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“It’s too complicated to fix it” is a near cousin of “it’s too complicated for you to understand”, sometimes this assertions are true, but some other times are

“It’s too complicated to fix it” is a near cousin of “it’s too complicated for you to understand”, sometimes this assertions are true, but some other times are just driven by the person fear of change. In a chess move, when it has not a very obvious outcome, the ramifications are so numerous that only the keen eye of an expert with thousands of games on their back can predict how it is going to affect the game and ending. In fixing the academia publishing industry there currently exists 0 experts that can predict that so any random guy’s guess is as good as anyones

nemothekid 5y ago
>In fixing the academia publishing industry there currently exists 0 experts that can predict that so any random guy’s guess is as good as anyones I'm not sure how you can look at political discourse in the United States today and say "yep, let's just blow up academic gatekeepers". Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites. The value of academic journals today is trust and the internet has not solved that. Pretend if GP had been searching Google, rather than SciHub. There are millions in the US who have used Google to deduce that placing rocks around your house can cure your migraines all because an enterprising individual had gamed SEO. "It’s too complicated to fix it" is not what the parent poster was implying. If you take a second to breakdown the actual value that journals provide then one clear way it can become much worse is a model similar to the open web where anyone can publish anything with very loose standards for reproducibility or rigor.
- LadyCailin 5y ago
  > Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites. Ok, so you admit that the journals aren’t even able to accomplish what they purport to. So if this is already a problem, yet good research is inaccessible, what again is the point of the paywalled journals?
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    No? The journals did their job - the paper wasn't published. The broader internet (and largely a single celebrity) then became vector for a con-man to amplify his misinformation for profit. I'm using that as an example of something that could become commonplace if you blow up the journal system. Then every paper becomes "I feel this is right because blog-A which aligns to my beliefs says so". Institutional legitimacy is not something that is built overnight.
toofy 5y ago
I’m not sure where or how you inferred something akin to “No one should do anything.” from my comment, but it is absolutely not what I said and absolutely not what I implied.
- ehvatum 5y ago
  As botverse pointed out, you offer numerous apologies for the current state of affairs while issuing dire and vague warnings against modifying it. The approach taken by the machine learning community succeeded and incurred absolutely none of sky-is-falling shyte you moan about.
  - toofy 5y ago
    I think your reading of what I posted is both pulling things out of the context of what I actually said and a bad faith reading. Please dont pull things out of context when you’re trying to have a discussion, when you do this, it implies you’re not getting full comprehension of what was actually said. It’s not a herculean task to keep all points from a couple paragraphs in context. It’s not difficult. I make it very clear that academic publishing has issues. I state it plain as day, I even literally finish my comment with “And to be very clear…: > And to be very clear, there are very serious problems in the academic publishing world, no question. However, changing something without even an understanding of what could go wrong is a very serious mistake. As I said in my comment, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to change and improve things. But if one can’t even imagine what could go wrong, than this person either hasn’t though much about it, or they clearly do not understand the subject very well. If something needs to be fixed, don’t fall into amature hour. Take the time to actually understand the subject first. Then start fixing. Now don’t pull bits and pieces of what I said and separate them, please. It’s only a couple paragraphs, It’s not difficult to hold onto the entire context of a couple of small comment paragraphs.

nemothekid 5y ago

>In fixing the academia publishing industry there currently exists 0 experts that can predict that so any random guy’s guess is as good as anyones I'm not sure how you can look at political discourse in the United States today and say "yep, let's just blow up academic gatekeepers". Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites. The value of academic journals today is trust and the internet has not solved that. Pretend if GP had been searching Google, rather than SciHub. There are millions in the US who have used Google to deduce that placing rocks around your house can cure your migraines all because an enterprising individual had gamed SEO. "It’s too complicated to fix it" is not what the parent poster was implying. If you take a second to breakdown the actual value that journals provide then one clear way it can become much worse is a model similar to the open web where anyone can publish anything with very loose standards for reproducibility or rigor.

LadyCailin 5y ago
> Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites. Ok, so you admit that the journals aren’t even able to accomplish what they purport to. So if this is already a problem, yet good research is inaccessible, what again is the point of the paywalled journals?
- nemothekid 5y ago
  No? The journals did their job - the paper wasn't published. The broader internet (and largely a single celebrity) then became vector for a con-man to amplify his misinformation for profit. I'm using that as an example of something that could become commonplace if you blow up the journal system. Then every paper becomes "I feel this is right because blog-A which aligns to my beliefs says so". Institutional legitimacy is not something that is built overnight.

toofy 5y ago

I’m not sure where or how you inferred something akin to “No one should do anything.” from my comment, but it is absolutely not what I said and absolutely not what I implied.

ehvatum 5y ago
As botverse pointed out, you offer numerous apologies for the current state of affairs while issuing dire and vague warnings against modifying it. The approach taken by the machine learning community succeeded and incurred absolutely none of sky-is-falling shyte you moan about.
- toofy 5y ago
  I think your reading of what I posted is both pulling things out of the context of what I actually said and a bad faith reading. Please dont pull things out of context when you’re trying to have a discussion, when you do this, it implies you’re not getting full comprehension of what was actually said. It’s not a herculean task to keep all points from a couple paragraphs in context. It’s not difficult. I make it very clear that academic publishing has issues. I state it plain as day, I even literally finish my comment with “And to be very clear…: > And to be very clear, there are very serious problems in the academic publishing world, no question. However, changing something without even an understanding of what could go wrong is a very serious mistake. As I said in my comment, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to change and improve things. But if one can’t even imagine what could go wrong, than this person either hasn’t though much about it, or they clearly do not understand the subject very well. If something needs to be fixed, don’t fall into amature hour. Take the time to actually understand the subject first. Then start fixing. Now don’t pull bits and pieces of what I said and separate them, please. It’s only a couple paragraphs, It’s not difficult to hold onto the entire context of a couple of small comment paragraphs.