Top all-time · #1927
Alvaro de Menard
Personal blog · fantasticanachronism.comsciencehistoryculture
Alvaro de Menard writes Fantastic Anachronism, a personal blog at fantasticanachronism.com about science, history and culture. Since 2020, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 56 times, most often “What's wrong with social science and how to fix it”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (28) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alvaro de Menard's posts on the replication crisis, citation patterns and scientific misconduct, and his essays on the Homeric question and Milman Parry.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called a "good article", an "excellent summary" of the Homeric debate, and "fascinating" with a "beautiful" ending; one commenter said "all you need" and "also
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 28 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
AI, futurism, metascience, history, literature, philosophy, and whatever else I'm obsessed about at the moment. Click to read Fantastic Anachronism, by Alvaro de Menard, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- What's wrong with social science and how to fix it6 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2020-09-11
- Two Paths to the Future6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-03-24
- Are Experts Real?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-11
- Homeric Question: With No Predecessor to Imitate, No Successor Could Imitate Him2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-03-03
- /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-12-07
- Book Review: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-14
- /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-05-22
- How I Made $10k Predicting Which Studies Will Replicate2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-18
- What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It:Reflections After 2578 Papers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-12-12
- On the Pleb Filter (2023)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-11-05
What Hacker News says?
Good article. For more on this subject try: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/08/11/how-many-undetec... https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52199285-science-fiction...
Comment linking /2020/08/11/how-many-undetected-frauds-in-science/
on “I tried to report scientific misconduct. How did it go?”Submitted Are Experts Real? as a story · 187 points
HN discussionNegative citations are extremely rare. https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... "You might hypothesize that the citations of non-replicating papers are negative, but negative citations are extremely rare.5 One study puts the rate at 2.4%. Astonishingly, even after retraction the vast majority of citations are positive, and those positive citations continue for decades after retraction.6"
Comment linking /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
on “A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more”Submitted What's wrong with social science and how to fix it as a story · 142 points
HN discussionThe replication crisis is not being addressed. It's being discussed occasionally within the academy, but a cynic might wonder if that's because writing about the prevalence of bad papers is a way to write an interesting paper (and who is checking if papers about replication themselves replicate?). It's been discussed far longer and more extensively by the general public but those discussions aren't taken seriously b…
Comment linking /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
on “A new replication crisis: Research that is less likely to be true is cited more”Submitted Boswell’s Life of Johnson as a story · 112 points
HN discussionThere's an article that explores the metrics here: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/08/11/how-many-undetec... > 0.04% of papers are retracted. At least 1.9% of papers have duplicate images "suggestive of deliberate manipulation". About 2.5% of scientists admit to fraud, and they estimate that 10% of other scientists have committed fraud. 27% of postdocs said they were willing to select or omit data to improve t…
Comment linking /2020/08/11/how-many-undetected-frauds-in-science/
on “AI tools are spotting errors in research papers”Submitted Against Effective Altruism as a story · 79 points
HN discussionThis post actually suggests cloning John von Neumann as one of the options if we ever have adversarial AGI :) https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the...
Comment linking /2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/
on “The Unparalleled Genius of John von Neumann (2019)”Submitted Reading Notes on Braudel's “Civilization and Capitalism” as a story · 78 points
HN discussionReplication is overrated. There's no point in doing more of it. You'd just replicate a ton of bad science: https://blog.plan99.net/replication-studies-cant-fix-science... N.B. nobody needed to replicate this study. It only took basic sanity checks to spot that it was very unlikely to be true (and thus, very unlikely to replicate). And they went much further than needed. They could have stopped at "the claimed effect…
Comment linking /p/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it
on “Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination”Submitted Boswell's Life of Johnson as a story · 75 points
HN discussionI learnt a similar lesson about teachers early on at school and extended it to all classes of authorities through life. See also Are Experts Real?[1] [1]: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/11/are-experts-real...
Comment linking /2021/01/11/are-experts-real/
on “Overwork contributes to 745k premature deaths per year”Submitted How I Made $10k Predicting Which Studies Will Replicate as a story · 63 points
HN discussionI wasn't actually talking about the training, I was talking about the concept of unconscious bias. So, keep reading. The implicit association test is what it's all based on but it doesn't have any test/retest reliability. You can test someone and it'll tell you they're a raging racist without even knowing it, and if you test them again 10 minutes later it'll tell you the opposite. It's junk science which is why unco…
Comment linking /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
on “Sr Manager at Google Resigns After Dalit Activist Disallowed from Giving Lecture”Submitted Returns to Scale in Broken Windows as a story · 60 points
HN discussionYou'd expect that yes, but weirdly, you'd be wrong. Journal impact factor and likelihood of replication don't seem to correlate: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... Studies that don't replicate are cited at the same rate as those that do: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with... This year I've read a lot of epidemiology papers, and sometimes their peer reviews. Ther…
Comment linking /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
on “'Havana syndrome' likely caused by directed microwaves – US report”Submitted How to Be Good at Dating as a story · 58 points
HN discussion"I'm concerned I may be kind of overstating my case, but it's hard for me to know exactly how widespread the worst-case version of the problem is. Certainly what I'm describing can and does happen." You're absolutely on the ball, except that everything is ~100x worse and more hopeless than you're describing :( Far from overstating it, you're understating it. "If you have a record showing that a particular PI has pub…
Comment linking /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
on “Many researchers were not compliant with their published data sharing statement”Submitted Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects as a story · 43 points
HN discussionIt's not a contradiction: wanting a small state implies both wanting a low burden of regulation on the private sector specifically, and also wanting a great deal of care to be taken with how money is spent by the government. It isn't a general argument for allowing arbitrary levels of public sector fraud or waste, and it feels bad faith to conflate these two things as if one implies the other. Nobody in the history…
Comment linking /2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
on “NSF starts vetting all grants to comply with executive orders”Submitted On the Pleb Filter (2023) as a story · 35 points
HN discussionA score on a test doesn't imply enough for you to actually have things in common. (However, just being in a secret club might motivate you enough to find some things to talk about.) You can get the Mensa experience without joining by having a Quora account - their AI always picks the oddest topics to send to you. For the longest time it would send me all the "what's it like to have a high IQ?" questions and I notice…
Comment linking /2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/
on “High IQs are associated with mental and physical disorders”Submitted The Alchemist and His Quicksilver as a story · 21 points
HN discussionIt's the critical question. The time frame is critical for reasoning about alignment and what to do now. If you expect AGI to happen tomorrow, you throw up your hands in despair or exhilaration, if you expect it in a hundred years, you might also throw up your hands, but it's a different picture; a hundred years of development will see the development of new technologies transformative in their own right. This excel…
Comment linking /2021/03/23/two-paths-to-the-future/
on “Book Review: “A Thousand Brains” by Jeff Hawkins”Submitted What's wrong with Social Science and how to fix it as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlvaro de Menard wrote an excellent summary of the long debate surrounding the Who was Homer? question. In his article [1] de Menard describes how Parry’s hypothesis accounted for aspects of the Iliad and Odyssey that could not be explained cleanly by prior theories. [1]: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/01/17/having-had-no-pr... "Having Had No Predecessor to Imitate, He Had No Successor Capable of Imitating Hi…
Comment linking /2020/01/17/having-had-no-predecessor-to-imitate/
on “How Do We Know That Epic Poems Were Recited from Memory?”Submitted Book Review: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI like to use short metaphorically, outside of financial contexts. For example, the decision to own guns is short civilization, as others have put it. You may be interested in prediction markets for study replication, where you can a real (financial) short position against bad studies: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-p...
Comment linking /2021/11/18/how-i-made-10k-predicting-which-papers-will-replicate/
on “Persist or let it go: a study of entrepreneurial decision making”Submitted On the Pension Apocalypse as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
