The worst part for me is that the two authors are Ph.D. candidates in MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) [1]. They aren't even tenure track faculty at the school and aren't really in a position to carry the name of the school on their shoulders. Yet from what it seems, it will be the school itself that will be hit with most of the public shaming burden (ex: the FB post's headline).
As a Princeton alum, I'm a bit saddened at the course of events :(
I am a current Princeton Ph.D. student in CS. Let me say that if one sees an article saying "Princeton study finds..." they are more likely to pay attention to it. Thus, unfortunately, we must also bare the brunt of bad press like this.
On the OTHER hand, this was a non-peer reviewed thought experiment by some MAE students outside their area. It would be akin to me turning in an assignment for a class and the media ran with it saying "Princeton study..."
Unfortunately, readers are going to read this rebuttal as an attack on Princeton, which it really isn't; if anything it's only funny because of how strong Princeton really is.
4500 undergrads, 1500 graduate students, and hundreds of faculty, and you think that every little paper they give or study they conduct is a product of the whole in a meaningful sense?
The study was practically just a thought experiment by two grad students looking at something outside of their expertise. It _only_ got any attention, because it was about Facebook, and so the media saw a chance to sell more ads. For the same reason, they used the metaphor of pars pro toto as a rhetorical ploy, because Princeton vs. Facebook sells more ads. Like many among the unthinking masses, you got punked by it.
The students also published it online before it was peer-reviewed. I think the grandparent is more referring to the typical corporate cop-out of "the actions of a few employees", even though the damage is done regardless of who did it--and the employees (or students) did it under the name of the organization.
They submitted their paper to a well known, well regarded preprint service (arXiv), which is pretty normal for a number of fields.
Then, presumably, the paper would go to peer review. Where one would hope the reviewers would point out a few glaring flaws (like that an SIR model without either the creation of new susceptibles or waning immunity must go to 0 and they are 'dooming themselves to success').
The paper would get rejected, or heavily revised, and the world would keep spinning.
They didn't actually do anything wrong. If you want to blame someone, blame an overexcited media that grabbed something off a preprint server and ran with it, knowing full well arXiv has no 'Is this right' quality checks, and isn't peer reviewed.
> The paper would get rejected, or heavily revised, and the world would keep spinning.
Which means they did something wrong. Sure it might have been just a mistake, not quite the cardinal sin the GP makes it out to be, but you don't have to publish papers with flawed arguments on ArXiv.
It's one thing to write up a silly LaTeX PDF with wild speculations, put it on your webpage, but you don't need to submit every brainfart to ArXiv either, or do you?
Beyond that, the paper isn't pants-on-head crazy. The objections most people have to it can be solved by adding a single term to one of the equations, and some very straightforward sensitivity analysis.
Which is, you know, exactly the kind of thing pointed out in peer review.
And it is standard for authors to list their university affiliations on papers whatever the quality of the paper regardless of whether it is a pre-print or not. Look at every other paper on arXiv, they all have affiliations, and there is a ton of crap on arXiv that will never pass pre-review.
These students didn't do anything wrong in putting the paper online here. Now if they did a PR to the media to promote their work and mis-portrayed it as peer reviewed or authoritative, that is a different matter. But putting a pre-print on arVix with proper affiliations is just standard procedure these days.
The bottom line is any paper made public will be examined and possibly turned into a story, so evidence and conclusions better be up to snuff or risk damaging one's and the institution's reputations.
The problem is with the media and the way things were spun. Correcting that should not involve stifling the workflows scientists use. The GitHub analogy is a good one as what you're suggesting is the equivalent of only pushing perfect code.
As a Princeton alum, I'm a bit saddened at the course of events :(
[1] http://www.princeton.edu/~spikelab/people.html