second search on the same name came up with a different summary for the same author, reporting only 5 publications, 15 citations, and an h-index of 15. That second search came up with papers that weren't listed by the first search. This screwiness isn't unique to Arday. A search on "W D Clinger" came back with 22 papers I wrote or co-authored, but clicking on my name as they listed it for those papers brought up a web page that says I have only 4 publications, of which only one was cited more than 11 times.)

 

[Darat]

Horrified? This is a deserved reckoning.
Even absent the fraud, Arday's work was garbage. Nobody should ever have been citing it. My only regret is that the fraud angle may conceal this, along with the fact that Arday isn't alone in producing tripe. Most of the people citing Arday are probably producing similar garbage, even if they're doing so honestly.

What do you base that on?

 

[Ziggurat]

What do you base that on?

Having read some of it.

 

[Darat]

Having read some of it.

Which papers or books? There seems to be quite a lot.

 

[Ziggurat]

Which papers or books? There seems to be quite a lot.

His Ph.D. thesis.

 

[Darat]

His Ph.D. thesis.

Apart from that?

 

[smartcooky]

The correct term is 'EDI'. DEI is American.