Related papers: On merit and equity in math
As David Berlinski writes (1997), the existence and nature of mathematics is a more compelling and far deeper problem than any of the problems raised by mathematics itself. Here we analyze the essence of mathematics making the main emphasis…
In this article we provide a rebuttal against the possible perception that a single number, such as the Likelihood Ratio, can provide an objective, authoritative or definitive weight of evidence. We also illustrate the extent to which…
Deep metric learning papers from the past four years have consistently claimed great advances in accuracy, often more than doubling the performance of decade-old methods. In this paper, we take a closer look at the field to see if this is…
In 2016, a Wisconsin court struck down the state assembly map due to unconstitutional gerrymandering. If this ruling is upheld by the Supreme Court's pending 2018 decision, it will be the fist successful political gerrymandering case in the…
We examine the role of trustworthiness and trust in statistical inference, arguing that it is the extent of trustworthiness in inferential statistical tools which enables trust in the conclusions. Certain tools, such as the p-value and…
Scientific publishing systematically filters out negative results. We argue that this long-standing asymmetry has become an urgent problem in the era of large language models, which inherit the positive bias of the literature they are…
Putnam and Finkelstein can be read as providing an answer to Kripke's skeptical argument by appealing to the way mathematics is commonly pursued. Nowadays, the debate surrounding pluralism has questioned the postulation of a unique way of…
Statistics is running the risk of appearing irrelevant to today's undergraduate students. Today's undergraduate students are familiar with data science projects and they judge statistics against what they have seen. Statistics, especially…
The evolution of mathematics is shaped importantly by interestingness: researchers choose which problems to pursue, and students choose which problems to engage with, based on expectations of interest and challenge. As AI systems,…
Scientific fact-checking aims to determine the veracity of scientific claims by retrieving and analysing evidence from research literature. The problem is inherently more complex than general fact-checking since it must accommodate the…
First, for decades the use of anonymity in reviews for science funding proposals and for evaluating manuscripts for publication has been gradually corrupting American science, encouraging and rewarding the dark elements of human nature.…
The recognition of academic excellence is fundamental to the scientific and academic endeavor. However, the term "academic excellence" is often interpreted in different ways, typically, using popular scientometrics such as the H-index,…
A few remarks on how mathematics quests for freedom.
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning can hinder them…
Contemporary approaches to assisted scientific discovery use language models to automatically generate large numbers of potential hypothesis to test, while also automatically generating code-based experiments to test those hypotheses. While…
In recent years, random matrices have come to play a major role in computational mathematics, but most of the classical areas of random matrix theory remain the province of experts. Over the last decade, with the advent of matrix…
Progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence has spurred the widespread adoption of automated decision systems (ADS). An extensive literature explores what conditions must be met for these systems' decisions to be fair. However,…
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals ('journal rank') that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has…
Researchers in NLP often frame and discuss research results in ways that serve to deemphasize the field's successes, often in response to the field's widespread hype. Though well-meaning, this has yielded many misleading or false claims…
This paper is one of a series in which elementary-education practice is analyzed by comparison with the history of mathematics, mathematical structure, modern practice, and (occasionally) cognitive neuroscience. The primary concerns are:…