You know that I like reading a ruthless critique of others’ work — I like telling myself that by doing so I learn good practices (in reality, I suspect I’m just a case what we call in Hebrew שמחה לאיד — the joy of some else’s failure).
Anyhow, I’d like to share a set of posts by Lior Patcher in which he calls bullshit on several reputable people and concepts. Calling bullshit is easy. Doing so with arguments is not so. Lior Patcher worked hard to justify his opinion.
- The network nonsense of Albert-László Barabási. Albert-László Barabási is a renown network scientist. There’s a network model named after him. Some people claim that prof. Barabási will receive the Nobel prize one day.
- The network nonsense of Manolis Kellis. Published one day after “The “The network nonsense of Albert-László Barabási“, this post critiques another renown scientist. Again, with a lot of solid-sounding arguments.
- When average is not enough: part II. (“Where is part I?”, you may ask. Read the post to discover).
Unfortunately, I don’t publish academic papers. But if I do, I will definitely want prof. Patcher read it, and let the world know what he thinks about it. For good and for bad.
Speaking of calling bullshit. Believe it or not, University of Washington has a course with this exact title. The course is available online http://callingbullshit.org/ and is worth watching. I watched all the course’s videos during my last flight from Canada to Israel. The featured image of this post is a screenshot of this course’s homepage.
Boris Gorelik 
2 comments