Why to never write a response (to a terrible paper)

Why to never write a response (to a terrible paper) Cyrano de Bergeraca a

Department of Philosophy, University of Hipparchus

Abstract There are two classic blunders – the most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”, and the only slightly less well-known of which is “never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line” (Reiner, 1987). This paper presents a third blunder, the importance of which, although long unnoticed, surpasses that of the two others. Keywords: Philosophy, Trepalium, Laws of Nature, Valence effect History repeats itself, and I see colleagues keep writing responses to terrible papers, thinking they will help their field, desperately sinking with their boat. By so doing, they repeat again and again the same mistakes I did when I was younger than you, but it doesn’t matter. I was a post-graduate at the time, and my supervisor and I came across a paper which was terrible, so terrible, that my adviser nodded that we should write a response. I bear full responsibility for accepting, thinking it would be easy. It turned out to be one of my worst academic mistakes ever. (Actually, it is the only one.) The paper was based on a fatal flaw. Not only was it based on a fatal flaw, there were actually mistakes in the flaw, and mistakes burgeoning on these mistakes, in an infinite regress of mistakes, the whole paper was a festival of mistakes (Fig. 1). It was a curious blend of serious errors of facts, of maths, and of everything else. It was published in a very good journal. There are few reasons to write responses, and many better ones not to write them. Among the few pros, is the hope that you will help your field, maybe make a name for yourself by correcting a famous professor, be the Nemesis of a whole field that you will debunk in a single argument. No hope. Your colleagues won’t understand your debunking, the famous professor will continue to be famous, and if anything, your paper won’t be Preprint submitted to Journal of Selenite Studies

Figure 1: Left: the argument, as it should have been in that particular terrible paper. Right: the argument, as it was. As one can see, it was terrible.

cited if successful since the whole field will break down on its grounds and you won’t make a name for yourself.1 Be prepared to suffer, though. Suffer like hell. Writing responses to terrible papers is not easy. Worse than not easy, it is not interesting. It is much like banging your head against walls. You are full of ideas, full of new things, of inventions, etc., and despite that, you keep explaining blatant facts to obtuse people, brushing in front of them the infinite maze of their misunderstandings, lying on your knees, patiently looking at them while they struggle in their world in two dimensions. You are worth much more than that. You are worth much more than checking the literature, and discovering that the tiny bits you 1

Making a name for yourself is not that important, but it helps with earning money. July 15, 2016

fatally flawed.2 This shall not be surprising, since producing a valuable piece of philosophy requires one to be a genius, which most people aren’t. You could spend your whole lifetime writing responses and tutoring your colleagues, and yet be unable to correct a non-null fraction of the field. Now, imagine you are tramping in the jungle, and come across a nice clearing where a troop of monkeys keep wandering around in random circles. The monkeys don’t seem to have any particular aim other than wandering around in random circles.3 Would you spend your whole lifetime gently correcting every monkey so that they may find something in the end, or would you rather open a whole new route to a new place where new monkeys could wander around in random circles? So, no, definitely no: never write responses to terrible papers. You can still write responses, but only to genius papers. Likewise, you can tutor colleagues. But only genius colleagues. Needless to say: if you are not a genius, don’t read the piece above.

Figure 2: The delicate balancing act of inventing charitable claims for obtuse authors they might be happy with. (Photograph: Thomas Subtil, Hakuna Matata #3 , 2013, with kind permission.)

didn’t know actually open entire fields where people have said what the other author should have said, for decades, which makes you the toilet attendant of the other author you don’t even love as a friend to start with. You are worth much more than thinking charitably for hours, sitting in front of your desk, trying to make sense of the nonsense, desperately inventing new claims the other author could have held, in a delicate balancing act where you can’t reasonably charge them for holding views which are trivially wrong but can’t credit them for holding views they wouldn’t hold either (Fig. 2). You are worth much more than writing in boredom. Writing in boredom is hard. In this particular occasion, it took us almost two years to come up with a satisfying paper both correcting the other author and saying something not trivial, though understandable. We have written genuine papers in two days, and they are, indeed, much better than this response. Let it sink: we should have abandoned the ship much earlier. Arguably, one might worry that if nobody ever writes responses, then mistakes will stand in the literature forever, dooming humanity to failure, the Universe to collapse, and God to religion. This might be true, but writing responses won’t make any difference. In my field (philosophy), 99% of the papers are

Acknowledgments I thank M. M. Chickencock and S. G. SaintPatrick of the Devilshire for editorial help. Part of this work has been supported by a grant PIANO-40-329541-D843. References Reiner, R. (1987). tt0093779.

2

The Princess Bride.

IMDB ID:

If you find this percentage excessive, maybe it is time to think about your papers. 3 Ethical note: this image is aimed at impressing the reader’s imagination. I nowise mean that monkeys are inferior to academics.

2