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What problem are you trying solve? As bad as problems as the academic community has (it has lots!!), names on papers is not one of them. Science is the organic

What problem are you trying solve? As bad as problems as the academic community has (it has lots!!), names on papers is not one of them. Science is the organic collection of all people and resources and knowledge engaged in figuring out how our world works. Having blind papers would mean I would just have to spend an extra 10 minutes reading each paper to figure out what group wrote it. The fact that Prof. Ivy League gets her results recognized more easily then Prof. Nowhereville is, actually, an ok system. Because Prof. Ivy is more likely to be pursuing interesting problems to the rest of the scientific community, she's more likely to be trusted by other scientists to be a good scientist (i.e. not careless), and the system supports people who have "made it" through the academic gauntlet. If Prof. Nowhereville actually finds something interesting, pursues publication, passes peer review, and it gets published then great. His results are probably worth the attention of the scientific community. But the fact that the barriers are higher is ok, because he hasn't proven himself to be as trustworthy.

jessriedel 11y ago
> What problem are you trying solve? I think this is ultimately a manifestation of "scientific deontology ethics", a fantasy that we should approach each paper with identical, non-prejudicial priors and evaluate it on its own merits. (It is the scientific analog to the reductio ad absurdum of maximum non-prejudice in human affairs, where one never considers any background about a person before dealing with them.) This position only seem tenable to those who haven't yet had to wade through the morass of terrible and misleading result in the literature. In other words, this sort of idea is not a consequentialist attempt to solve a problem, it's a deotological attempt to stop unfairness.
- jeffbr13 11y ago
  Every new scientist having to learn the heuristics to judge a high-quality paper from its metadata seems like a local maxima in fighting spam, and something that makes the profession harder to get into. The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions, which seems like a better way to filter poor-quality human-written content (we're not talking about email spam here). Plus, by making the process explicit and visible, it'd be easier for an outsider to engage with new scientific literature too. Perhaps that's an approach we could use in software development. It's mostly how I use HN or Reddit -- I read plenty of comments, and only ever look at the name if the comment provokes interest in the writer's background.
  - jessriedel 11y ago
    > The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions I think you've got it backwards. First make the good tools, then stop using the bad ones. You don't force people to develop good Bayesian spam filters by banning whitelists. Rather, the Bayesian spam filters get invented, then people are happy to stop using whitelists. Likewise, scientists would love nothing more than to have the tools that enable a transparent frictionless utopia free to barriers to entry. They'd get access to a few new ideas caught in the spam filter! But we don't get there by anonymizing papers. That would just lead (almost instantly!) to good scientists whispering in the ears of their colleagues about which papers they just published, or to take a look at that new paper by so-and-so, etc. (And then the only people who could access the metadata would be those who are already at good institutions!)
  - afarrell 11y ago
    > The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions Firing people to either develop tools or have a terrible situation on their hands doesn't necessarily mean they would develop those tools. If you push someone into water, it forces them to either swim or drown, but it doesn't necessarily imply that they swim.
Wingman4l7 11y ago
Prof. Ivy League likely has better resources than Prof. Nowheresville, too.
- micwawa 11y ago
  Someone should pen an essay explaining why Resource Inequality is actually a good thing in Academia.

jessriedel 11y ago

> What problem are you trying solve? I think this is ultimately a manifestation of "scientific deontology ethics", a fantasy that we should approach each paper with identical, non-prejudicial priors and evaluate it on its own merits. (It is the scientific analog to the reductio ad absurdum of maximum non-prejudice in human affairs, where one never considers any background about a person before dealing with them.) This position only seem tenable to those who haven't yet had to wade through the morass of terrible and misleading result in the literature. In other words, this sort of idea is not a consequentialist attempt to solve a problem, it's a deotological attempt to stop unfairness.

jeffbr13 11y ago
Every new scientist having to learn the heuristics to judge a high-quality paper from its metadata seems like a local maxima in fighting spam, and something that makes the profession harder to get into. The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions, which seems like a better way to filter poor-quality human-written content (we're not talking about email spam here). Plus, by making the process explicit and visible, it'd be easier for an outsider to engage with new scientific literature too. Perhaps that's an approach we could use in software development. It's mostly how I use HN or Reddit -- I read plenty of comments, and only ever look at the name if the comment provokes interest in the writer's background.
- jessriedel 11y ago
  > The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions I think you've got it backwards. First make the good tools, then stop using the bad ones. You don't force people to develop good Bayesian spam filters by banning whitelists. Rather, the Bayesian spam filters get invented, then people are happy to stop using whitelists. Likewise, scientists would love nothing more than to have the tools that enable a transparent frictionless utopia free to barriers to entry. They'd get access to a few new ideas caught in the spam filter! But we don't get there by anonymizing papers. That would just lead (almost instantly!) to good scientists whispering in the ears of their colleagues about which papers they just published, or to take a look at that new paper by so-and-so, etc. (And then the only people who could access the metadata would be those who are already at good institutions!)
- afarrell 11y ago
  > The community would be forced to develop tools and documentation to judge new papers based on actual content and aggregated opinions Firing people to either develop tools or have a terrible situation on their hands doesn't necessarily mean they would develop those tools. If you push someone into water, it forces them to either swim or drown, but it doesn't necessarily imply that they swim.

Wingman4l7 11y ago

Prof. Ivy League likely has better resources than Prof. Nowheresville, too.

micwawa 11y ago
Someone should pen an essay explaining why Resource Inequality is actually a good thing in Academia.