OrionWorks - Steven V Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
> All I know is that it sure wouldn't be in my own self-interest to look > for trouble. This strikes me as terribly reckless behavior. > It is particularly reckless when you can make every argument without including accusations of fraud. Krivit can say that McKubre is wrong for thus and such technical reasons. If it turns out McKubre is in fact wrong, Krivit wins. He does not need to discuss motivation. Let the reader decide whether McKubre was incompetent or dishonest. Along the same lines, I can show that the data published by MIT was manually manipulated. (See the Miles paper.) I do not have to accuse the profs at MIT of academic fraud. Why should I accuse them of anything? For all I know they manually messed up the data while preparing the graph, and they never noticed it. A mistake is bad enough. It should have been corrected either way. I'm not being hypocritical. I have no inside knowledge about MIT beyond what Gene told me. Naturally I trust his account. I suppose they were probably nefarious. I personally have no proof and I concede it might be an accident. I'm not a police investigator. Also along the same lines, as I just mentioned, if Mary Yugo thinks Defkalion is up to no good, she can make a case for that without resorting to extreme accusations and without going out on a limb. It is enough to say "it looks like fraud to me" or "it looks like incompetence." If it turns out she is right, she will get as much credit and praise for being right as she would for making a bolder assertion. - Jed
