Seeing this reposted throughout the physics community concerning the "ethics of putting out a preprint outside our immediate area of expertise during a major public health crisis".
"THE BEST THING YOU CAN DO TO FIGHT COVID-19 IS NOTHING. STOP WRITING THAT PAPER. DON'T PUT IT ON THE ARXIV. u/VeryLittle 2020-03-31 "In recent days we've seen an influx in papers on the arxiv modeling the spread of COVID-19. Many of these are relatively simple papers clearly written by physicists using simple SIR models, some basic curve fitting, and even Ising models to model the spread of COVID-19. "I'm writing to ask you, from the bottom of my heart, to cut that **** out. "This is not an unexplained X-ray line from the galactic center. This is not the 750 GeV diphoton excess. This is not something where the first paper to correctly guess the peak number of COVID-19 cases on the arxiv gets a Nobel prize. People's lives are at stake and you're not helping. "At best, you make physicists look bad. Epidemiology, as a field, already exists. Any prediction from a physicist tinkering with equations pulled from Wikipedia is not going to be a better prediction than that of professional public health experts whose models are far more sophisticated and already validated. "At worst, people die. The remainder of the statement and the subsequent discussion is worth reading: [Some NSFW language] https://www.reddit.com/r/Physics/comments/frsd16/the_best_thing_you_can_do_to_fight_covid19_is/ -glen _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
