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Adam Přenosil

 Discussion on question by Kendall: Ca…

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Adam Přenosil
Apr 8 22:12
I understand that you have observed people who write "bullsh*t" with the intention of being less offensive, but why do you believe that anyone is going to care about the difference between "bullshit" and "bullsh*t"?
 

 Discussion on question by optimal con…

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Adam Přenosil
Mar 12 18:47
@optimalcontrol "Besides, I suppose you may not be aware of how often people are accused of sexual harassment or misogyny in such contexts." No, I am quite aware of this, which is precisely why I am making the point that if you want this to change, then you as a tenured professor, as opposed to academicians in less secure positions for whom such an accusation may have much more dire consequences, are in the best position to lead by example.
Adam Přenosil
Mar 12 18:47
"I avoid responding or reacting because I fear that the discussion could be misinterpreted and that I might be accused of being misogynistic." This is not a very good attitude. You are a tenured professor. If tenured professors are too afraid to act according to their own conscience even in minor things like this, and instead act based on "oh gee, I am afraid to speak my mind because I fear that I could be falsely accused of XYZ", then what are non-tenured academicians supposed to do? What kind of effect do you think this attitude has on academia in general?
 

 Discussion on question by Daniel Tsai…

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Adam Přenosil
Mar 8 01:40
Out of curiosity, what do you mean by "alternative/esoteric methods" in math?
 

 Discussion on question by Ulysses: Sy…

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Adam Přenosil
Feb 23 16:17
This article contains a number of links that might be of interest to you: quillette.com/2021/03/24/…
 

 Discussion on question by student: Ca…

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Adam Přenosil
Jan 24 04:44
@AzorAhai-him- Sure, I don't think you have any obligation to read such papers.
Adam Přenosil
Jan 24 04:44
@Ray I think we are talking past each other. I am not saying anyone has any obligation to read through papers of obviously low quality, or to follow what is being published in low quality journals. (OP's original question was phrased differently.) I was just saying that a blanket policy of ignoring every paper published in a "predatory" journal is not justified. If you know that a good paper was published in a "predatory" journal, obviously you should not ignore it.
Adam Přenosil
Jan 24 04:44
@AzorAhai-him- If a paper that legitimately advances a field in some way ends up being published in a predatory journal, I see no reason to avoid referencing it. (Of course, this does not seem to be the situation here.) For that matter, same goes for unpublished manuscripts, provided that they are accepted by the relevant community as legitimate. The publication status is not, or at any rate should not be, that important. At least that's how I feel about papers in math. I imagine other fields like medicine may have good reasons to ignore papers that were not properly published.
Adam Přenosil
Jan 24 04:44
The question as you state it has a very simple answer: no, which journal the paper was published in is simply irrelevant. However, I suspect that what you wanted to ask is: can I ignore papers of dubious quality which contain "substantial errors"?
 

 Discussion on answer by Ben: Comparin…

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Adam Přenosil
Nov 22, 2024 06:52
The most upvoted comment here takes issue with the word "mess", but this is a very superficial point. Ignoring the word "mess" completely, a universally acknowledged general principle is: after you use a shared resource, you should return it to a state where it is ready to be used by others. This applies to dishes, kitchen appliances, shared computers, shared cars, bathtubs, books taken from the shelf, etc. etc. etc. Why on Earth would blackboards be an exception?
 

 Discussion on question by Mikhail Kat…

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Adam Přenosil
Nov 4, 2024 12:26
@MikhailKatz I don't think my comments constitute an answer to your original question, I was merely making a small point about your subsidiary question.
Adam Přenosil
Nov 3, 2024 13:02
@mudskipper "I don't think that the trivial distinction that you explain is relevant here." It is relevant because it is the distinction that Dummett was actually making in that sentence, which was misread by Mikhail Katz as involving about some sort of distinction between "each" and "every". In contrast, what you write is true but irrelevant to the sentence of Dummett's that's under discussion.
Adam Přenosil
Nov 1, 2024 20:22
@MikhailKatz (continued) For example, it is a simple matter to recognize for each n>5 that n is a sum of three primes. A computer can do that by exhaustive search. It is a much more difficult matter to recognize that for each n>5, n is a sum of three primes. The latter task, but not the former, requires understanding the proof of Goldbach's weak conjecture. (I think a similar misunderstanding is behind your view that Dummett made a blunder in (1) by calling the step trivial, but I do not care to argue about that now, since the case of (2) is much clearer.)
Adam Přenosil
Nov 1, 2024 20:22
@MikhailKatz I am sorry, but you seem to be ignoring the point that I was making re (2). You are acting as if Dummett wrote the same thing twice, just replacing "each" with "every", (which he didn't) and inferring that he is making some grand point about some distinction between "each" and "every" (which he isn't). The distinction is in the scope of the quantifier. He is making the distinction between "recognizing, for each n, that A(n) is true" and "recognizing that for each n, A(n) is true", or if you will between ∀n R(A(n)) and R(∀n A(n)).
Adam Přenosil
Nov 1, 2024 20:22
As an example, in Robinson arithmetic, for each m and n it is provable that m+n=n+m. However, it is not the case that in Robinson arithmetic it is provable that for each m and n, m+n=n+m. This is the distinction that Dummett is alluding to.
Adam Přenosil
Nov 1, 2024 20:22
"There are certain assertions in Dummett's piece that I find inscrutable" Dummett's writing is generally very clear, it's just that one needs to pay close attention to detail. For example, the quoted sentence which puzzles you is not really making a point about any kind of distinction between "each" and "every". Rather, it's about the distinction between (i) for each n, I can recognize that A(n) is true, and (ii) I can recognize that for each n, A(n) is true. The former is a much easier task than the latter.
 

 Discussion on question by Luna: How t…

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Adam Přenosil
Oct 30, 2024 15:27
If you decide to address the issue, I would advise you to be clear about what offended you in the email (presumably the word "promptly"), rather than make a vague point about "issuing demands to academic staff regarding how we conduct our teaching work". If the student didn't understand that it was rude of them to ask you to "promptly" do something, they are unlikely to correctly identify the offending part of their email based on this. You could e.g. write: "Please note that it is somewhat inappropriate to request "prompt" feedback when I have explained in class that" etc.
 

 Discussion on question by somethinggo…

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Adam Přenosil
Oct 29, 2024 15:53
There are a number of reasons why many people who start a PhD eventually end up leaving academia. In my limited experience, not being "smart enough" is not even in the top 5 (for people who have reached certain basic level of competence).
 

 Discussion on answer by Vosoni: Advis…

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Adam Přenosil
Oct 16, 2024 22:01
Ok, understood. Your original comment made it sound like you had intended to do this all along when you originally added the comment.
Adam Přenosil
Oct 16, 2024 22:01
@Vosoni "So I think you are taking a bit of a leap here." Not really. (I did say that it is a very low level form of misconduct.) You stated that during review, you add some text in bad faith to appease the referee and to increase your chances of acceptance, and then you abuse the production process to remove it. Unwillingness to follow reviewer recommendations is of course not research misconduct, pretending to follow review recommendations with the intention of later abusing the production process to remove them is. Again, this depends on if you are acting in good faith vs. bad faith.
Adam Přenosil
Oct 16, 2024 22:01
Agreed with @user2705196. I find it unbelievable that anyone would publicly admit to this form of (admittedly very low level) research misconduct using a profile linked to their real identity.
Adam Přenosil
Oct 16, 2024 22:01
@Timea4Tea If you are a PhD student, you are very likely overestimating how clear your paper is, because you lack experience with how vastly different people's background knowledge can differ even within a fairly narrow field. It's quite difficult to get a good sense of this as a very junior researcher. I'm not saying it's impossible that the referee is wrong, but the odds are stacked against you and it's rarely a bad thing to strive to make your paper clearer.
Adam Přenosil
Oct 16, 2024 22:00
@Time4Tea Referees can make mistakes, but as a rule of thumb, if a referee asks for something to be clarified, you should probably take their advice. You are, almost by definition, a much worse judge of whether something is stated clearly enough than a third party. It's possible that the referee didn't do their job properly, but it's much more likely that they devoting more attention to your paper than the average reader will. So if they find something unclear, so will the average reader, despite your feeling that you already "made it very clear and explicit in the paper".
 

 Discussion on question by SimpleStude…

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Adam Přenosil
Oct 10, 2024 03:05
In a "negotiation" both sides need to have something to bargain with. This is not the case in your situation. Insisting more forcefully that you get what you want is not a "negotiation". Also, your reasoning appears to be "the professor has many grants, and therefore he must be lying about not being able to hire me", but that reasoning is simply wrong due to your lack of understanding of how funding works in academia.
 

 Discussion on question by Klaus Kiene…

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Adam Přenosil
Oct 8, 2024 19:37
Is it possible for your friend to find an ally among the faculty ranks (such as one of their former instructors) who (i) understands that "AI detection" services are nowhere near the level where they can reliably tell human-generated from AI-generated text, and who (ii) is willing to talk to the supervisor about this?
 

 Discussion on answer by Mikhail Katz:…

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Adam Přenosil
Sep 23, 2024 20:17
Given two equally complicated arguments where one involves the AC and the other one doesn't, plenty of mathematicians will prefer the latter. However, given a simple, natural argument involving the AC and a convoluted one without the AC, I am confident that the vast majority of mathematicians will prefer the first. For example, if a mathematician needs to "divide by three", they will not feel the need to refer to the "division by three" paper by Doyle & Conway or the original paper of Tarski.
 

 Discussion on question by zzmondo1: W…

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Adam Přenosil
Jun 25, 2024 00:49
You may disagree with this, but I don't find this reception confusing at all. "What could I take away from this?" That maybe it's time to learn how to live your own life, even if that means not succeeding as a psychologist or whatever. Overall it sounds like your parents' decision to "help" you by putting you into a situation where you have to rely on non-stop hand-holding and external assistance to even be able to keep up with others has been absolutely terrible and detrimental to your growth as a person. (Just my five cents as a random internet person who does not actually know you.)
Adam Přenosil
Jun 25, 2024 00:49
They are saying that lots of people who do not thrive academically could if you threw a sufficient amount of resources at them. You have (apparently) had a lot of resources thrown at you and people are saying that if others (e.g. from not so well-off backgrounds) were afforded a fraction of these resources, they could also thrive. So they feel that this is unfair and maybe not a great use of society's resources, and that if you need non-stop hand-holding from a life coach etc. to get into grad school and stay in grad school, then it's doubtful whether grad school is the place for you.
 

 Discussion on question by Tho Re: How…

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Adam Přenosil
May 28, 2024 18:26
Your real complaints seems to be that you would like them to spend more of their time helping you. Fair enough, but what does that have to do with whether they are conducting "private businesss" or not? The only way that your complaint makes sense is if we asume that if the student were not conducting "private business", they would instead spend this time on helping you. That seems like a highly speculative and probably false premise to me. If you want them to help you with XYZ, just ask them to help you with XYZ instead of ruminating over their "private business".
 

 Discussion on question by mto_19: Suc…

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Adam Přenosil
Apr 20, 2024 17:33
"The papers you suggest us to cite are not related to our work, which raises the suspicion that you are trying to unethically promote your own papers." Less is more. What exactly are you hoping to achieve by explicitly accusing the referee of "unethically promoting their own papers"? If they are, surely the editor is able to form the same suspicion on the basis of the first part of this sentence. In case you are right, you are not adding any information that the editor is not aware of. And in case you are wrong, you will look silly.
 

 Discussion on question by Hydrazin: H…

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Adam Přenosil
Apr 1, 2024 16:31
"I thought of make them attend for every single seminar in the future and of cutting support for conferences and other goodies." This sounds like a sure-fire way to poison the atmosphere between you and your students (and to possibly look very petty to your colleagues).
 

 Discussion on question by user366312:…

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Adam Přenosil
Mar 29, 2024 15:36
"Everyone around me are publishing in open access journals" Well, then ask them what procedure they go through when they need to ask for funds for open access. No-one here can tell you what the precise procedure is at an unknown university in an unknown part of the world.
Adam Přenosil
Mar 29, 2024 15:36
What expenses? Are you talking about open access fees or something else? Generally one does not incur any expenses in the publication process unless you actively opt for open access during the publication process. I don't know how things work where you're at, but in my experience generally expenses are covered by some grant or another, or possibly by departmental funds.
 

 Discussion on question by LyndaElaine…

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Adam Přenosil
Mar 15, 2024 21:02
@vsz It's clear that what the OP means is that no verbatim quotations are allowed, not that the students are not allowed to cite any literature.
Adam Přenosil
Mar 15, 2024 21:02
I see some votes to close this question. I urge people not to vote to close this question. It is disturbing that someone who does not at a very fundamental level understand what plagiarism is is teaching a class on how to write a scientific paper and enforcing this misunderstanding with potentially serious consequences for their students, but it's also commendable that they reached out for a second opinion, and the more answers this questions gathers, the more likely it is that the OP might change their mind and that their students won't have to face baseless accusations of plagiarism.
 

 Discussion on question by Ooker: Rese…

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Adam Přenosil
Mar 2, 2024 03:32
Honestly, it seems like your main complaint from the pov of the reader is simply "I like reading papers on my phone and it annoys me that pdf files don't easily fit into my phone's screen", to which the obvious answer is to read papers on a larger screen, such as a tablet or a computer. "Which part I'm missing here?" My best guess is that the part you are missing is that although a lot of people in general probably access internet content in general primarily through their phones, most researchers probably don't read scientific papers primarily on their phones.
Adam Přenosil
Mar 2, 2024 03:32
And what exactly makes you think that LaTeX is not "the right tool for communicating via screens"? Here is a random example of a paper that you can read both in HTML format and in pdf format (click the blue "View PDF" button): sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021869323000959 Please tell us how exactly the HTML format is better for reading than the pdf format in this case (or in any other particular case of your choosing where the paper is available in both formats). I for one find the pdf version much easier to read, and I read pretty much exclusively on screens.
 

 Discussion on question by ilctf: Leav…

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Adam Přenosil
Jan 4, 2024 08:18
@BryanKrause It's this post: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/203389/… I suppose there is a slight difference in that in the previous post the OP talks about papers that have already been published.
 

 Discussion on question by strawberryc…

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Adam Přenosil
Dec 9, 2023 03:39
There appears to be a communication mistake on her end and a failure to exercise elementary common sense on your end (i.e. deducing that "clearly what must have happened is that I received a mass email sent to the whole class which should not have included me as a recipient, rather than my instructor deciding to cancel my accommodation during the course of the exam without so much as a word of explanation"). No-one here can tell you how these two factors might be weighted against each other by the instructor or by the office in charge of accommodations.
Adam Přenosil
Dec 9, 2023 03:39
It is reasonable for the instructor to shift the responsibility for correctly computing the appropriate end time to your side (provided that they tell you how to compute your extra time!) and it's on you to ask if this is unclear. They may have a number of students with different accommodations, and trying to correctly computer everyone's end time might easily result in mistakes. If the information that "she would give me 75 minutes on multiple choice, and 165 minutes on the written part" was given to you beforehand and you didn't ask for clarification, then I don't think you have a case.
Adam Přenosil
Dec 9, 2023 03:39
This reads like a series of communication failures on both of your parts. For example; 'My midterm started at 6:30 pm, but she only increased my multiple choice time from 6:30-7:15 pm to 6:30-7:45 pm, and kept my end exam time at 8:45 pm. That meant my written portion was decreased by 30 minutes" This is such an implausible arrangement that is almost certainly not what the instructor meant. Overall, "I wasn't sure what they meant" is not a good excuse unless you have actually asked for clarification and did not receive one. In that case the responsibility shifts more to their side.
 

 Discussion on answer by Ben: Pronouns…

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Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 19:14
(And with that I will leave the chat. Thanks for the discussion!)
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 19:13
@Wrzlprmft As a final point, I should add that the idea that what defines a woman is <a non-specific cluster of properties typical of women> seems to me to be very much at odds with the idea of gender self-determination. In particular, it implies that if a person identifying as a woman does not have enough of the properties stereotypically associated with women, then they're not a woman, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. This does not seem to be a position you wish to endorse.
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 18:42
* if ultimately your strategy ... relies on ...
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 18:40
In any case, if ultimately your strategy for avoiding the charge that your idea of gender involves endorsing sexism by relying a general assertion that for cluster social properties necessarily the criteria for telling that something an X in a everyday situation coincide with the criteria for being an X, that's good enough for me as an outcome of our discussion. I don't want to get into philosophy, but hopefully it's clear that this is something reasonable people can disagree with.
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 18:39
In any case, we could throw around some examples and I guess we would disagree with each other's interpretation of those examples (for example, I tell whether someone is a policeman or not by whether or not they have the appropriate uniform and I don't think the uniform is part of the cluster of properties that define a policeman, but I suspect that you would disagree with this last assertion).
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 18:33
@Wrzlprmft Sure, but being a cluster property or not is independent of the fact that criteria that I use to tell whether something is an X and criteria that actually define an X can be quite different. I really don't see why the two should coincide for cluster properties.
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 18:23
For clarity: instead of "you are a woman because of your dress and hair" imagine I said "what makes you a woman, as opposed to something else, is your dress and hair".
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 18:20
For example, I use ordinary, everyday criteria for deciding whether a liquid is water or something else. That does not mean that the definition of water is stated in terms of these criteria instead of in terms of H2O.
Adam Přenosil
Dec 6, 2023 18:19
I understand ontological categories need to ultimately be defined in terms of things we can know and observe, but the relation between the two is not the straightforward one that "what we use in everyday situations to conclude that something is an X" is the definition of X.