Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

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> You made a claim in #1 about the likelihood of people calling police when they think police won’t do anything about it. That claim sounds plausible but is it correct? Do know of studies on this?

There's a number of studies, some of them contradictory (perhaps because they're looking at different populations of people). Hagan et al[1] found that in urban African-American communities, cynicism towards police and the legal system was a major factor in whether or not someone called the police after being a victim of a crime (in a way that is actually a bit counterintuitive to me).

Anyways, I owe the authors an apology. I took another look at the paper and noticed that they (sort of) addressed the issue of under-reporting, as was mentioned in the article.

Tautologically, they point out that underreporting of the crime rate doesn't impact the accuracy of statistics showing that the number of reported crimes went down. However they do admit that this makes it harder to make a causal link.

> Maybe these things aren’t addressed because it’s obvious to them that these aren’t valid objections and it’s obvious to their target audience.

That's an interesting point, and I suppose it's hard to say without being an expert. OTOH, from talking to people I know who have left academia[2], the 'publish or perish' mentality makes it easier to put blinders on when faced with something that's inconvenient.

[1]: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1722210115

[2]: Admittedly this is going to be a biased sample

"The 'publish or perish' mentality makes it easier to put blinders on when faced with something that's inconvenient."

I'd like to provide a competing take on this.

In my experience, it's the job of the peer reviewers to force the authors to test alternative hypotheses, especially if it's something obvious or inconvenient. I once published a methods paper, where the reviewers got aggrieved I didn't mention a complementary, but mostly unrelated, method in my discussion. At first I was annoyed, because it was OBVIOUS to me that their objection was flippant.

However, once I thought about it, I realized that the reviewer was probably representative of the audience that's going to read my paper. Their criticism while tiresome was entirely valid. So I sat down and spent a week coding a series of experiments that showed how the two methods (mine, and theirs) were different and how they could complement each other. That translated into a paragraph in the discussion section and a couple of supplementary figures, and overall a better paper.

So to go back to the original point of the GP ("maybe things got left out because they are obvious"):

Obvious things, unless it's something really trivial, are only obvious to the authors of the paper. If you expect an educated reader to raise an obvious/natural objection, you should really address it in your text head on. And if you don't, then hopefully the peer review will catch it.

PS

This is not meant to be a commentary on the paper linked in this thread. I have not read it, and have no opinion on it. I just wanted to opine on the general topic of peer review and whether "obvious" things should go into an academic paper.

Pertaining to your last paragraph. I very much agree with what you wrote. I think a better way to state my point is this. I try to read academic papers with skepticism and when I think of an obvious potential objection I think it highly likely the authors are aware of this and didn’t address it because their knowledge of topic is such that they know it’s not really an objection. I then try to find out whether or not my potential objection really is valid or invalid. I assume the latter when I don’t have more information or the time to delve deeper into the topic.

Thanks for the link to the study.

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