Talk:spurious

RFV discussion: October–November 2019

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spurious

1. False, not authentic, not genuine.

   His argument was spurious and had no validity.

2. Extraneous; stray; not relevant or wanted.

   I tried to concentrate on the matter in hand, but spurious thoughts kept intruding.

   Spurious emissions from the wireless mast were causing nearby electrical equipment to go haywire.

3. (physics) Resulting from a random process that gives the impression of a real relationship

RFV sense 3. Need evidence that this sense exists, is physics-specific, and is clearly distinct from senses 1 and 2. Mihia (talk) 18:32, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Probably isn't: I've seen e.g. "spurious null pointers" regarding programming, which could be spun into a supposed computing sense but is really just the normal broad sense. Equinox ◑ 20:03, 4 October 2019 (UTC)

See also Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/September#spurious. If anything, the label ought to say “(statistics)” (see Spurious relationship) or more generally “(sciences)”. In most cases, the use in publications in physics goes directly back to the statistical usage, due to the role of hypothesis testing in the scientific method. In the term spurious emission it has a different meaning though, our sense 2: “unwanted”, and there are probably other examples of use in a scientific or technological context in which it has that meaning. In the originally statistical sense I think it also does not have a technical meaning but simply means “false, not genuine”, as in false positive. Conclusion: this is not truly a separate sense, but the common meaning applied in a specific context. We could add a usage example with (e.g.) “spurious correlation” to sense 1 and “spurious emission” to sense 2.  --Lambiam 10:24, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

“spurious *”, in OneLook Dictionary Search. shows that there are about 30 collocations involving spurious that some dictionary, glossary (ie, lemming), or other reference (eg, WP) included in OneLook's coverage have chosen to include. Many are medical, some anatomical, some from computing, etc. It might be a good exercise to determine whether we have definitions for all of these at spurious that are appropriate and then to consider whether normal human beings would find the connection between our 'appropriate' definition and the collocation to be sufficient for them to decipher the collocation. DCDuring (talk) 18:17, 5 October 2019 (UTC)

RFV-failed Kiwima (talk) 23:43, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

"memes with spurious origins"

"Do we have a responsibility to purge our cultural vocabulary of memes with spurious origins, or does that just lead to the elimination of, well, all internet culture?" [1]
I would class this terrifying usage in the same category with the one I discuss at Talk:refute. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:08, 2 September 2022 (UTC)