I'm sorry I killed the discussion... and you have a point regarding my patronizing tone. I should have refrained from replying to specific comments, but it got on my nerves. Most of these are bordering the "not even wrong" kind.
The usual behavior towards this kind of ignorance and arrogance is contempt. I could have kept shut and let people make fools of themselves but, somehow, I care about this place and the quality of the community, hence my reply.
I probably wouldn't have been as vehement hadn't I known (remotely for most of them) some of the authors, hence the disclosure, but that's not the point.
The criticism below come from people who, by the fact of their comments, displayed flagrant ignorance of the subject and of the scientific process, and imagined they could criticize the paper on a technical ground when they are clearly incompetent to do so. Hence the link to the original paper and the information complement ==> "Please read the paper and make your opinion based on it rather than on a simplified summary".
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I know of course that there are smart people outside the academic world. That's why I'm hanging around here. But the Science reviewers are the best researchers in their fields, and, to get there, you need to be impressively smart and knowledgeable. I hope you've had or will have the chance to hang around with people in that "league", they are amazing. Assuming you can outsmart them at reviewing a paper without having even read it is just dumb.
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At last, I didn't see the comments here as threats to the paper it is solid, and so are the people behind it. I wouldn't have written the comment if I had a single doubt about it. The Cyclotron team routinely publishes papers in the best journals (Science, Nature, PLOS, PNAS, the Lancet, to name a few). They're badasses ;-)
You didn't kill the discussion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not everyone's is necessarily informed. Pointing out that people who only have a casual, indirect understanding of the material at hand should keep this in mind when attempting to critique the paper is a perfectly valid, non-elitist, thing to point out. Quite frankly, even if I were to read the paper, I probably would not have enough understanding to make an informed opinion on the subject. I can give a bunch of javadoc class descriptions to a neurosurgeon. But that doesn't mean that she'll have the prerequisite knowledge to make sense of it.
We should celebrate our specialties and the amount of narrow and deep knowledge required to become experts in them instead of having our egos tripped up because we can't have our intelligence validated in every single domain.
I know a future neurosurgeon who, as a teen, used to code 3D demos in 80386 assembly... Including whipping on his own linear algebra routines, for the fun of it...
That said, I agree with your point, and thank you for your support.
The usual behavior towards this kind of ignorance and arrogance is contempt. I could have kept shut and let people make fools of themselves but, somehow, I care about this place and the quality of the community, hence my reply.
I probably wouldn't have been as vehement hadn't I known (remotely for most of them) some of the authors, hence the disclosure, but that's not the point.
The criticism below come from people who, by the fact of their comments, displayed flagrant ignorance of the subject and of the scientific process, and imagined they could criticize the paper on a technical ground when they are clearly incompetent to do so. Hence the link to the original paper and the information complement ==> "Please read the paper and make your opinion based on it rather than on a simplified summary".
-
I know of course that there are smart people outside the academic world. That's why I'm hanging around here. But the Science reviewers are the best researchers in their fields, and, to get there, you need to be impressively smart and knowledgeable. I hope you've had or will have the chance to hang around with people in that "league", they are amazing. Assuming you can outsmart them at reviewing a paper without having even read it is just dumb.
-
At last, I didn't see the comments here as threats to the paper it is solid, and so are the people behind it. I wouldn't have written the comment if I had a single doubt about it. The Cyclotron team routinely publishes papers in the best journals (Science, Nature, PLOS, PNAS, the Lancet, to name a few). They're badasses ;-)