SoylentNews

tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

The site Little Atoms has a detailed breakdown on the problems with David Grimes' paper on the mathematics of conspiracy theories [littleatoms.com].

Can we predict how long a conspiracy of a given size will last? That’s the question asked by Dr David Grimes - the researcher, skeptic and writer who published the paper.
...
It’s a nice idea. Unfortunately the answer is a resounding "no", and the resulting paper ends up being a sort of case study in how not to do statistics.
...
It would be easy to blame Grimes for all this, but the bigger failure here is in PLOS ONE’s peer review process. It’s easy to screw up calculus. What’s less excusable is that expert reviewers looked at this paper ahead of publication, and none of them spotted an elementary mistake that myself and others saw almost immediately. Numerous other helpers are cited in the acknowledgements, but none of them seem to have glanced at the math or challenged some really odd assumptions. Grimes made a mistake – we all do – but he was also severely let down by his peers and colleagues.

Some of the problems were mentioned in the original article on Soylent [soylentnews.org].

Originally spotted at Cocktail Party Physics [typepad.com].

Original Submission