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Surely the act of people reading it is peer review? Unless you assume that nobody on Hacker News is qualified to read scientific papers, which seems like a stre

Surely the act of people reading it is peer review? Unless you assume that nobody on Hacker News is qualified to read scientific papers, which seems like a stretch.

jonathankoren 10y ago
No. Peer review is more than that. It's a vetting process. 90% if everything is crap, and so if you don't vet it, you'll get 90% crap. Also, by conflating a forum full of lay people with experts in a specific field is a bit absurd. Simply put, not everyone's opinion should be given equal weight.
deleted 10y ago
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argonaut 10y ago
For any given arxiv article, I'd wager 98% of people on HN are unqualified to critically review the article. They're not aware of prior work that might contradict the article. They're not aware of the limitations of prior work that the article cites. They've never tried the experimental or theoretical methods the article uses, and so on. Yet these are the people upvoting and commenting on implications.
- sievebrain 10y ago
  98% sounds like a made up stat, so if you grant me the same privilege then let's say HN has 1 million readers. So 2% of that would be 20,000 people qualified to judge the article, which is plenty of people.
  - argonaut 10y ago
    1) HN has 300k daily uniques (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581). Of those readers, nearly all do not comment (we don't have 300k comments, do we?). Of those commentors, only a fraction comment on a given article. 2) Of those commenters, most are not actual researchers, who are, IMO, much, much busier with real work (you know... research) than your average HN commenter.
    - sievebrain 10y ago
      Of course most don't comment, but commenting is not required for a paper to be peer reviewed, only reviewing it is. If someone were to see the paper here, and review it, and find an error, presumably they would contact the author. 300k * 0.02 = 6000 people who may be qualified. How many people are typically asked to peer review a paper? A handful? The odds are still good.
      - argonaut 10y ago
        The original poster was talking about what would be better for the HN community. The HN community is a discussion forum, not a system of people privately emailing.

Surely the act of people reading it is peer review? Unless you assume that nobody on Hacker News is qualified to read scientific papers, which seems like a stretch.

jonathankoren 10y ago

No. Peer review is more than that. It's a vetting process. 90% if everything is crap, and so if you don't vet it, you'll get 90% crap. Also, by conflating a forum full of lay people with experts in a specific field is a bit absurd. Simply put, not everyone's opinion should be given equal weight.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

argonaut 10y ago

For any given arxiv article, I'd wager 98% of people on HN are unqualified to critically review the article. They're not aware of prior work that might contradict the article. They're not aware of the limitations of prior work that the article cites. They've never tried the experimental or theoretical methods the article uses, and so on. Yet these are the people upvoting and commenting on implications.

sievebrain 10y ago
98% sounds like a made up stat, so if you grant me the same privilege then let's say HN has 1 million readers. So 2% of that would be 20,000 people qualified to judge the article, which is plenty of people.
- argonaut 10y ago
  1) HN has 300k daily uniques (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581). Of those readers, nearly all do not comment (we don't have 300k comments, do we?). Of those commentors, only a fraction comment on a given article. 2) Of those commenters, most are not actual researchers, who are, IMO, much, much busier with real work (you know... research) than your average HN commenter.
  - sievebrain 10y ago
    Of course most don't comment, but commenting is not required for a paper to be peer reviewed, only reviewing it is. If someone were to see the paper here, and review it, and find an error, presumably they would contact the author. 300k * 0.02 = 6000 people who may be qualified. How many people are typically asked to peer review a paper? A handful? The odds are still good.
    - argonaut 10y ago
      The original poster was talking about what would be better for the HN community. The HN community is a discussion forum, not a system of people privately emailing.