[yalue]

One of the most fun (?) parts of academia is the unique blend of frustration and satisfaction that results when a shoddy paper somehow clears peer review only to get eviscerated when it lands on the desk of an actual expert.

"the detailed exploration of irrelevancies" LOL, if that isn't a "time-tested" method for making a paper sound academic, I don't know what is.

[hannob]

It hasn't cleared peer review, it's a preprint (which is pretty common in cryptography, peer review usually happens when results are already old news).

[ramraj07]

This is not always the case. SA and Sabine, are the hyper rare outliers in this regard. Fields like biology have no such folks for variety of reasons (I’m counting out some celebrities involved in pointing out actual misconduct instead of sloppy work).

[biomcgary]

Biology has so many exceptions and idiosyncrasies compared to physics that being broadly competent is difficult.

Physics found the "zoo" of diverse particles to be inelegant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_zoo). In biology, actual zoos hold a small fraction of diversity at the organismal level. The diversity at the molecular level is insanely high and the vast majority of "rules" have exceptions. Even the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_bio...) is a bit messy, unless stated fairly carefully (e.g., https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24965874/).

[lofatdairy]

Who even are the big science communicators in for current research in bio? Nobody comes to mind, not even a non-professor.

[cscurmudgeon]

> the detailed exploration of irrelevancies

Also signals a bad reviewer who wanted their work cited. Not in this case though.