3 ms·

But the real question is: how else would you do it? Having journals/conferences with things like double-blind peer-review processes in place to me is probably

But the real question is: how else would you do it? Having journals/conferences with things like double-blind peer-review processes in place to me is probably the only way to do this. How else would you filter all the noise? We don't have this in industry and it's a bit sad. I mean we do in the form of some blogs, conferences, etc. But in no way it compares to the system academia has. Have you ever tried publishing to an academic conference compared to an "industry conference"? All you need for most industry-conferences is an abstract, an idea, not even evidence of new sorts; actually you need reputation but that's a different issue. There are flaws in every system for sure and academia has their hands full of them especially since they have to deal with quite important things like medicine. But I find it funny that people complain about academia, and yet there's no other system that comes close to producing empirical truths.

aluren 8y ago
You're right, of course. I mostly complain because it feels cathartic to rant, but I am well aware that it's probably the same in the private sector, the government, etc. That's just human structures I guess. As for designing a better system that's more robust to these flaws, it is a hard problem. There are structural issues when trying to apply traditional scientific virtues to the real world (how do you reasonably ensure reproducibility with a ridiculously expensive experiment, or one spannig decades, or one involving cohorts of tens of thousands of people? How do you ensure peer review is honest and comprehensive when there are exactly three labs specialized in a subject, and they're all competitors? Or even collaborators?), even if you assumed that editorial bias (toward big names, against negative results, toward trendy subjects, etc.), dishonesty and nepotism didn't exist. Plus there's a wide system of power-wielding stakeholders with huge incentives to maintain the status quo: established big shots, publishers (cough cough Elsevier cough cough), and so on. So yeah, things are broken but we're all trudging along trying to enjoy what we do and make do with what we have. Who knows, things may even get fixed one day.

aluren 8y ago

You're right, of course. I mostly complain because it feels cathartic to rant, but I am well aware that it's probably the same in the private sector, the government, etc. That's just human structures I guess. As for designing a better system that's more robust to these flaws, it is a hard problem. There are structural issues when trying to apply traditional scientific virtues to the real world (how do you reasonably ensure reproducibility with a ridiculously expensive experiment, or one spannig decades, or one involving cohorts of tens of thousands of people? How do you ensure peer review is honest and comprehensive when there are exactly three labs specialized in a subject, and they're all competitors? Or even collaborators?), even if you assumed that editorial bias (toward big names, against negative results, toward trendy subjects, etc.), dishonesty and nepotism didn't exist. Plus there's a wide system of power-wielding stakeholders with huge incentives to maintain the status quo: established big shots, publishers (cough cough Elsevier cough cough), and so on. So yeah, things are broken but we're all trudging along trying to enjoy what we do and make do with what we have. Who knows, things may even get fixed one day.