/sci/ - Science & Math

Standards are low everywhere. This is because no prefessor has time to do thorough reviews. Most of them give these to PhD students or if lucky postdocs, who don't have any time either.
If you look at their papers they are masters of making bullshit sound deep and at first glance it seems they did indeed do their research. It wasn't easy at all finding someone able to dismantle their constructions.

tl;dr: peer review is fucked, yes.

>>10486634
>It wasn't easy at all finding someone able to dismantle their constructions.
honestly i've read through their email threads, and i can't really find anyone who dissected their actual work (i.e. on quantum groups and stuff) to show how it was nonsense; rather it seems to me that the verdict in favor of concluding they're bullshitting was based on pointing out some blatant physical misconceptions they have. nobody i've seen has found a legitimate error or fallacy in their group theory junk, afaict. let me know if i missed something.

i think that's why Lubos thinks (or at least thought) he could try to support them, right? he argued they did some sort of valuable work. and admittedly i don't know quantum groups well enough to argue against Lubos (even though i hate that douche)

and yes, i agree, peer review needs to be fixed. the publishers should pay more (i.e. at all) to their reviewers and also pay some meta-reviewers to oversee peer reviews. they make more than enough money to do that, but don't, which is just ridiculous

>>10486580
>do you think they got their PhD's because of a lower standard in Europe vs. the US?
No, that's because they were extremely rich and self-funded it for 7 years.
4 years is the standard in the UK, and 3 years is the standard in France.

Then, their adviser died and they found a new one which didn't care about it, at all.
And after that, they published 4 papers in big (American) reviews.
The Jury learnt about the details of the thesis less than a month before it actually was organised, and the actual defence didn't even happen at the place it was suppose to take place.
One guy (physics) got his phD with the lowest possible mention ("Honourable", which means a very average work), the other (math) had instructions to remove a good chunk of thesis (deemed "too speculative") and to rewrite the other half. It is unknown whether he did it or not. I know that at least one of them got denied on their first defence. Which is something that never happens in scientific thesis ; you're only ever allowed to defend if your adviser is sure that you'll pass.
Finally, a report was done to void their title and to investigate the deffencies that led to their thesis being accepted. The scientific content of both was judged "mediocre or non-existent, hidden behind useless jargon", with the math guy having "one chapter which could have the level of a very rough, disorganised, and unclear, graduate memoir."

>Random hucksters can get PHDs they didn't earn
>Can't even get a master's in my field even though I've run my own programs and have several published articles
Feels great, let me tell you

>>10486580
FUCK the faggots criticising my Bogdaniggas. They worked too hard on that shit to deserve autists who haven't even read it talking shit.