I am guilty of citing sources I don’t believe in, particularly in machine learning. There’s a common pattern where most papers are low quality, and no can/will investigate the validity of other people’s papers or write review papers, so you usually form beliefs by an ensemble of lots of individually unreliable papers and your own experience. Then you’re often asked for a citation and you’re like “there’s nothing public i believe in, but i guess i’ll google papers claiming the thing i’m claiming and put those in”. I think many ML people have ~given up on citing papers they believe in, including me.
I am guilty of citing sources I don’t believe in, particularly in machine learning. There’s a common pattern where most papers are low quality, and no can/will investigate the validity of other people’s papers or write review papers, so you usually form beliefs by an ensemble of lots of individually unreliable papers and your own experience. Then you’re often asked for a citation and you’re like “there’s nothing public i believe in, but i guess i’ll google papers claiming the thing i’m claiming and put those in”. I think many ML people have ~given up on citing papers they believe in, including me.
Do you have any guesses for how that’s affecting progress in ML?