When I read that sentence, I immediately thought it sounded like some people were being childish and defensive.
OTOH, a bunch of people got unsolicited error reports for already published papers, and I can understand being initially irritated. This was, by the admission of the statcheck authors, a way to get attention quickly.
My guess is it'll all settle down and people won't complain about bullying once everyone just uses statcheck like they do spell-check.
To answer your question though, I think feelings have everything to do with science. There are many reasons different people do science, and they all stem from emotions. Some people do science out of curiosity, to solve mysteries. Some do science as a means to an end, to gain knowledge required to further some other goal. Some do science to gain social standing & intellectual superiority. Some do science to help others understand how the world works. In all cases, the reasons people are doing science is because of a want, some kind of desire to achieve a goal. Nature and physics will continue to exist whether we explore it or not, we do so because we care, and caring is a feeling.
> unsolicited error reports for already published papers, and I can understand being initially irritated
Please don't see this as me attacking you, i am genuinely baffled by what you said and would like to understand your thinking.
How exactly could you possibly have any sort of understanding for that? How would you feel about a software author being irritated by unsolicited error reports? If that irritation is less acceptable than the one in your quote, where would lie the difference?
> How exactly could you possibly have any sort of understanding for that?
I'm also confused by your question, so I can relate to you. :) Despite your warning, the way you phrased that question does sound like an attack, it implies that you know my experience does not allow me to speak on this subject, which you do not know. Why is it hard to think that I can empathize? What do you think you know about me that makes it implausible for me to understand this situation?
I can and do relate to it because I'm a published paper author. I imagine that it would be irritating to me as easily as I imagine it would be irritating to others. For me personally, I don't think it would make me angry, but it would give me anxiety to cast doubt on a paper I'd already published, even if the report about inaccuracies are true. It would mean that I didn't do as good a job as I thought, which of course I want to know, but a published paper is part of a record that cannot change. I'm sure many paper authors, for better or worse, have the same reaction, that something that casts doubt on their publications after the fact would cause some degree of mental anguish. That doesn't mean we shouldn't search for the truth, it means only what I said, that I can understand the reaction.
Your analogy to software errors fails. (And I also have first-hand experience with this as the owner of a software business.) Software is an on-going work that can and should be improved to remove errors at all times, and errors that get fixed do not affect my personal reputation or career. Reports of software errors can also be irritating in their own way - I don't want to know my software is buggy - but they are always welcome. Published papers cannot be improved, they are fixed in the permanent record. There are some ways to recover from severe errors, but there are no ways to recover from minor errors, and public (academic) perception of the quality and level of the errors in a paper can change the way an author is viewed.
> it implies that you know my experience does not allow me to speak on this subject
Not in the least my intention. I could not understand how anyone, regardless of knowledge level, could empathize with the quote as stated.
From your response, it seems then that your quote wasn't meant in the way it seemed to me. It's not even the unsolicited nature of the report, but any error that causes irritation, and while possibly felt in the direction of the messenger, ultimately caused by the system being ... Well. Broken.
Yes having any error pointed out can be frustrating.
However, the unsolicited nature of it may play an important role in this case. In order to empathize with the feelings of people who might have been irritated it is helpful to understand the academic paper publishing process.
The authors all went through a stressful process of submitting their hard work to a journal and then being evaluated by a panel of "experts". Many of them had to make changes to their papers and resubmit them in order to get published.
There's a level of understanding and expectation about how this process works. The papers aren't normally open for public comment before publication, and they don't normally get public comment after publication. They're evaluated by people in the field, and presented at conferences, and then referenced in other papers if they're influential.
Having a unknown third party with brand new possibly buggy software cast public aspersions on a paper after the fact, at a time when nothing can be done about it, is simply not helpful to the authors and is not how reviews normally happen. It's very easy to see why authors wouldn't particularly like this, even if they would use statcheck in the future.
The only real problem here was statcheck's authors publishing all the results and making a great deal of noise about it. They didn't have to do that, it is an aggressive move that was not designed to help authors, it was designed for statcheck to get attention. We have no idea how big of a problem it is, this article might have been mostly muckraking, and statcheck might be great and well liked.
Anyway, I don't think the system is broken. It is currently working better than it has worked at any time in the past, and it is continuing to improve. Statcheck might improve it more, but that remains to be seen. Other software tools already have improved it.
In Mathematics, if you get an unsolicited error report and the report is accurate, your first reaction is "oh my god" as you assess the damage and how much revision needs to be done to correct the paper. Then the answer is "thank you! I didn't realize so many people even read my work so closely! I'll add a correction and thank you for your contribution in an update of the paper".
Yes! And I think this is true of most paper authors in most fields. It has been rare in my experience to see anyone end up angry or upset about getting a correction in the mail. The majority of people who publish know that errors occur all the time, and are glad to hear about it, more so if it happens early enough to do something about it.
I'd bet the majority of recipients of statcheck's automated correction, whatever their initial reaction, appreciate and end up wanting to use this kind of a tool before publishing their next paper.
It is worth mentioning there's a large stylistic difference between receiving an unsolicited error report directly from a reader & having a nice conversation about it, and being notified that an unsolicited error report has been published and attached to your paper automatically, without review, for all to see.
OTOH, a bunch of people got unsolicited error reports for already published papers, and I can understand being initially irritated. This was, by the admission of the statcheck authors, a way to get attention quickly.
My guess is it'll all settle down and people won't complain about bullying once everyone just uses statcheck like they do spell-check.
To answer your question though, I think feelings have everything to do with science. There are many reasons different people do science, and they all stem from emotions. Some people do science out of curiosity, to solve mysteries. Some do science as a means to an end, to gain knowledge required to further some other goal. Some do science to gain social standing & intellectual superiority. Some do science to help others understand how the world works. In all cases, the reasons people are doing science is because of a want, some kind of desire to achieve a goal. Nature and physics will continue to exist whether we explore it or not, we do so because we care, and caring is a feeling.