4 ms·

Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News. We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subje

Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News. We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had. We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.

chaosite 8y ago
Or, maybe not. An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system. All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to articles) isn't very good at that.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the reviewers: - "Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after all!" - "I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B. Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition." - "I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and therefore will never allow this paper to pass." - "I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my field as rubbish." - "This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit." - "I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement of this paper because..." Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's human politics all the way down.
  - chaosite 8y ago
    Of course it's human politics. Science is a human endeavor, and you can't remove human behavior from it. My argument is that a blog aggregator style system is a bad fit which doesn't meet the requirements we desire from a replacement of the current commercial publishing scheme.
tomlu 8y ago
You definitely do not want that. Vetted science should not go through a pipeline of what amounts to a low brow popularity contest. Hacker news might be somewhat better than reddit in this respect, but there's no way you want to subject it to that kind of process.
fifnir 8y ago
Upvote/downvote lists a horrible way to publish science. Simple silly example: big group publishes, everyone gets online and upvotes the post in the early stages so it floats to the top.
mschuetz 8y ago
Considering the popularity of homeopathy and other junk science, that's probably not a good idea.
gjm11 8y ago
Systems like HN and Reddit work (when they do, and to the extent that they do) mostly because they _don't matter_. If you tried to use them for things that people care more intensely about, like determining what gets to be part of The Academic Literature, then they would instantly become the subject of concerted efforts at manipulation. Even now, HN has to deal with voting rings and the like; it would be much, much worse if people's careers were riding on it. It's Goodhart's law: as soon as a measure becomes a _target_ it rapidly stops being a good measure.

chaosite 8y ago

Or, maybe not. An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system. All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to articles) isn't very good at that.

vanderZwan 8y ago
> All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the reviewers: - "Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after all!" - "I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B. Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition." - "I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and therefore will never allow this paper to pass." - "I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my field as rubbish." - "This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit." - "I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement of this paper because..." Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's human politics all the way down.
- chaosite 8y ago
  Of course it's human politics. Science is a human endeavor, and you can't remove human behavior from it. My argument is that a blog aggregator style system is a bad fit which doesn't meet the requirements we desire from a replacement of the current commercial publishing scheme.

tomlu 8y ago

You definitely do not want that. Vetted science should not go through a pipeline of what amounts to a low brow popularity contest. Hacker news might be somewhat better than reddit in this respect, but there's no way you want to subject it to that kind of process.

fifnir 8y ago

Upvote/downvote lists a horrible way to publish science. Simple silly example: big group publishes, everyone gets online and upvotes the post in the early stages so it floats to the top.

mschuetz 8y ago

Considering the popularity of homeopathy and other junk science, that's probably not a good idea.

gjm11 8y ago

Systems like HN and Reddit work (when they do, and to the extent that they do) mostly because they _don't matter_. If you tried to use them for things that people care more intensely about, like determining what gets to be part of The Academic Literature, then they would instantly become the subject of concerted efforts at manipulation. Even now, HN has to deal with voting rings and the like; it would be much, much worse if people's careers were riding on it. It's Goodhart's law: as soon as a measure becomes a _target_ it rapidly stops being a good measure.