“An anonymous tip”

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I and a couple others received the following bizarre email:

**’s research is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to expose more serious flaws, look at research by his co-authors – ** at ** and ** at **. I won’t be checking this disposable e-mail address again.

People send me tips all the time where they ask to maintain anonymity, and I do this. This one’s just strange with all the cloak-and-dagger stuff, also because the correspondent didn’t supply any details. If there’s a problem with some published work, you could point to the publication in question and say what the problems are, no?

I would not be surprised if **’s co-authors’ work has serious flaws; at this point I suppose that any readers with a decent internet connection should know to examine very carefully any published claims coming out of that subfield.

P.S. I redacted the names for obvious reasons. The funny thing is, at this point there are dozens of possibilities! Please don’t make any guesses in the comments, as this would add zero value and would just be rude. People make enough real mistakes that there’s no point in slamming them for flaws that have not yet been identified: that’s a form of statistical inference that we can already do in our heads.

8 thoughts on ““An anonymous tip”

  1. Almost sounds like a coworker who wants revenge or is jealous or something, and thinks we’re attack dogs to be unleashed at will. My guess is the sender doesn’t understand the current situation as to why people are paying attention to these issues.

    • In truth, “exposing flaws” is a boring activity. It is not something anyone should really “want to” do. Andrew is doing people a favor, but they think it is an attack he is performing to boost his ego/status. This is totally clueless; a functioning education system would filter out such thinking before grad school level.

  2. It’s like a mad lib:

    “Batman’s research is just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to expose more serious flaws, look at research by his co-authors – Max Headroom at Cloud City State and Jean-Luc Picard at the University of Arrakis. I won’t be checking this disposable e-mail address again.”

    Note: This isn’t intended to be a guess.

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