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setgree · 2024-03-04 · Original thread
Prior: most published research is false [0].

If a paper is being forgotten by the internet, that's a weak signal that it was not valued by its field. If you combine that weak signal with the strong prior, you'd conclude that the paper wasn't a meaningful contribution and can be safely forgotten.

I can see why this mass forgetting is a problem for preservationists and historians of science.

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

[1] e.g. Gordon Allport's "The Nature of Prejudice" was published 1954, has been cited >50,000 times, and is still in print: https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Prejudice-25th-Anniversary/dp/...

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