Add more detail to the simulation description #25
Description
In response to: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.02188v3.pdf, R1 writes:
I went through the paper, and I still don't understand what the model of diffusion is. The parameters are wildly under-discussed. In a typical diffusion paper, you state that this is how X diffuses to Y based on the following parameters. Here the explanation is extremely vague.
From a more big picture fashion, the paper seems to claim that diffusion of idea X depends on diffusion of idea Y through the population of susceptibles and the network of knowledge. This sounds like a cool idea, but the PNAS-level version of this paper would:
(1) state the model cleanly, in math form,
(2) use a parameter \eta to capture the "level of interdependence" where \eta = 0 means fully independent and increasing \eta increases interdependence,
(3) state a clear research question "I wanna explore effect of \eta on polarization" for instance,
(4) Clearly state the message of the paper in abstract, intro, and so on, and why this finding is important.
Whether steps 1-4 would lead to a PNAS paper, of course, depends on the model, results, message, and significance. But at this point the paper is just impossible to follow, and none of those steps are executed well, so my recommendation is to reject the paper.
Man, this stuff is hard to communicate. You can't please everybody's tastes. I believe that the model is presented cleanly, the pseudocode should be sufficient to replicate. What does "in math form" even mean? The model is as simple as it can be to demonstrate the effect. It may look different than your standard diffusion paper, but that's because it does something differently...
Number 2 is what I hav done, just with two levels of "\eta", because that is sufficient to demonstrate that "\eta" has an effect in a context where the prior assumption was that it didn't. This was a conscious choice. early versions of the paper did vary the levels of interdependence - and it was even more confusing. I could say that this is a completely unstudied